Palladium Books Going Out of Business

kainewynd2 writes to mention a public plea put out in the Palladium books forums by the company owner Kevin Siembada. He bemoans the Rifts publisher's poor financial outlook, and asks people to buy a $50 print to save the company. From the post: "The truly wonderful Rifts® videogame - Rifts® Promise of Power - was stillborn. The N-Gage platform never took off in North America. That meant the N-Gage and Rifts® Promise of Power would NOT be available on the mass market in the USA and Canada. Finding it anywhere in North America required an act of God. There would be no Nokia royalty-based revenue stream. Nor would there be a Nokia videogame sequel and the money that might come from it. Nokia treated me nothing short of GREAT. They lost truckloads of money on this venture. We're both the victims of marketing fallout. Please don't blame these wonderful people for Palladium's woes - circumstance just didn't make them part of our solution." Wow, they made a game for the N-Gage and then lost a bunch of money. Who ever could have forseen that?

Comments

Re:Palladium

[HunterZ]

Same here. First pen-and-paper RPG I played was Heroes Unlimited. I found their rule system impossible to grasp as a first RPG, however, and even more frustrating was that they simply copied-and-pasted the core rules into every book they published, instead of revising them to be more coherent with each new book. Even better would have been to publish an independent core rule manual that would be required as a base for use with the individual setting books (Robotech, Rifts, TMNT, etc.), which they then could have revised over time.

Alternatively, they could/should have jumped on the d20 system when it became popular.