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Wizards of the Coast Declares Gleemax Site a Critical Failure
In a recent blog post, Wizards of the Coast Vice President of Digital Gaming Randy Buehler announced that they were killing their Gleemax social networking site. Originally designed to create a central hub where gamers could meet, discuss, and play games online, it has thus far been unable to deliver on the grandiose promises made at launch. "The mistake that I made, however, was in trying to push us too far too fast. I still think the vision for Gleemax is awesome: creating a place on the web where hobby gamers (or lifestyle gamers or thinking gamers, or whatever you want to call us) can gather to talk about games, play games, and find people to play games with. But I've come to realize that the vision was too ambitious. We've made progress down about ten different paths over the past eighteen months, but we haven't been able to reach the end of any of them yet."
They had well entrenched websites already that did a lot of what they initially offered.
www.enworld.org though simple, has a plethora of reviews, forums, news, chat
www.paizo.com was able to get interest because they carried more than just wizards of the coasts products.
It's a tough market I would think. People that want to socialize in an alternate setting probably use something like second life. People that want to mindlessly kill stuff and gather equipment and power game probably play warcraft.
They named the site after an inside joke about a giant "brain in a jar" that runs development.
Who the hell in Marketing thought that was a good idea?
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
It was set up and running by a friend of mine, before gleemax even launched. It's the same kind of blog/wiki/forum for gamers, except for it's meant for all kinds of games, and it's actually a good useful site.
see www.boardgamegeek.com for what I think Gleemax was trying to be. The market was pretty well covered with a great site, for free, not limited to WOTC products.
Covered recently with great accuracy by The Daily WTF.