BGA yesterday, now and tomorrow

[Charlie Wilson54]

You are to be thanked and congratulated for what you have done in the development of BGA.

Asmodee - hmmmm......

[aleix]

Thanks for all sourisdudesert & Emmanuel. It's hard to imagine how only two guys made all this platform as a side project in your spare time lulz.

This is a really big and good news for you, it's time to be happy and rest well, you really did a great job. Congratulations!!

But I'm scared about this:

Of course, at some point in the future, Emmanuel and I will probably leave BGA to live some other adventures, but that is certainly not for now.

I'm quite sure that BGA would run perfectly as long as you are the ones in charge, but once you leave it, I'm really afraid about what would happen. You were really devoted to the community. But asmodee is devoted to €€€. Money is their only god.

Kind regards.

[AngryPanda]

So what site can we move to now?

[senorchaos]

Good for you guys cashing in on some well deserved efforts these past 10 years.

Not going to lie, I think this is going to suck in the long run for us users. We thank you for all the good times, but mark my words Asmodee will fuck this site over and turn it into a shell of it's current glory. I'd love to think positively, but I have to start thinking of alternatives as this site is going to change for the worst like everything that company touches.

This is horrible news for us. I guess nothing lasts forever. Congrats again on the payday.

[FamousTheAardvark]

Thanks for your work creating BGA. It has been a great place to play games. Congrats on getting to cash in on it. But I suspect you'll be as sad as the rest of us when Asmodee ruins it.

[towehaal]

I feel like this news should be on the front page! It's the top of /r/boardgames right now. This is pretty big news.

I'm happy for the site creators, but time will tell about how this will go. Asmodee doesn't exactly have a great track record of being consumer friendly.

[agila13]

I hope Asmodee does not ruin BGA. I love BGA as it is!

[Wheeler]

a team of just 4 people!

And dozens of volunteer developers + hundreds of volunteer playtesters, right?

[intelekt]

a team of just 4 people!

And dozens of volunteer developers + hundreds of volunteer playtesters, right?

None of whom were paid, and as I understand it - BGA+Asmodee do not intend to pay going forward... You don't get a valuation of 1.3 billion dollars while being altruistic, I guess.

[Tisaac]

Would really like to discuss what this means for smaller publishers and creators who have offered games freely in the past. You all were a small start up that we offered games to for free. Asmodee is a 1.3 billion dollar entity that doesn't traditionally "play nice" with their competitors (which a large majority of other publishers on the platform are considered by them). They can most certainly afford to pay for the ongoing use of our mods and game properties, and they should. This is an investment firm, they bought this site because they see potential for financial gain, if that is the case, the contributors should be compensated.

Quite frankly, asking extremely small publishers and individual to continue to support a 1.3 billion dollar entity without pay is unethical, and quite frankly, illegal based on Asmodee being HQ'ed in the U.S.

Finding out that our properties have been sold to another company after the fact is also incredibly unprofessional. Each publisher with a game on your platform should've been contacted prior to this sale. I'm really furious with the ownership of BGA right now, this is absolutely not the right way to have gone about this. Please find a time to have a meeting with developers and publishers so we can find a solution, I can see here I'm not the only one with massive concerns about this move.

Publishers can revoke license agreement anytime they want, that's one of the clause of the license agreement of BGA. So probably a couple of games will actually be removed if publishers no longer want them here.