Updated with a minor clarification and a few typos

Dire Wolf Digital (DWD) casually dropped a bomb that’s caused quite a bit of a stir. The tldr; is they are not moving forward with printing the four softcover volumes of the Cortex Prime Spotlight settings, of which 16 of the original 20-ish that were funded made the cut. There were less than 400 backers who had backed at the level to receive the softcovers, which cost about $30. So, those people are out the $30 basically, given that the handbook and the PDFs of the Spotlights were delivered (along with some other odds and ends). The print Spotlights were the last thing to be delivered for the Kickstarter, and with DWD “closing the book” on them that means the fulfillment of the Kickstarter is over, but incomplete.

There’s a lot to unpack here. It genuinely sucks for the Kickstarter backers that won’t get what they paid for. It is an occupational hazard for things like this to happen with Kickstarters. Not to mince words, but the Cortex Prime Kickstarter was on shaky ground before Fandom purchased the proprety. I think that DWD’s rationale in their announcement is not completely bad. But there are just two things that stand out to me:

1. Holy fuck, how did they spend $12.5K per Spotlight?
2. The wording of the post itself is horrendously tone deaf and dismissive.

I’m not even going to speculate about the costs they incurred. They’re a tech company at heart, and I know those well. Throw money at the problem until FinOps slaps your hand and pulls your budget. There had to have been hookers and cocaine involved.

But the tonedeafness and dismissiveness is something else. It’s not just that the Kickstarter backers have been expecting those books for over 5 years (6? Did the statute of limitation run out on it?) — it’s that the Spotlights are what they paid $30 extra for. The print Spotlights were the rewards for the backer level they chose. Obviously there’s a whole basket of snakes regarding Kickstarter not being a pre-order, etc., etc., but backers are right to be upset about not receiving what they thought they paid for.¹ And then to read “We feel like we’ve done right by Cortex fans” is…wow. I’ll get more into that shortly.

But Are the Backers Right…and Who Is Responsible?

The Kickstarter backers aren’t wrong that they didn’t get exactly what they paid for. When Fandom bought Cortex, they went ham on the whole thing…the handbook, the online compendium, the promises of a creator’s studio and other online tools. The Cortex Prime Game Handbook itself is a thing of beauty, and it’s a great rules resource to boot.² The online compendium was just thrown in there as a kind of happy ending. Fandom’s reasons for going all in with Cortex aren’t known, but I strongly suspect that Fandom thought they were going to create a competitor to D&D Beyond, if not D&D as a whole. There was so much happening just after the Fandom purchase — COVID, D&D’s profits rising, WotC’s various moves with the D&D brand — that Fandom may have gotten cold feet. They have found out that WotC was one step ahead of them in wanting to buy D&D Beyond from them, and it was too good of a deal to pass up.

Regardless, by the time Fandom decided they were done with RPGs, a little less than three years after they purchased Cortex, and DWD bought it, the Cortex Prime Kickstarter had been through three sets of hands. The Kickstarter was run by Cam Banks, who formed Magic Vacuum Design Studio to license Cortex from Margaret Weis Productions. The common misconception is that Cam Banks owned Cortex, and sold Cortex to Fandom. That wasn’t the case. Margaret Weis Productions was the one who chose to divest themselves from it. Cortex Prime came along for the ride, possibly because of MWP’s obligations to Magic Vacuum Studio, but Fandom could have possibly negotiated some way to leave Cortex Prime (and Cam Banks) behind. But something magical happened - Fandom took on the Kickstarter and Cam Banks.

Now, we have no idea exactly how all of that went down. There were probably a lot of good reasons for Fandom to do this, and until Fandom went radio silent on their RPG efforts in the months leading to DWD acquiring Cortex Prime³ it seemed like a really good deal. The handbook got delivered, better than promised, we got the online compendium, and we even got an awesome Cortex Prime-powered game in form of Tales of Xadia.

But the question is: did Fandom have any responsibility to fulfill a Kickstarter started by a licensee of the company they purchased the property from, and does DWD also have that responsibility? That’s really fuzzy…my only guess is that Fandom chose to fulfill the Kickstarter versus being obligated to, and if DWD didn’t think they could get out of it, they would have as well.

But Shouldn’t They Feel Something?

Which leads to the big question: even without any legal responsibility, should DWD have an ethical responsibility to “do the right thing”? They broke, if not a promise, a strongly implied expectation, didn’t they? As of last year, when the last of the digital Spotlights were delivered, there was every indication that the published Spotlights would follow. Then there were delays, and more delays, and radio silence, and then some Tales of Xadia dice released at GenCon this year (which ngl, are pretty sweet). Then, after all of that, this.

In light of what seems like utter and complete financial mismanagement of the Spotlights, I think that DWD did what they needed to. But they could have called it last year, and then partially refunded the Kickstarter backers for not receiving the softcovers. When R. Talsorian Games flamed out on the Mekton Zero Kickstarter due to Mike Pondsmith having to frequently galavant to Poland while CDPR was making Cyberpunk 2077, refunds were the route they took. Sometimes things happen where you can’t fulfill a project, but you wind up with more money than you started with (apparently people like Mike Pondsmith). 351 backers at $30 each is $10,530, which isn’t too bad and is probably a write-off or something. They could probably do that now and it wouldn’t hurt their bottom line too much, except that they already sunk $200k into it and DWD’s CFO is likely holding a shotgun to everyone involved in case they even think about it.

And what about the creators of the Spotlights? Don’t they deserve to see their works in print? That’s a slightly different story. For one thing, it was all work for hire. I’m not privy to how it went down with them signing on for writing the Spotlights, but I have a decent idea. They approached Cam Banks, or he approached them, to attach their name as stretch goals for the Kickstarter. This is a common approach to bolster interest (and the funding level) of Kickstarters. Somewhere along the line, they finished the writing, turned it in, and they were paid.

My understanding of most work for hire situations is that would be the end of it. There were no royalty agreements, there was no passing the Spotlights back to the writers to put up on their itch page or get featured in a creator’s studio or whatever. They still own the IP they developed, but one of the companies (Fandom possibly first) owned the manuscripts themselves.⁴ Those manuscripts eventually made it into DWD’s hands, and leaving out the thorny (and apparently astronomically expensive) issue of printing the softcovers for the KS backers, DWD could do what they wanted to with them.⁵

This is the part that baffles me, especially in light of “we did right by the fans” — DWD could decide to release the PDFs more broadly. They could put them up for sale, make them available on the Cortex website as part of the digitial compendium, or just make them free. But, for whatever reason, they have (thus far) chosen not to do that. And that’s a shame, because the Spotlights are the kind of thing that Cortex Prime needs — to showcase what Cortex can do, to show off the work that the writers did, and (possibly most importantly) to give back to the Cortex community and build some goodwill towards DWD.

It’s Community, Not Fans

Here’s where we get to the real talk about DWD’s assertion that “we did right by the fans” ringing hollow — the fans part. Because that’s all that they think the people who play and enjoy Cortex are. Less really, we’re actually just customers. They make a thing, we buy it, end of relationship⁶. But what we really are is a community. Fandom understood the assignment, and until they pulled the plug they went through the motions of trying to do something for the community. They had a commmunity manager — the awesome Mellie Doucette. There were actual plays, Twitch streams, videos. DWD doesn’t have that. They never have, even before they bought Cortex Prime, and after two years I’d wager there’s little chance they’re going to start.

But the thing is that the Cortex community existed before Cortex Prime. It existed before I got involved. Nothing that DWD does, or doesn’t do, can take that away. They’re not responsible for it and have done very little to foster it. And I don’t think it’s too far of a reach to say that I’ve had a hand in building the community as it is today, along with many other amazing, talented, creative people. I’m a volunteer moderator in the official Cortex Discord. I’ve run Cortex Prime and Tales of Xadia games online and at conventions. I’ve participated in the confabs that Mellie organized. I’ve blogged about Cortex Prime and talked about it on social media. Prior to Fandom purchasing Cortex, we were going to use Cortex Prime for our nascent Tribe 8 reboot, and that involved phone calls with Cam Banks to try to make the arrangements with Dream Pod 9⁷.

But I don’t feel existential despair when I look at my Cortex Prime and Tales of Xadia Game Handbooks because of what DWD has or hasn’t done. I see all of the awesome people who have contributed to making Cortex Prime bigger than those physical books, and bigger than DWD’s own part in the long saga of corporate interests tossing Cortex Prime around. I don’t need them, and the community doesn’t need them.

So, instead of washing my hands of Cortex Prime because DWD doesn’t really seem to value any of that, I’m not giving up on that community. I fucking built part of it. I’ve put parts of myself into it. I’ll keep doing what I’m doing, and if DWD gets their shit together maybe — if the community is feeling gracious — they can also be a part of it.