GMT ya había recibido protestas por varios de sus juegos: Labyrinth, Hitler's Reich, A distant plain, Serbien muß sterbien y muchos más. En ningún caso se había achantado. Si ahora ha declinado la publicación de un juego no creo que sea por puritanismo.

Pongo algunas repuestas que ha enviado Gene:

Citar
Thanks for taking the time to write and share your feedback. I appreciate your concern and generally agree with your point about P500. But the situation was more difficult than that. We've stood up against censorship of various games over the years and will do so in the future. So what was the difference this time?

In this case, certainly there was a lot of outrage directed at us, the designer, and the game from the PC crowd. But the level of that outrage/controversy wasn't really at the heart of the issue for me. It was the treatment of the game we had to deal with to face the controversy. If this were a COIN game or Labyrinth, we'd have so many ways at our disposal to make sure we address a broad spectrum of social, political, and military aspects of the conflict. Or if it were a game about a war that we marketed to our core wargame audience, very few would have issues because we understand that in wargames, we often abstract many social, economic, and political aspects to focus on studying strategy and tactics. But after some strong supporters and close friends came to us privately (which I respect and listen to WAY more than I do the online noise from people who care more about their issue than they do about GMT) and explained carefully what the big issues were with Scramble, it was clear to me, on closer inspection of the game, that the treatment (euro, 3X, family-oriented, quick-play) just didn't leave us the tools we needed to provide the kind of broader look at the subject that was needed. Without those tools, we had a eurogame that appeared (to much of the eurogamer crowd, which was the target market for the game and a market that the game needed to make its P500 #s, as we don't get a lot of support for euros from our core wargamer base) to shrug at the suffering in Africa during the period and focus on the colonial competition. So what we faced was a rising controversy that had potential to seriously hurt our overall brand and a game system that didn't give us really any good tools to work with to address the desires of the market the game was aimed at. In that situation, Tony, Andy, Rachel, and I all agreed this was the best course, and the designer concurred.

As I worked through the controversy over the past few weeks, trying to listen and understand it, I realized that in the beginning after I looked at Scramble and told Joe I thought we could sell it (that's always something that's part of our game eval, naturally), I both misread the market and didn't look carefully enough at the game treatment. It is that nexus of a "breezy, 3X, let's get the highest score, eurogame" treatment with a serious perhaps controversial subject that I should have caught (and Andy Lewis or I almost always do at that stage). Totally my mistake, and the moment I realized it I knew I had to cancel the game - because there was just no way to make minor changes that would have fixed it. It needed a complete overhaul, which would have taken months or years, during which the game would have still been on the list basically lying to our customers about what it was. I couldn't do that. So my first (private) apology was to Joe. I let him down in this case. He's a classy guy, so you'll probably never hear him say that in public, but I'm kicking myself because I should have taken a deeper dive on this before we accepted the game. At least one result of my mistake was this big controversy which was beginning to have a negative impact on some of our other designers and their games. We couldn't allow that to happen.

In the future, for whatever (comparatively few) eurogames we do, I think we're going to have to be a lot more discerning up front about topic and treatment, before we add a game to P500. Beyond that, I believe that getting right back to work - as we're already doing - on the many great historical wargames/strategy games created by our other 50+ design teams - is what's needed. This decision certainly has consequences - and part of that is that more than a few of our long-term wargame customers are varying degrees of unhappy with us right now. My belief - and hope - is that continuing our mission and producing plenty more games that our customers enjoy (starting in a month or so with C&C Medieval, Gandhi, and The Last Hundred Yards) will remind people over time of who we are and what we're about.

Citar
I have no problem with a game on the SfA - in fact I hope we do a deep, nuanced one on the subject someday.
We'll absolutely create future games on challenging historical topics. If our general customer base knew today about a few we have in design in the background right now, they wouldn't even be asking some of these "is this the end of GMT taking on tough topics?" kind of questions.

Parece que ni se ha abandonado debido a la presión ejercida en internet ni van a abandonar este tipo de temas en sus próximos juegos.

Cita de: Kaxte en 10 de Abril de 2019, 19:08:22
Veo un futuro en el que sólo podremos jugar abstractos para que no se puedan quejar los ofendiditos de turno

Yo veo ofendiditos que se creen que les van a censurar tan solo porque una compañía ha decidido no producir un juego que no se adhiere a su política de publicación.

En todo caso, parece que si le escribes un correo a GMT te clarifican su decisión. Si estáis realmente preocupados por el tema os recomiendo que les preguntéis directamente.

Se trata de GMT, en sus juegos puedes hacer ataques terroristas, usar armas de destrucción masiva, orquestar campañas de terror contra la población civil e incluso capturar esclavos. No creo que sea algo tan simple como que el tema pueda ser ofensivo.

Yo había entrado en el P500 y me quité hace unas semanas al leer las notas del diseñador. No se si lo habrán retirado por el mismo motivo pero a mi, personalmente, me pareció estúpido que te quiten PV por una carta de evento de atrocidad y que te den PV por una carta de cerrar mercado esclavista cuando al mismo tiempo estás construyendo plantaciones, explotando minas y construyendo ferrocarriles. No se trata de obligar a condenar la esclavitud ni hacer ningún alegato político, pero si vas a incluir valoraciones morales en tu juego prefiero que se haga con más rigor.