Gleemax The New Online Gaming Site For Wotc

[Moderator Sinister]

Here's the latest FAQ:
1) This site doesn’t have much more than forums, is this really Gleemax?

What you are viewing right now is not Gleemax. This is a promotional site helping to announce Gleemax and get input from the community who will be using it.

2) When will we see the beginning of what Gleemax really is then?

We will have an initial ALPHA (read: very alpha) release on or around GenCon in August.

3) What will it cost (if anything) to be a part of Gleemax?

The short version is that we're giving away lots of social networking functionality for free. Most people who set up their personal page on Gleemax will probably never give us a dime and we're ok with that. There will be a healthy toolset that ranges from the basics of internet communication (blogs, friends lists, etc.) to game-genre specific functionality (army builders, decklist managers, etc.) available to everyone.

If the users don’t pay to use a majority of the site, how will WotC make $?

A. There will be advertising on the social networking pages.
B. There will be premium functionality available for customers who are not satisfied with the free Gleemax toolset. This will probably mostly be done via monthly subscriptions, but not all of our plans have been finalized yet.
C. We will publish digital games that we hope you will want to pay to play. We already have MTGO and we have already announced both Uncivilized: the Goblin Game and a Gleemax Board Game portal ... more stuff is in the works that we aren't ready to talk about yet. (This is the piece we expect to make most of our money on - we think of our Community and Editorial efforts as primarily designed to drive traffic to the website so we can get more people to sample our games.)
Actual prices and business models will vary from game to game. For example, MTGO is booster packs - $3.99 will get you a pack of 15 randomized cards just like in the real world. U:GG will be a pay-per-instance, kind of like a fantasy sports league. You pay once for 2-3 months of game-play and then when it's over some folks win and some folks lose and hopefully you liked it enough to pay again. We have not announced a price yet. Meanwhile, the Board Game portal will give users several payment options:

1) You can sample games for free by waiting for someone else to start a game and invite you to play.
2) You can pay-per-game-start as if the game was a coin-op arcade machine. Only the person starting the game needs to pay.
3) You can sign up for a monthly subscription that will give you (among other cool bells and whistles) a bunch of free game starts. We haven't announced prices yet.

4) What kind of content has been announced?

A) A Social Network for Gamers:
Initially the social network will be in place allowing gamers to create their own profile, start blogs, find other local players, and begin networking with like-minded people. Everyone will be given their own free basic-functionality personalized page on Gleemax which will include both a public profile and your basic communication tools such as like blogs, friend’s lists, and a personal profile. We'll have wikis, special blog templates for things like tournament reports and game reviews and search tools to help you find the content.

B) Board Game Portal:
We plan to have at least eight titles when we launch, including a mix of both board games and card games. Guillotine will be there as a fairly light offering and Axis & Allies will be there on the deeper, more intense side of things.

Another title we will definitely have on the site is Vegas Showdown. It's more of a German-style board game. It's also Games Magazine's 2007 Game of the Year. The easiest way for us to launch this portal is to take advantage of the titles that Wizards of the Coast the Coast and Avalon Hill already have in their catalogs. However, we do not want this to be "just" an Avalon Hill portal. We're already talking with other companies about acquiring the rights to more board games. We don't have anything ready to announce yet, but we are definitely interested in bringing the best titles we can to Gleemax and turning this into the place where gamers hang out and play gamer-games.

5)What can you tell us about the Game Portal costs?

Our current plan for a pricing system for the board game portal works like this:
1. Anyone can join a game that someone else has started (unless the starter made it a private game, anyway). Thus, you'll be able to try out games (many times) without ever giving us a dime.
2. Tournament games cannot be joined for free.
3. Subscribers will be able to start lots of games each month. (There will also be other premium features that are only available to subscribers.)
4. There will be a way for non-subscribers to start games and/or join tournaments by paying one game at a time, coin-op arcade style.
Having free players means that subscribers should never have trouble getting enough folks to play with. It also means that potential future subscribers get the chance to sample a meaningful portion of the content in order to decide whether they think it's worth paying for. Meanwhile, given that our overall goal with Gleemax is to recruit new hobby gamers, we figure the more people that come hang out and play, the better.
Our current timeline has us launching this portal early next year. There's a small chance that some of our infrastructure projects could fall into place quickly and facilitate an earlier launch, but our current expectation is early 2008.

6) When does the first part of Gleemax go Live?

The initial ALPHA launch of Gleemax will happen on or around GenCon. This will be a very basic start to Gleemax. The social network side of the project will be the first phase of Gleemax with a personal profile and blog ability.

__________________

[Imperious leader]

We plan to have at least eight titles when we launch, including a mix of both board games and card games. Guillotine will be there as a fairly light offering and Axis & Allies will be there on the deeper, more intense side of things.

And when they say Axis and Allies they are only talking about the boardgame and not the miniatures or RTS as these are not Axis and Allies other than borrowing the name. And i'm quite sure the other 7 titles are all non-historical

[Moderator Mired]

A new group of Community Leaders is being formed here:

Open Discussion: http://forums.gleemax.com/forumdisplay.php?f=725
Directed (restricted) Discussion: http://forums.gleemax.com/forumdisplay.php?f=726

I would reccomend that a number of you jump over there to have your voices heard.

[Colonel_Coo]

Originally Posted by Moderator Mired

A new group of Community Leaders is being formed here:

Open Discussion: http://forums.gleemax.com/forumdisplay.php?f=725
Directed (restricted) Discussion: http://forums.gleemax.com/forumdisplay.php?f=726

I would reccomend that a number of you jump over there to have your voices heard.

I would recommend a better guarentee of product replacement than the very limited liability of MTG on-line. $4 for random virtual cards is stupid. Bar none. No distribution, no packaging, and very limited overhead. Dumb. Too much money for too little function.

[Moderator_Mimir]

Let's keep things on topic, please. This thread is for information about Gleemax and its features.

[Colonel_Coo]

Okay,

I went over and saw nothing about AAM. Other than a breif mention in one thread.

Trouble is my log on from here doesn't work THERE.

A long time ago I had the same log-on for thoses "other pages" that WoTC supports. Colonel_Coo. Unfortunetly, that email is no longer available and I have no idea what password is.

Hmm, maybe my dead dog's name (my favorite dog when alive).

Be right back. . .

Nope, not it.

Can any of you help on this matter?

[Moderator Kayn]

Just make a new log on. Change some small something about Colonel_Coo.

Right now they have the change email function locked, so we're unable to help from within. Name change would get you in, immediately.

[Colonel_Coo]

Originally Posted by Moderator Kayn

Just make a new log on. Change some small something about Colonel_Coo.

Right now they have the change email function locked, so we're unable to help from within. Name change would get you in, immediately.

Okay will do.

Maybe ColonelCoo.

Anyhow. . .
Regarding you moderators: Do you have other jobs? How many of you are there? Do you game?

[Moderator_Chaos]

We'd be glad to say a few things about ourselves, but please start a new thread for it, since this one needs to be kept for Gleemax.

Oh BTW. Gleemax went live today. It's still *very* buggy, but they released an alpha version on purpose so the customers would tell them how they wanted it molded.

Go check it out.

Chaos

[J.L.Robert]

As long as these boards aren't absorbed into Gleemax, I'll be happy. That site gave me fits trying to import my Star Wars Minis ID over. That community is going to miss a Top 10 trader from their group if I can't figure it out soon.