Slamdance loses a sponsor
(Visited 4571 times)Jan 092007
You may have seen this in the trackbacks already, but it looks like USC, one of the sponsors of Slamdance, is pulling out over the SCMRPG issue as well.
This certainly is snowballing.
6 Responses to “Slamdance loses a sponsor”
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Not surprising. Then again, given the name of the competition all of this could be a ruse to promote games as art.
Im not sure whats going on, and why all this “Pulling out” is going on. Care to catch me up?
@Trucegore: here.
Supporting Indy games is important to this industry, so it’s unfortunate that it had to come to this. Unfortunately, Slamdance made a horrible call. I’m glad to see that there is some self-correction in this industry after all.
So the brief of it is, they let a game go threw a competition all the way to the “Finals” and then dropped it citing “Inappropriate material”?
Then others hear this…and start pulling out the competition.
Dramatic.
Gota say, i don’t blame them… I mean, if they let people participate that far in, just to be dropped before what could be the biggest day for them (If they win). I wouldn’t trust that jury or competition either. They have already shown they cant hold to there own processes and rules, because i am sure there were requirements even to start in the competition.
What a bummer that must have been.
Slamdance simply couldn’t win with SCM existing as an indy game. Period.
This is what they get if they ditch the SCMRPG. If they’d kept it, I’d bet money they’d get wider coverage in the media, and I’m pretty certain that having the ‘indy game industry’ associated with a sound byte that included the words ‘columbine massacre’ and ‘game’ would probably do more to damage the game makers as a whole than help it.
“Any publicity is good publicity” is pure hogwash when it comes to news items like Columbine… hell, most people are still convinced games had something to do with it. They won’t even try to find the ‘depth’ or the ‘real meaning’ if the game does have any reasonable merit.
There was simply no right answer for Slamdance as an organization regarding inclusion or exclusion of that game. They only thing they could have done better was not allow it up front or drop it early in the competition.
Part of the problem I have with them dropping SCMRPG is that they were the ones that asked SCMRPG to enter in the first place. Ask them to enter, let them get to finals, then ditch them? Uh… no. That’s slimy and underhanded. If you want to bar it from entering in the first place for the safety of the comp, fine. Its your comp. Ask them to enter, let them become finalists, then ditch them… no cool at all.