Penny Arcade's statement is here and CAD responds here.
So, PA has decided that since game publishers are all eating each other, this is the perfect opportunity to screw their competition by trying to get legal rights to be the only gaming web comic. Essentially, they're trying to copyright their subject matter and create what is for all intents and purposes an artistic monopoly. This of course will eliminate Control Alt Delete, VGCats (which has yet to respond to the statement), Player versus Player and countless other weekly and daily strips.
Bullshit. Absolute Bullshit. Penny Arcade is claiming that the competition will drive them under, as if PA has anything to worry about. Everyone knows they were first, and despite what other strips we read, we always come back. Why? Because they're fucking funny... at least until they feel the need to cement their position as big fish in the pond. They're going to be wiping out any number of well done, creative, and funny comics. (No word yet by the way if they're going after 8-bit theater) So anyway, I hope they lose.Gutless Ass Fuckers wrote:Eventually, it's not going to be the kind of thing I can avoid, because I'm going to walk into an Electronic Arts retail location here in a couple years and purchase a white box with the word "Game" on it, and that's going to be the industry. EA just snapped up DICE, as I'm sure you saw. Before that was the much ballyhooed NFL thing, to which Take Two responded by securing MLB exclusivity, of a sort - and their recent acquisition of Sega's Visual Concepts sports studio will gird their loins for the coming battle. It's madness. I don't even have time to jot down an ironic comment on the state of things before the constituent things have been entirely reconfigured.
That, more than anything else, is why we sought to secure "rights in perpetuity to any and all humorous comic interpretations and/or situations arising or inferred from the electronic entertainment industry and/or the products thereof." The fact of the matter is that with strips like Ctrl-Alt-Del, VG Cats, PvP, and that fucker Greg Dean (congratulations on the engagement!) nipping at our heels - and the black day of the single, hydra-headed Ultrapublisher ever hastening - the air's getting a little thin.
You might be wondering what recourse is available to you, the disenfranchised web auteur. Honestly? Dig a hole and die in it. I have crafted these bleak circumstances, and I have set them upon you like dogs. Your exertions will only make you more delicious to them. They will find you cast in blue light, huddled in the subdirectory where you shiver with your .gifs, and they will end you.
Fuckers.
