Friday, July 20, 2007

Dreamblade: Organized Play Canceled

It is a sad day for any fans of the Dreamblade CMG from Wizards of the Coast. WotC has decided to cancel the 1k and 10k tournaments and other mainstream Organized Play aspects. Here is the Dear John letter:
Dear Dreamblade Players:

As you prepare your warbands for Augusts’ Dreamblade 50K championship, many of you may be wondering about the future of Dreamblade Organized Play (OP).

When we designed this game, we envisioned highly competitive organized play as one of the key things that makes the game great, and we provided robust organized play with Dreamblade. Despite our best efforts however, we didn’t get enough tournament players, and we can’t continue supporting the game with the same depth of OP that we’ve offered in the past. As a result, we will no longer be supporting the 1K and 10K events. The August 50K event will continue as scheduled, as will Edge Tournaments. We love this game and we know you do too. It’s a painful change but a necessary one.

Night Fusion, Dreamblade’s fifth set, releases in September and promises to be our most exciting set to date. It includes a number of new features that we have been reserving for Dreamblade’s second year. The success of Night Fusion will be very telling for Dreamblade as we gauge demand for the future. We hope fans come out in droves to support it!

Thank you for your passionate support of Dreamblade and your patience during this time. We hope to have the opportunity to continue to bring you this innovative and revolutionary game experience for some time to come.
Does this spell the end for Dreamblade? Not yet. Local Edge tournaments will still be supported, but historically they have been hard to maintain. The prizes for Edge events are sub par. Plus Edge events are easily ruined by veteran players playing top tier warbands forcing newer players to "buy up" or "ship out".

This is not a surprising announcement, but it is a sad one. Dreamblade is a great game that only suffers from a fairly high price point and low player population.

3 comments:

  1. Anonymous11:59 PM

    I think this should be a lesson for WotC: When you have a game that uses miniatures and sets a scale for them (D&D), don't make another miniatures game that runs on a different scale!

    When Dreamblade was announced, I was confused. The D&D Miniatures game was doing fine, why make another one?

    When they made clear that the Dreamblade mini's weren't going to be in D&D scale... that was the end of the road for me. I'm not going to invest a lot of money in fantasy miniatures unless I can use them in my main fantasy game.

    Sorry that you dig it buddy... but they would have done better if it worked for the core D&D game too.

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  2. Well here is the thing. The base that is part of the mini, is the D&D minis scale. Unfortunately they are attached to another base that has the rules information on it.

    I personally like the Dreamblade pieces, but for playing a game, not for collecting. Aside from a few cool sculpts, I think the overall theme of the pieces is too nightmarish.

    Personally, the size of the minis is one of the reasons I love the game. The tactile feel of the larger minis in your hands as you move them about the board is great. When playing D&D minis or Star Wars minis the pieces are often just too damn small. Dreamblade, on the other hand, really has some weight behind the pieces. Of course that leads to higher pricing, but at least they are not metal!

    Fortunately, out of our local group, I have the smallest investment. I lack a lot of power pieces and I'm glad I held off dropping $30-$50 for the big name pieces. I did spend a lot initially, but I should have a 50% recoup rate with one large sale.

    I am probably done with Dreamblade, aside from keeping one warband for casual play purposes.

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  3. I'm not even remotely surprised that Dreamblade is failing (and it is.)

    And it's because it's competing with all the other games out there. That happen to be mini's oriented. And I think they are starting to hit a saturation point where in the end, things will either stabilize, or they will die off leaving on a few core items, like Clix games.

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