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 Wednesday, February 11, 2004

Bowing to pressure from Fantasy Flight Games, the great folks that built A Game of Thrones Online have taken the game down.  Apparently one of the concerns is physical game ownership of the players that are playing online:

They did have one interesting requirement, however, which has compelled me to launch a question on the forum (http://www.agotonline.com/forum/):

All judges and PBeM games 'must be structured in such a way that it is impossible to play without owning a copy of the game.'

I am not sure how we can comply with this request.  In reality, there is no way to determine whether a human judge needs a copy of the game since the rules are published on their Web site.  Though we heavily encourage ownership of the game and very much want everyone to own a copy, I can't know for sure that every player owns a copy.  (Or do we just need one of the five players to own a copy?)

I think this is a bad move by the Fantasy Flight.  They run the risk of alienating the very individuals most likely to evangelize their games.