Eric Gibson's Ownership of West End Games
| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Role-playing, board and wargaming publisher |
| Founded | 2003 |
| Founder(s) | Eric J. Gibson |
| Headquarters | Coatesville, Pennsylvania, USA |
| Products | D6 System, Torg, Junta |
| Owner(s) | Eric J. Gibson |
| Website | None (formerly www.westendgames.com) |
In November 2003 West End Games was bought by Eric J. Gibson, who moved the company to Downingtown, Pennsylvania, in 2004. Under his tenure, WEG's flagship line was a generic version of the D6 System, which led to a line of irregularly produced supplements and met with general approval from fans. Unfortunately, this approval did not translate into high sales; in a post on the official West End forums in 2008 Eric Gibson announced that none of the D6 products produced since he acquired West End had turned a profit, and West End's other RPG lines were not performing as well as he had expected, leading to losses of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
West End also expanded back into board games, beginning with a new edition of Junta, which according to Eric was one of the few products that was turning a profit.
West End Games' most recent planned offering, the Septimus roleplaying game, was publicly cancelled by Eric Gibson in March 2008. Eric Gibson announced on the morning of July 16, 2008 that West End Games could not currently afford to provide refunds to customers who pre-ordered the cancelled Septimus product, and indeed could not even afford to pay the postage to ship books to individuals who expressed a willingness to accept a refund in the form of products instead of money.
On Sunday, July 19, 2008, following both an extended discussion of West End's failure to provide refunds for those who had preordered Septimus and the ensuing forum flameout, Eric Gibson announced on the West End Games forums that he was officially through with the company and was selling all of its properties; he revealed that he had already been contacted by interested parties, but felt that he should not make the facts about the offerings public. Eric Gibson later expressed that he was no longer looking to dissolve the company or sell off any of its properties.
Eric Gibson has stated in an interview that he was "perhaps naïvely optimistic" in assuming that distributors would order products produced under his ownership of the company "just because it's West End Games." He further stated that this led him to print more books than he could sell, books which he had to destroy in order to save on storage costs. Towards the end of the company's history, Gibson had plans to release the d6 System under the terms of the Open Gaming License "to save the d6 System from myself," meaning that if the company had to go out of business, the system would still be available to the general public.
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