Tuesday 7 September 2010

Letters - part 3

New one, from CFO of Indy21

Dear Fellow Dragons,

I am Yongnam, Partner and CFO at Indy21.

I believe that this is the first time that I, on behalf of Indy21, am talking to the community directly. First off, thank you all very much for having been the biggest supporters of 9Dragons. You have always been with us through our ups and downs.

Although there have been many times that I wanted to communicate with you directly, especially to show my gratitude, we chose to let our previous publisher take care of the direct contact with you, due to a contractual obligations.

However, the series of events that happened recently has made me want to step up and initiate this communication to provide you all with our perspectives and thoughts on the current situation.

On August 26, I was shocked and disappointed by the way business was conducted by reputable companies like Playdom and Disney. We are operating in the business in which, I believe, if there are any disputes, we try to resolve the issues in congenial terms between companies by putting our customers interests first, not by holding our loyal community members hostage.

I believe, whether you are Western-based or Eastern-based, that is just a simple rule of thumb in the industry that we are in.

We had known that 9Dragons was to be transitioned to our new friends at GamersFirst and were promised by our former publisher that they would support a smooth and friendly transition of all player accounts. We had already inked our agreement with GamersFirst and had started working together to begin this transition, cooperating fully with Acclaim and taking them for their word. However, when the plug was pulled, we, along with the rest of you, were left completely in shock. We were not given the promised notice; the game database, which we required to recreate your characters and accounts for the upcoming re-launch of the game, was not transferred. What is most hurtful and saddening was that even in the last few hours of service, you were not informed of what was going on with the game.

SO, where do we stand now? We have a steep challenge ahead of us and here are our immediate priorities:

1. Restart 9Dragons immediately! We are working tirelessly with our friends at GamersFirst to re-launch 9Dragons as soon as humanly possible.

With little or no sleep in the last week both our teams are working around the clock to re-launch the game. In our estimate we are about less than ten days away from restarting service.


2. Recreate ALL player characters and accounts: It is my promise along with the rest of my team that we will move mountains to make this happen. We are consulting legal counsel and negotiating with stakeholders at Disney to find an amicable solution. We are also working with GamersFirst and trying to come up with some innovative solutions to resolve this problem. We don't have a definitive timeline for this but, again, it is my promise that WE WILL MAKE THIS HAPPEN. GamersFirst and Indy21 will do manual account updates if it becomes absolutely necessary athough we don't think it will come to that!

3. Design and Develop exciting new content updates and communicate the release schedule with you all. The abandonment of our community has fired up each one of our developers here in Korea and they are on a mission to make the 9Dragons community the greatest gaming community out there via providing you with enriched content updates.

With our combined efforts, we will all be playing 9Dragons again very very soon and we look forward to this new chapter in our journey as a stronger community and close friends.



Yongnam

Partner and Chief Financial Officer

Indy21 Co., Ltd.



In fact, nothing new. We work on 9D, we work on database... etc etc etc. Just another name who said that, that's all.  And the funny part is "10 days". Every little kid is thinking they will be able to play in 10 days. I don't wanna be in their shoes in the 11th day...

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