It’s also 120 cards designed vs 240+ cards designed for a single MtG set.
It’s also 360 cards printed vs 15*36 = 540 cards printed in a cycle vs a box.
There’s also Real prize support for mtg tournaments, which is a secondary income stream. Not tournament fees directly, but the prize support and so forth.
LCGs kind of sit halfway between CCGs and board games, I think. So you don’t have people buying lots of product chasing rares, but you do have a lot more people buying every expansion as soon as it releases than you would for, like, Catan.
This is true, and one of the reasons that there is a bigger prize support for it is the income that is generated by the sales of the booster packs and boxes. WotC are also marketing masters that gain a lot of endorsement support. Fees for being able to participate in FNM. I love the LCG format, I just think that it is susceptible to lower Revenue and Profit.
Just my two cents.
the real money prize support was also a big reason the star wars ccg failed in the 90s. for a time, it even outsold magic, and this was the height of ccg popularity before the bubble popped in the early 00s
but the prizes were just rare cards. so the more tournaments they had, the more cards in circulation. the more cards, the less valuable they are and also less incentive for people to buy new boosters (either by owning them already or being able to buy them cheaply)
then wotc also convinced lucasfilm that the ip would be better off with them
narrator: it wasn’t
Wow, seems kinda crappy.
I can only assume this is WoTC not renewing the licence for some reason. It doesn’t seem rational for FFG to end it at this point.
I guess we’ll see what happens. It doesn’t seem beyond hope that WoTC or someone else has plans for the game system, but I dunno.
Gotta confess, I’ll be slow to buy into externally licensed games in future. FFG could definitely have been up front about when things expired if this was part of the plan.
Hopefully we get an inside scoop at some point.
Keep running as long as we have player-organized events, which I hope will be a long while yet.
Either way, it was truly an honor to serve the community.
This was a brilliant community, and even though I haven’t played in a while I will miss you all very much. This sucks, and I hope there’s some better explanation than “whoops, we sucked at negotiating the license!”. So many good memories.
Netrunner 2.0, RIP. Hard times, daddeh, hard times.
Perhaps this is an opportunity for FFG to produce their own Android: WebDodger game.
This comes up a lot when people compare LCGs to Magic but each Magic set has reprints and cards that aren’t really “designed” in any meaningful way, vanilla creatures with predictable mana costs. Every LCG card has to have some design work and testing. Effort-per-card is greater I guess is what I’m saying.
I’m shocked. I made some great memories and enjoyed the community. A sad day indeed.
FWIW, the Warhammer 40k: Conquest LCG is kept alive by fans (Team Apoka) who have created a fair amount of new content as print-and-play. Understood that WotC might be a little more on edge about that kind of thing however.
I suppose WotC just got too greedy.
I strongly doubt they’re planning to do anything with the license themselves.
Back when the 4th edition of the D&D RPG was the current version, something similar happened in non-US countries. Licensing fees became so high that no German publisher was interested anymore.
This paved the way for the Pathfinder RPG, which is basically a clone of D&D’s 3rd edition. It’s now completely taken over the market here.
Meanwhile the 5th edition of D&D is the most successful version of the game in all times, but it’s still completely dead in Germany (and likely just about everywhere except in the US).
Anyway, this is shocking news that completely caught me by surprise. I have only just decided to get back into the game after all!
Yesterday the rest of the Kitara cycle was delivered to me…
I’m probably still going to get ‘Reign & Reverie’, but I’m not sure about ‘Terminal Directive’.
Man, what a thing to wake up to. Lying in bed, grab the tablet and fire up FFG’s website to see if the new cycle was announced yet… and then… that.
Woof.
I do feel bad for the Boggsfather, since he didn’t get to work on a new cycle of his own.
Wonder what’s next, since now they’re down to only two competitive LCG’s. I wouldn’t be amiss to a Android: Corporate Warfare card game. Always wanted a Globalsec corp deck… but not this way…
What exactly did FFG license from WotC? From what I understand, you can’t copyright mechanics, and FFG owns the setting. So, the only thing they licensed were words like Netrunner, ICE, etc?
Countered by the fact that MtG designs for Draft and Standard, at least. (They often say they don’t bother looking at Legacy/Vintage, and only mildly look at Modern, if at all.)
There’s realistically extremely few true reprints, but a few more functional reprints (card does exact same thing, with a different name and sometimes creature type. Imagine a breaker named Acid Rain that had the exact same stats as Corroder…)
And remember, one Cycle comes out for every two MtG sets (though one’s a small set and the other one’s a big set…)
Effort to design is roughly equal, or more effort for MtG. It’s hard to directly compare.
Did Boggs at least get to design reign snd Revery? If not that really sucks, it seems like he had a lot of great ideas.
I was so optimistic about the Kitara Cycle and 2.0 was great as well.
I am sure I will still have a lot of fun with the game, but still, I liked getting new cards every month. 
So this
Damn, this wasn’t what I expected to wake up to on a Saturday morning. I feel sadder than I have any right to, given that I’ve been jacked out for a long time and haven’t even bothered buying any Kitara product. But it seemed like the game was turning a corner: Boggs really looked like he had the right ideas and Core2 was a clever way to clear out broken cards without invalidating veterans’ purchases.
I burned myself out on the game a bit before the worst of the Mumbad doldrums, trying to force wins with jank that just wasn’t going anywhere and kept my distance after that. But it was always with half an eye on the game, like an old friend you don’t really talk to anymore but occasionally look up because you hope they’re doing well.
The end of production and official support doesn’t mean the end. What the players choose to do with the game in its final released form is up to them.
Exactly what I was wondering about. Anybody here able to answer this?