Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

I am about to go out and about, so please Bear with me.

A long time ago, back when Borderlands first came out, I found this comic on Deviantart about it. Or rather, my brother showed it to me. One day, I wanted to look at it again, I don't remember why, but I didn't know what site it was on and I didn't want to call my brother because he was at work. So, I typed in "Borderlands Comic" into Google Images, and this came up:



Now, as you can see, that comes from NerfNow, a webcomic about TF2, most of the time. After looking at that and the one other Borderlands comic in the same few posts, I jumped to the first comic and started reading through, no idea that it was a comic about TF2 with guests, instead I thought of it as a comic about games. As I read more about TF2, it eventually got me actually interested in it. Right about when I was at this arc:

Start:


End:


I was interested enough to check the game out. So I did. I did some digging and eventually (in a few minutes, to tell the truth) found Meet the Engineer:




Watching Meet the Engineer prompted me to watch all the rest of the available Meet the Team Videos, and as soon as I had the money put together, download Steam and buy TF2.

So, by simply letting a Web Comic writer make his comics based on TF2, they eventually got a whole new player, and you can not tell me that I am the only person with which this has happened.

My question that I was wondering, and that I was hopeing we could discuss, is.... Why don't the folk over at GW see fan made things as free PR, much like NerfNow is viewed by Valve? If even one person mistakingly googles Turn Signals on a Land Raider, and starts to read it.... BOOM, another player, all because some guy wrote down the games of the Emperors Pointy Sticks (not to be confused with the Pointy Sticks of the Emperor).

So, why don't they allow it? Why do they Exterminatus everything? I don't know, I just don't understand.

It's kind of like WoT Now?. Because of that webcomic, I was able to convince a few friends of mine to read the Wheel of Time Series, causing more books to be sold.

VALVe was always a company that embraced it's fanbase, especially the modding community, whereas most other companies treated them as nonexistant at best, a pest at worst. However, if you take a look, almost all of their games ,bar Half Life, Portals and perhaps a few others I cant recall ,was spawned as a "retail" version of a mod, or a sequel to one of these games, so it could just be them being lazy on coming up with original material. In any case it works. Dunno if the same method would work for Games Workshop though, as it's a different industry altogether.

True, on all accounts, but still. Wouldn't it be smarter to keep these things as a free advertisment? Just kind of slap them on the wrist telling them they can't make money from it, and I would think they would be good. I mean, I can see TSoaLR, simply because of how silly it is compared to how GrimDark 40k is, but still....