Created in 2003, SMART TRADING DIFFUSION was first distributor of multimedia products: Video games, Accessories, Computer products, Board games, ... via Cmoinscher.fr (an internal site), many e-commerce sites: Cdiscount , Allociné, Ludikbazar, Pixmania, ... but also in supermarkets Carrefour, Leclerc, Intermarché, ..

For more than 3 years, SMART TRADING DIFFUSION has been involved in business consulting, particularly in the Administrative and Financial Department, and more specifically in the gaming universe, including crowdfunding operations (Editions SANS-DETOUR, Ludikbazar , Ludibay).

Finally, SMART TRADING DIFFUSION, has been involved in the production of 3D illustrations for Editions SANS-DETOUR: The call of Cthulhu V7 Limited Edition AMMIRATI, intervenes in the production of a Web Series and a comic that are in progress of development.

 .Mikes. wrote:
- The rules are finalized. No options (spells, miracles ...)

Statement about Éditions Sans-Détour
Posted by Michael O'Brien on December 08, 2018

Éditions Sans-Détour (ESD) has long been a valued Chaosium licensee, releasing a range of beautifully produced Call of Cthulhu materials in French.

ESD's license for Call of Cthulhu expired in September this year. It is with regret that we announce that Chaosium shall not be renewing ESD's license for any products. ESD's permission to use our trademarks, logos and all related intellectual property has been withdrawn.

As fans of Call of Cthulhu, you deserve to know our reasons why sadly we cannot continue this relationship.

In a nutshell: ESD has not paid Chaosium any royalties on any of its sales since late 2016.

Chaosium has patiently tried to work with ESD during this time; however, to date we have not even received any sales data for the past two years, let alone any payments on outstanding royalties. (Not even on crowdfunding projects like Les Masques de Nyarlahotep et Le Jour de la Béte, which are straightforward to calculate and pay).

Last month Chaosium made it clear to ESD that the license had expired and would not be renewed. ESD were advised they are in cardinal breach of its previous license - nb this would have been grounds for immediate termination of the license, if it had not already expired.

Chaosium does not want ESD’s failures to perform its contractual duties to result in you the fans not getting product you already paid for on ESD’s crowdfunding campaigns.

We are willing to work with ESD to enable it to fulfill its crowdfunding obligations to you. However, at a minimum ESD needs to pay Chaosium the royalties it owes under its licenses. Unfortunately, to date, we have received nothing - not even from crowdfunding campaigns completed in 2017.

EDS's failure to comply with the terms of our license agreement leaves Chaosium no choice but to proceed to take legal advice on avenues to settle the substantial debt owed. As Éditions Sans-Détour has long been a valued part of the Call of Cthulhu family, we are saddened that we have been unable to resolve these matters in a constructive manner.

Going forward, Chaosium has a new licensee for Call of Cthulhu in French. A formal announcement will be made shortly.

Michael O'Brien
Head of Licensing
Vice President - Chaosium Inc.
www.chaosium.com

HaleysRedComet
about 2 months ago
I agree and want to post my screed here about it again:

So, let's think about this. I, and I believe most people here, want the return of Confrontation. CMON dropped the ball on this when they held the rights. They teased Phoenix edition through a different project and never delivered on that, and now SD holds the IP rights and plans to bring the game back via Resurrection. So far, so good, I think. We got a company who is actually doing some work to bring the brand back. Awesome.

OK, so back in early 2017 SD announces that Classic and Ressurection will be something they are working on, and at some point Classic will be a Kickstarter project. Awesome. I'm jazzed about this, I love this game and the minis and can't wait to see how SD does with it. Then... not a lot happens. As the project draws closer there is a poll for characters to be included with the pledge, actually pretty cool. Get the community involved, good idea. But then...

Mostly silence from SD. People, in general, don't get responses to questions on the FB. One thread in particular had a ton of pretty basic questions - what's the pledge structure, etc... - but the only question that was answered was someone asking for SD's Twitter account. So, we know SD is seeing these questions but ignoring them. I'm not saying I was expecting detailed answers, but a simple "Wait and see" or "This is the basic idea" would have been nice. This would be a trend that SD continues to this day - they mostly don't respond to social media inquiries.

Anyway, the KS launches and funds in 2 hours. It raises about 650K Euro. Awesome. But then... people start asking questions and looking closer at things. The minis will be PVC with ABS weapons, similar to what Wrath of Kings does. Personally, this doesn't make too much sense to me, as my metal Confrontation minis tended to have stability issues with ankles more than anything else. But, this is the project SD wants to do. So, we will have PVC and ABS. The issue of quality comes up again and again. It's answered, but because a prototype isn't shown people don't believe it. We are told to trust SD, many backers do because they've delivered on their RPG projects before. SD posts and update saying they can be trusted because they've made products before. OK.

So, we are 3 days from the end of the project and it is down to about 461K Euro right now. That's nearly 200K lost and about 66% of what it was at the height of funding. What happened? Here's where I am going to get really critical: Sans Detour barely worked on this project.

The project launched with over a year of planning able to go into it. What we saw was pictures of the old Rackham minis - the same ones used in their catalog and on the mini's cards. There's even art used in a few situations instead of miniature images. That's weird. Not a single model was ever cast by SD. They're offering a resin pledge, people thought maybe SD made some of those minis. Nope, I confirmed that they were leftover from old Rackham. SD then doubles down on this and states that they are unable to produce a mini they have made, that it is cost prohibitive. I have never seen a single miniature company using KS that has said this. So then people start asking to see how they will scan the masters into a computer, as SD stated they will do this to make molds. Nope, again. So we are left to conclude that Sans Detour has not done -any- work prior to the KS campaign to show people what they plan to produce. They said they've made calls to factories. That seems like it is enough for some people.

Then, we get into the weird grey area of how business ownership and partner companies. In an update, Sans Detour stated they would use Ludik (with whom they share an owner and address) for logistics on this project. They stated that, if Ludik were to go under, they wold simply switch to a different company. So, in a comment, it was disclosed that Ludik is now controlled by a liquidator. I don't know how this wasn't known before, it's a huge red flag. Then, we also find out that Stellar Licensing, the company who owns the IP, only owns the Confrontation IP as their single asset and is owned by the financial Director of SD. Again, kind of weird.

So - in the year leading up to this project, the only prep work done was to photoshop existing images together, make a choice of minis featured, and contact factories. That is, observably, the only work done by SD leading up to what they hoped (looking at the stretch goals) would be a million Euro+ project.

This brings us to the current situation. Sans Detour, the account, is barely involved with getting information out. Instead, Joss - the project manager - has his own account and comments, while other collaborators - who are friends of the project and not SD employees - also give official information. The collaborators get all their info from SD directly, so if they don't have the answer to a question and want to answer it, they have to ask someone. Fine so far. But - we have seen that some of the collaborators have berated and ignored people who have questions or concerns about the project. It's also apparent that there is no native English speaker who works on this project, which sometimes causes misunderstandings. It's a small issue, but for a company to launch a large project in English without a native speaker seems like a mistake.

It also came out that SD was not able to produce game play videos of the game they are pitching, which was a request frequently asked of them. I asked a collaborator about this and was told that there are only 2 players around their office and they had no time to record. I don't see how, in the year they had to prepare for this, they couldn't run through a game and take pictures or record. That doesn't add up to me, and makes me think this project wasn't taken seriously by SD from the start.

It would appear that SD thought it could put together a project for a game that hasn't been produced in about 10 years and expect that people would be willing to buy a 300 Euro box of minis without even seeing how they might look in the material they will receive them in. Next to no prep work was done, and SD seems to be happy with the fact that it passed it's goal at all despite the fact that it lost 1/3 of it's funding so far. SD plans to launch a new edition of Confrontation next year sometime. No one has seen any work that has gone into that so far, so we are left to conclude that as much effort will go into that project as went into their current one. Which is to say - not much at all.

 warboss wrote:
Yeah, I hope the backers don't get screwed but I'm not holding my breath. This kickstarter had more red flags than any I saw since the Heroquest 25th anniversary board game... and that years late example wasn't exactly turning out great last I checked either.

 TwilightSparkles wrote:
At some point surely people start thinking before backing?

Dear backers,

In spite of our efforts, the two successive defections of the partners who were taking care of the production of our resin Collector’s Choice will not allow us to get you these models in time for Christmas as we had planned to.
We have received the first part of Hysterical Games’ production and we’re waiting for the now rapidly forthcoming second part.

As soon as we receive this second part, we’ll proceed to a first wave of shipping for those of you who had ordered these models.

For models which were originally supposed to be produced by GRX, we’ve set up a collaboration with a new partner, who has assured us that they’ll be able to produce what was missing in a few weeks’ time. We don’t have the exact date for the completion of this production, but as soon as this information is known to us, we’ll pass it along to you. Once completed, we’ll proceed to a second wave of shipping in order to complete these orders.

We’re clearly aware that many among you were hoping to get these magnificent pieces to be able to gift them for Christmas, and we’re saddened that this can’t be the case. In order to allow you to still mark the occasion for the holidays, however, Olivier has prepared small festive cards to announce the arrival of these collection models (downloadable here)

To finish, these collection models will also be added, in early 2019, to the Sans Détour online store. You’ll thus be able to preorder them and they will be shipped once the order of all backers who have chosen the “2018” option have been delivered.

We wish you all happy end of the year holidays, and will return early 2019 with news about Confrontation Classic and Confrontation Resurrection!

 Mysterio wrote:
What happened between SD and Hysterical Games?