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Regarding today's events with WorldAnvil
🕑 Added 2019-08-08 21:56:24 +0000 UTCEarlier today, WorldAnvil announced a new feature that looked familiar to me. Per their announcement, they've been working on this feature for 2 weeks. Dimitris, the creator of WorldAnvil, gained private access to the LegendKeeper Closed Beta 2 weeks ago. This was done using Janet's (another founder of WA) personal email account, shortly after changing her profile picture from an identifying photo of her face, to something more anonymized. I figured I would address this here. (The sidebar in particular is a pretty candid lift of LK's design, down to the palette choices for icons.)
LegendKeeper, for comparison.
I have to be honest: I was pretty bummed out when I saw this. It feels weird that a large player in the space would pay me to access my closed beta, and then turn around and use it to benefit their publically-released product.
As a competitor, I guess I could understand what drives a person to do this.
As a person, I thought we were better than this. It kinda feels like I'm in middle school again.
Both my designer (who created this design expression) and I are pretty disappointed in WorldAnvil and Dimitris' behavior. After I confronted him about it, Dmitris joined my Discord server, said a few things to my users in the public channel, and then messaged me privately and admitted he created designs directly based on the content he was allowed to view in the closed beta. He stated it non-apologetically, matter-of-factly, paid me lots of compliments, and told me I was "probably stressed right now".
Part of me just wants to let it go, but as an independent creator, I feel like I should stand up for myself and my designer. The LegendKeeper team frowns on this kind of blatant copying. If we were in 1.0, I'd brush it off, but these folks paid to access closed beta in order to use our design expressions. Something about that just makes me kinda queasy in my stomach.
So what are we going to do now? I've stated my piece; I just wanted people to know what happened. Now...We're just going to keep making. We're going to move forward, continuing in the same spirit of curiosity and kindness that we have been. We'll continue to develop a user-focused, empowering creative tool that I hope will inspire everyone to make things that they love.
We're proud to be creating something that inspires everyone, even our competitors. ;)
FYI: Please be kind in your comments. No reason to talk too much smack about anyone. I strive for this to be a positive, uplifting place. I hate to bring up such a downer, but I figured it was right to let people know.
Ciao.
Braden
EDIT: In the interest of fairness, I added a couple more images for comparison. I appreciate everyone's support tonight. Let's try to keep it positive-- Please no brigading or harassing anyone. WA showed up and gave their response; that's fine, let's be respectful and appreciate them for taking the time to tell their side of the story. It doesn’t change my stance.
EDIT: In response to comments below, LK was in development before I ever heard of WorldAnvil, nor was LK ever “another take” on WorldAnvil; I have never said anything of the sort. LK started as a project codenamed “Multiverse” in June of 2017, but didn’t start significant development until January 6th of 2018. This is documented in Github. LK has never borrowed any design components from WA.
