UPDATE: December 6th 2010 – Fred, founder and organizer of the DominanceWar, has put the contest on hold.

Due to recent events, Dominance War V has been suspended. To read up on what is happening, visit: http://www.gameartisans.org/forums/showthread.php?t=18042

This challenge will resume once the Founder, Fredrik Hultqvist, makes an official comment about recent events and the state of DominanceWar.com and GameArtisans.org. 

Dominance War V will resume shortly. Thank you for your patience ….

ORIGINAL STORY:

The submission date is looming ever so close and there have been some amazing entries from the talented members of the Polycount Community. A bunch of new faces came to represent for the Green and Black and massive props go out to everyone who participated in the challenge.

However, I need to bring something to the attention to all the entrants (present and future). You may have noticed this small disclaimer at the bottom of the submissions page (you must be logged in at Game-Artisans to get to the submissions form).

This may be something harmless and a way to generate funds to expand the ever growing Game-Artisans Community. But bare in mind that there was no mention of selling artwork in the rules/brief before the contest started, it wasn’t added during the contests duration and it was only brought to the attention of all the forum mods/admins involved less than a week ago. So this is new to us as it is to you.

So why have we flagged this as a caution? Because we at Polycount like to protect our community and all the members within it.

Polycount has dealt with Fred and Game-Artisans since the first Dominance War and we continued the relationship to the Unearthly Challenge also. In that time, the practice and conduct of these contests have been sketchy at best with the constant delays, poor judging system, missing prizes, lack of communication and always in search of donations and sponsors.

Now we have a new addition to that list, where Game-Artisans will be selling your artwork for their own financial gain. That’s right! The artwork you’ve spent the last several weeks producing in your own spare time will be put onto the market and sold.

I personally asked Fred if the contributing artists would be compensated from the sale of their artwork. And was met with an abrupt no. Followed by this direct quote from Fred himself:

“Yup, this might make a few artists angry… but, not my problem.” – Fred Hultqvist

I have dealt with Fred and Game-Artisans personally and I’m also in direct contact with others in the same position and have experienced this kind of misconduct first hand time and time again. This latest incident has broken any trust that we at Polycount had left and we’ll question any further relationship Polycount has with Game-Artisans.