How do we hate thee, eBay? Let me count the ways.

Ok, we haven't been blogging in a while, but we have a reason.

In case you've been keeping track--and judging by our site stats, you haven't-- we sell digitally deliverable goods on eBay. All our stuff is written by gamers and freelance writers we hire so we know we are producing a quality product. Unlike a lot of the garbage out there, we put time and effort (and even money) into our guides. It's a pride thing. We sell them through our website and through eBay, the website run by fine purveyors of all kinds of douchebaggery...

Sorry.

We're a little upset. Back to the post...

Now, eBay has decided that ebooks can no longer be sold on eBay. They can only be listed as 'classified ads'. This basically means they can't be listed.

We have no idea why ass-clown extroardinaire Brian Burke (director of eBay Global Feedback Policy) decided to take this ridiculously assanine action. According to his statement, it's because 'digital goods are re-produced at little to no cost to the seller.' We truly have no idea how to respond to that. Is he saying that goods need to have high-reproduction costs to sell on eBay? What constitutes 'little to no cost to the seller'? Not even counting listing fees, final value fees and no-questions asked returns, our product development process involves writers, editors, gamers, web designers and lots of time spent creating these projects (not to mention time spent playing the game, researching the game and doing everything needed to make a reader-friendly product), which means the cost to produce these items is nowhere close to 'little to no-cost'.

Yes, we ship digital goods. But because of that we don't have to charge our customers for our shipping, printing or manufacturing costs. All our costs are front end, not reproduction related. But apparently, someone at eBay is a business model nazi. Or nazi-commie. Or perhaps nazi-commie-monarch-luddite. Yeah. Probably that last one. (Note: we cannot confirm or deny that anyone at eBay has ever had any relationship with any nazi, nazi-commie, nazi-commie-monarch-luddite organization. Yet.)

Well, we're done with eBay. Look for our products through our website exclusively.

And if you ever see someone who works for eBay, kick them in the teeth once or twice for us.

'Till next tie, true believers!

Then we hold the world ransom for... ONE MILLION DOLLARS!

So you want to create an MMO but aren't sure where to get the cash. You've called in all your favors, searched through your couch cushions and even donated plasma. Even with the giddiness that accompanies the sudden loss of a nearly fatal amount of blood, you are sure you still don't have enough. What is a person to do?

Well, if you are David Jones (One of the original creators of the GTA series), you just go to your friendly neighborhood venture capital firm and ask them to fund your planned console MMO. After that, getting a check for 50 MILLION DOLLARS is just a matter of opening your mailbox. (At least, we hope it was a check. Sending that much cash through the mail would probably cost you a lot on postage.)

So to Mr. Jones and his company, Realtime Worlds, we say: Fuck YO Casino! CJ!! (Yeah, that's a quote from GTA: San Andreas.)

And not to go off on a total non-sequitur (though it's never stopped us before) we'd just like to say that we are REALLY jazzed about the forthcoming release of the next GTA game. We haven't been able to think about much other than the prospect of beating new hookers with even bigger double-headed dildoes. (Dildo's? Dildi? We don't know.)