Wizards of the Coast has announced that it is pulling the plug on its Gleemax social networking site in order to concentrate on other digital initiatives, namely Magic Online and Dungeons & Dragons Insider.  Although WotC remains committed to building a community of gamers online, as Randy Buehler, WotC’s V.P. of Digital Gaming put it: “until we have our games up and running at a quality level we can be proud of, it will be the games themselves that receive the lion’s share of our attention and resources.”

WotC’s plan is to shut the Gleemax Website down completely sometime in September.  Announced in June of 2007, Gleemax was an ambitious initiative to construct a next generation “online home” for hobby gamers (see “Gleemax: WotC’s New Online Initiative”).  Writing on the Gleemax site blog, Buehler, who was interviewed at length on ICv2 about WotC’s plans for Gleemax (see the three-part “Interview With Randy Buehler”), admits that his plans for Gleemax were “too ambitious,” and that the mistake he made was “in pushing us too far, too fast.”