|
A common meme running around in my gaming table is that White Wolf is being terribly changed by piracy. The thesis is: Too many people pirate, therefore WW is not profitable, therefore they are no longer creating new books. Are they really publishing much less than they used to? Are sales really down? If so, to what extent might these be changes attributable to piracy? |
|||||||||||||||||
|
|
They are publishing much less new World of Darkness than they used to during the old World of Darkness, but it's not necessarily piracy that is causing the change. They are currently owned by CCP (the company behind Eve Online) and involved in creating the World of Darkness MMO. There has been an economic slowdown in the last 5-6 years, reducing the amount of disposable income available to customers. There were also complaints about the rate of releases in the old days (At least one book per mainline per month, with at least one book from a smaller line on top). Their focus has moved away from print books to PDFs and Print on Demand. There are arguments which suggest that this would both increase and decrease piracy (and thus revenue). On one side, it's easier for people to buy stuff as soon as they find it. On the other, creating the PDF makes it easier for people to share. The balance of these two probably favours the increase in revenue. |
||||
|
|
|
@Okeefe has already mentioned Onyx Path Publishing, which is comprised of former WW employees and has the license to produce both oWoD and nWoD books. They've got a full release schedule coming up, including two brand-new games and revisions of World of Darkness and Vampire: The Requiem. It's not accurate to say that they're no longer producing new work. I'd like to address the idea that piracy was the cause of the slowdown and eventual cessation of straight-up book publishing. That's not true. The primary reason why White Wolf (and CCP/na) got out of the business of putting books on shelves in stores is the broken nature of the hobby-games distribution system and the decline of brick-and-mortar bookstores and game stores. It made more financial sense to deliver product to the fans directly, and keep more of the money, than to involve middlemen who were increasingly no longer adding value to the process. |
|||||
|
|
That White Wolf stopped publishing has less to do with piracy and more to do with the fact that White Wolf's parent company, CCP, considers tabletop games and White Wolf to be legacy businesses with respect to MMOs. Some new things are happening, though. They've embraced pdf sales and print on demand. There's a licensed company, Onyx Path Publishing, that's working on new White Wolf content. |
|||
|
|
|
It's nothing to do with piracy. White Wolf's focus has moved to MMOs and is less on RPGs now (like at many companies, sadly). And they are doing less print publishing and more PDF - which is always going to be less successful regardless of piracy, given that the average gamer still buys books. If piracy was their big problem, you'd think they'd move to print and away from PDF! Not that either print or watermarking is any impediment at all to piracy (see: any torrent site). Print has wider distribution, more people buy print; if you are publishing PDF only you can expect a fraction of the sales you would in print. PDF is a great alternate channel but more of the world is offline than we give it credit for nowadays. To rebut common claims:
Now, for White Wolf having PDF sales makes sense especially for the "long tail" of their huge back catalogue, where they make recurring sales at practically zero incremental cost to themselves. But it does discourage more new product generation. Chalking the reduced focus on RPGs up to piracy is the usual "talking without any data to back it up;" usually one requires proof of an unsupported assertion rather than having to gather proof it's false. |
|||||
|
