Note, he specified World of Darkness comics, which are likely not going to be 52 titles, 10 of when are Batman or Superman derivatives. It's not fair to compare the entirety of the second biggest comic book publisher in the world to one niche line that's likely going to be published by Darkhorse, Image, Top Cow, or IDW.FrankTrollman wrote:Martin wrote:Short answer is that the economic centre of the company will be computer games. Unless something weird happens and people start buying roleplaying books, WoD novels and comics like they were Harry Potter. As things are now tabletop publishing hardly breaks even.
What Martin is noting is that the sales of World of Darkness paper products aren't very good of late. But he's pretty much looking at Onyx Path and late era White Wolf numbers to draw that conclusion. And as he notes:
True. But that quote was about how they'll be ignoring their nWoD IP because it has shit popularity and isn't worth developing.So basically he's looking at the sales of a product line that had failed worse than New Coke and somehow draws the conclusion that there isn't a market for soda. Once you acknowledge that public reception and sales of the NWoD era were worse than even doomsayers like me were saying at the time, you don't really get to point to those sales as evidence that tabletop products barely break even these days. 4th edition D&D and NWoD were really poorly received, but that does not mean that those poor sales numbers are the new normal. It means only that those sales numbers are normal for an edition that nobody likes.Martin wrote:I love CoD and find that is a much more playable game with a more vague and unsettling aesthetic than WoD ever had. Too bad it never sold for shit and that old players hated it. It lacked the epic scope and the punk passion of the classic WoD. Had it done even remotely as well as the classic WoD things would be very different.
Well, generally, you don't classify Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th as Urban Fantasy, even though they are. There's an emotional difference, there. Urban Fantasy is about wonder and empowerment. Horror is supposed to terrify you. In other words, he's pretty much railing against Vampions there. Which is wrong, but it's a different kind of wrong.I... have no idea what he thinks this means. While he is correct that Exalted was the beginning of the end of the company and that all of the "Exalted Tie-In" books like Mummy: the Resurrection were shit that nobody liked, that's not what "Urban Fantasy" means. I feel like there might even be a language barrier issue here, because Urban Fantasy is the name of a genre that Vampire: the Masquerade has always been solidly inside of. Contemporary settings with real-world locations and supernatural elements are Urban Fantasy by definition. The only way to make World of Darkness stop being Urban Fantasy is to set it on Tatooine or Athas.Martin wrote:The attempt to create a deep mythology by linking the setting to Exalted was the worst choice ever. That was the last step in WoD’d death-march from being an artistic horror-IP to full on immature, escapist Urban Fantasy.