Martin Ericsson clearly gets to see sales figures and other inside baseball numbers that we do not. And he's obviously a dedicated fan of many years who pays more attention to the World of Darkness than any of us do. Possibly more than anyone in the world does. That said, a lot of this looks just plain wrong.
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.
The thing is that comics
do put up Harry Potter like numbers. Over the last 19 years, the Harry Potter books sold over 450 million copies. And that's a lot. To pick a month at random, in February of 2013, the top ten DC Comics titles sold in excess of 1.5 million. Now extend that for twelve months a year for nineteen years and you get about 350 million copies. And while the drop off from a top ten title to a lesser title is pretty steep, remember that in February of 2013 that DC was publishing 52 titles. If you add it all up, it probably comes to about 450 million - same as the seven book Harry Potter series. It's a different market, but sales are basically fine in it.
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:
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.
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: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.
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.
I feel like Martin Ericsson has a much more encyclopedic knowledge of World of Darkness than I do, and I feel that he likes and respects the subject matter. I also am impressed and heartened by the fact that he is able to put on his big boy pants and admit that not everything in the past was good and that some of the White Wolf design directions were actually terrible. I also like that he is willing and able to point to objective criteria to make those decisions.
But... and you knew that a "but" was coming... I am not convinced that Martin Ericsson has a lot of
external perspective. Whether he's talking about book sales or literary genres, he doesn't seem to know what he's talking about in the wider context of the world
outside White Wolf fandom. Which is really most of the world and even most of fandom. Even when White Wolf was the champion for a few years in the late 90s, it was still a
plurality of the fandom rather than a
majority.
So when he says this:
Martin Ericsson wrote:Onyx Path also have a license to produce nostalgia books for the classic WoD settings. These are official but set in the same nebulous ”eternal nineties”, using the old-school buckets-of-dice-system featured in the original lines. Future editions will move the setting, mythos, metaplot and mechanics almost 15 years forward into present day.
I have literally no idea what he thinks a "present day" mechanic is or would look like. Seriously: none at all. He seems to be disavowing dice pools, but dice pools are still one of the main core mechanics for a game to use. NWoD had terrible mechanics and OWoD had terrible mechanics, but the fact that they were using buckets of dice wasn't the reason. And yet, he's talking like he thinks it is. Switching WoD to a d20 system would not inherently solve anything, as McWoD showed.
-Username17
