Pholtus:I just hope the tools are Mac friendly. Tired of all the Mac hate by game developers
Deimos_Masque:It's not Mac hate so much as it is that Mac takes entirely different set of coding to program for and covers only a small share of the home computing business.
Lord of Badlands:Do I stand correct, that they don't want to publish more printed books in the future (2011?)? This whould suck really hard
Christian A:The entire thread is rather relevant, really. Russell's comments are all over the thread.
Russell Bailey:As for another edition... honestly? I don't know. I don't think we're going to do an nWoD 2e. Doing a new edition of some of the core books would be great, but I don't see a need for supplementary material.The old industry model of a new edition every couple of years and a new run of similar supplements really isn't a great idea right now. The whole idea of "support" is questionable, from both business and creative perspectives.It used to be that the smartest thing to do was just build as many books as we could. Quality was a priority, but ship-or-die was the reality. We've shifted from that, for a lot of reasons. The idea now is that a White Wolf book should be, as you put it, "fucking amazing."
Russell Bailey:I don't think I'll be doing much of what we've always done -- note the weird plurals there. Right now, the people most responsible for Vampire: The Requiem are Eddy Webb and me. I'm the line developer, Eddy's the publishing guru. I've got two massive projects right now that you all already know about. Eddy's got many smaller projects in the pan.None of these things have easy analogs in past products. When I think of the future, I think of stuff like Damnation City, Block by Bloody Block, the clan series, and New Wave Requiem. The development gang and I are also trying to sell management on various further-future projects that are also further out from the core plus splats model. We'll see what they think.
Russell Bailey:Ryan says (and sees) things Ryan's way. And let's be perfectly honest here, he's a vastly bigger wheel at CCP than I will ever be.That said, he's right about some things. One of them is that tabletop gaming is not something which is making White Wolf larger. Another is that White Wolf's not doing any more board games or card games on our current schedule.If you guys actually want board and card games, now's a good time to make yourselves heard. Anything you want, now is the time. White Wolf's future is wider open and better funded than it has been in a very long time.As for size in general... a lot of people who used to be solely associated with White Wolf are now, if you look at it the way Ryan is there, part of CCP. I'll give you an example: when I joined the company, there were two accountants working just on WW stuff. One of them, Ben, had been with the company for nearly twenty years. Now, he and his colleague make the financial magic* happen for all of CCP North America.Another example: one of my bosses, Aaron. Aaron started out at WW in the early nineties as a writer and resident obscenely young guy. He's run operations for the company forever... now he runs them for all of North America, plus overseeing the warehousing stuff* worldwide.White Wolf used to have a person-what-made-licensing-happen. Now she negotiates EVE deals, too.Finally, let's make it personal. I came aboard two years ago as EVE developer. Since then, I've added EVE Online, Vampire: The Requiem and secret stuff** to my portfolio.So, if you're Ryan, being asked what CCP's future in physical products is, your answer is going to be that White Wolf's dedicated staff is no longer "fairly large." If you're me, talking about the part of the business I'm personally passionate about to my own people, it's that we're a similar staff with much bigger jobs.And if you're Ryan, the marketing VP, you have to look at publishing tabletop games as a legacy business.If you're me, the gamer and hack writer, it's a legacy I'm working hard to carry on and live up to.* Many of these jobs seem to involve outright sorcery. I'm not sure exactly how they work.** Which is not necessarily part of the MMO business.