Paradox Interactive (the Crusader Kings people, not the Conan/Mutant Chronicles ones) buy the White Wolf properties [Merged x10]

[Ephsy]

Thing is, talking as someone that is familiar with at least Spanish market... Either people have the books translated, or those books are not consumed. Period. Not having spanish translations means utterly missing that market.

That's correct. In the late 80s, early 90s, if you knew english you were an imperialist pig.

[Luis Carlos]

I am Spanish, and I was in the golden age of Spanig roleplaying games, from 1995 until 2005. In the Spanish market happened a thing.. with a example.. "Bastest" was of the first English books I bought, and when that same tittle was published in Spanish languange.. I didn't buy it again. Spanish roleplayers didn't want to wait too long time the translated edition.

After it was the boom of the videogames, and the end of the arcades in the neighbour. Blizzard, Diablo, Starcraft, Diablo II, Counter Strike... and you can imagine the rest.

[Thorbes]

Thing is, talking as someone that is familiar with at least Spanish market... Either people have the books translated, or those books are not consumed. Period. Not having spanish translations means utterly missing that market.

[Asmodai]

Oh? Okay, then. Tell me how it "actually works."

And again, I never said it was the ONLY reason, I simply said it was a huge one. Thousands of fans have access to Masquerade, in their language, during White Wolf's golden age most certainly helped steer South American and European fans more towards the cWoD.

Nota bene, I'm quite unfamiliar with the South American (Spanish/Portugese) market, and even though I am well versed in the European side of the RPG I have no idea what La Factoria has been up to - I did hear that they translated the complete Sorcerors Crusade to Spanish, and that sounds like some amazing support even for a fringe line.

First of all, we need to inspect the difference between 1991, the time of the White Wolf boom and 2016. This were the nascent years of the internet and when ordering stuff via the internet was nigh impossible. It was the age of coming to a comic book store (RPG stores were fucking rare) and finding whatever you could. Thanks to the Diamond distributors catalogue, comic book stores were well supplied with White Wolf products and the only catch was that you were forced to suffer the whim of the people holding the store. In addition to them, if you were one of the lucky few you could have found your own translation of the White Wolf games - German, French, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Portugese. These were available in hobby stores and through direct mail order (later you could even email them or purchase stuff in their webstores after being mailed a payment slip to take to bank!).

Now, having stuff in your own language is amazing as a gateway thing. It opens things up to a wider audience, and it helps you get it to appeal to people who wouldn't have even looked at it twice before. And this is quite amazing. However, a closer inspection of what's actually available (or, well, was) is troubling - both Hexagon and Feder & Schwert started very strong - even producing their own White Wolf supplements! But as things went on their support tapered off. Towards revised only the cores would get properly translated and it was only worse in other languages. Add to this the fact that there were few reprints of the translated material (and even then mostly cores), and you find yourself without access to books.

There was also a strong following for White Wolf in countries that never got translations - scandinavia, most of eastern europe. We all had to get by somehow, and most of us, even the folks who could buy translations ended up getting books in English, as it was the only way to get everything you actually wanted. At least towards the end we had usenet and forums and web stores which allowed us to communicate and help each other with filling out our collections.

What sold the books was excellent word of mouth, a novel approach to gaming and the zeitgeist of the 80s and the 90s distilled into the punk aesthethics of the WoD. It didn't matter if you were Italian, Serbian, Polish, French or Finnish... everyone was getting in on it. And thanks to the budding internet and English being the lingua franca of the late 20th century we actually managed to get our fix in by getting English stuff.

When the nWoD (CoD) came around the trick was that there weren't many translations for it, but it didn't have the word of mouth or the 80s/90s aesthetic to rely on for pushing things onwards. It actually had a bad buzz due to the rawness of transition among the people who should have embraced it, and it had bad marketing that didn't realise they needed to approach a new audience with this.

This resonates even further with the Onyx Path business model - there are no more translations, there are no more books, but everything's out there and available. We have huge kickstarters and people from all the nations flocking to Onyx Path's products seeking to continue support for the games they enjoyed through the ages. We have that because the WoD had the buzz and captured the tone and attitude of the 90s and the people who were into it at the time. Did translations help? Sure, but they were only a part of the appeal.

[Darksider]

Correction. Not a buy out, a merger. At the time of the merger CCP wanted to use the IP to make games and WW wanted the funding to keep producing books. Then, over the course of multiple changes in staff, the direction changed. CCP suffered a bit of hubris and the business plan changed when they had to shift focus to retooling their core product. I've been around since well before the CCP merger, back when the forums looked like a primitive BBS message board. Here's hoping PI learned from CCP's mistakes and doesn't repeat them.

[Odd_Canuck]

And again, I never said it was the ONLY reason, I simply said it was a huge one. Thousands of fans have access to Masquerade, in their language, during White Wolf's golden age most certainly helped steer South American and European fans more towards the cWoD.

I suspect it's in part at least due to the general market decrease for RPG games.

3.0/3.5 D&D the early WoD era, when video games were still a little too crude to fill the mass market RPG appeal, that was a big time for the table top RPG market. At that point it made a great deal of sense that if you were a distributor to a market to invest in localizing a gaming product. Now the market is much more sparse.

Add to that the reputation of the company. For the first few years of the CoD (formerly nWoD) game line they were the struggling company trying to drive the new product into the market, then they were bought out (and I still encounter people that think White Wolf went under after the end of oWoD) and then a few years later the strong shift to digital production, which utterly destroys the previous model of publishing and localization.

[nofather]

The fact that books aren't soda or fast food joints probably places a larger importance on translation as well.

[Fat Larry]

You could research a bit more into how marketing and product placement actually works before before concluding that. Translations definitely help but they are not what makes a thing tick. This is especially different in the age of the internet where english products and words of mouth make things move in quite different ways then before.

Oh? Okay, then. Tell me how it "actually works."

And again, I never said it was the ONLY reason, I simply said it was a huge one. Thousands of fans have access to Masquerade, in their language, during White Wolf's golden age most certainly helped steer South American and European fans more towards the cWoD.

[Heavy Arms]

In this particular context (the CoD not selling well in European markets compared to USA markets) translations matter more than they would in an abstract market theory.

One of the big differences is that - even while the WoD and CoD have strong differences - you're asking existing fans, with existing products in their hands, to convert to a new product. Taking away services/functionality harms the attempt to market the new product. Ceasing translations is just that sort of thing. Why "upgrade" to the new version if the old stuff you have works for you, and doesn't mean having to deal with an extra step to make it work (dealing with no text in a language you know).

We see this sort of thing all the time. I know people that are still holding on to Windows XP because of features that later editions either took away (or added that they don't want), and unlike a computer OS which can eventually make it super annoying to avoid an update (for example Skype doesn't work with XP any more to get people to update to 10), the old WoD books don't go bad no matter what else gets released.

[Ephsy]

The only reason it hasn't been translated is because the IP holder (Be it CCP at the time, or PI at the moment) doesn't gives a fuck about it. Otherwise, yes, you can bet they would sell.

[Asmodai]

Not sure if you're kidding or not. If you're not, while it may not be THE key factor, it most certainly is A key factor. A huge factor, if you will.

You could research a bit more into how marketing and product placement actually works before before concluding that. Translations definitely help but they are not what makes a thing tick. This is especially different in the age of the internet where english products and words of mouth make things move in quite different ways then before.

[Fat Larry]

Something being or not being translated isn't usually the key factor to how popular something is outside the states.

Not sure if you're kidding or not. If you're not, while it may not be THE key factor, it most certainly is A key factor. A huge factor, if you will.

[Darksider]

It's not a key factor in popularity, but it is a strongly correlated indicator of popularity.

[Ephsy]

Something being or not being translated isn't usually the key factor to how popular something is outside the states.

You're kidding me, right? It doesn't even has more than the corebooks translated to Spanish. Meanwhile, third edition of WoD had everything up to Time of Judgement translated.

[Asmodai]

A small and vocal minority would cry murder if they did.

I doubt it's all that small. The old WoD system is not perfect, but it has a quite different tone to CoD's. If you're replacing it, the one in CoD's not the way to go.

That's because it hasn't been nearly as translated as Masquerade was.

Something being or not being translated isn't usually the key factor to how popular something is outside the states.