Ok....apparently we are going full Forsaken.

[reaperfrost8]

Oh, I don't imagine Paradox selling the CofD off is likely. But it makes way more sense than not, because owning an IP just to keep people from making stuff for it is... not really a great way to make money. There's no way the CofD being sold to Onyx Path results in a net loss of Paradox. Paradox isn't getting CofD to come to WoD5 in significant numbers by starving CofD, so the idea that they'd lose money to competition is shaky. It's shakier when you look at 20th and CofD coexisting for years just fine, and even more so when you look at the sheer amount of resources Paradox has to promote WoD5 compared to Onyx Path's ability to promote CofD on its own.

Paradox selling CofD is a good move. It's a good PR move. It's a way to recoup money they spent on an IP they're not profiting on at this point. Selling it is - beyond again some tax stuff I might not understand because it's hard enough to have a lay grasp of US's laws - better for Paradox than keeping it just to kill it.

It's not about gain it's about loss take for example video game pirating companies spend tons of effort to stop piracy Nintendo is a really good example where they spent a lot of hours doing it.

Paradox would gain more selling it than keeping it but there looking at the loss instead of the gain if they lose cofd they lose control over an IP they've bought lock stock and barrel.

A lot of companies have a ton of unused IPs but choose to keep it for whatever reason and it feels very likely that cofd is going to sort of end up like that.

[Heavy Arms]

OK.... what point are you trying to make here? If you're just trying to tell me that what I wish would happen is unlikely to happen? Reread the first sentence of the post you quoted.

If you think you're defending Paradox's decisions around CofD in some fashion... you're not doing a great job of it by comparing things to what many analysts consider bad corporate priorities motivated by short term quarterly profits for their investors instead of long term health and stability of the company.

You also seem to think Paradox is a much bigger company than it is if you think it can casually toss aside a few hundred thousand dollars worth of investment and not have to answer to their shareholders.

[reaperfrost8]

OK.... what point are you trying to make here? If you're just trying to tell me that what I wish would happen is unlikely to happen? Reread the first sentence of the post you quoted.

If you think you're defending Paradox's decisions around CofD in some fashion... you're not doing a great job of it by comparing things to what many analysts consider bad corporate priorities motivated by short term quarterly profits for their investors instead of long term health and stability of the company.

You also seem to think Paradox is a much bigger company than it is if you think it can casually toss aside a few hundred thousand dollars worth of investment and not have to answer to their shareholders.

I am not defending paradox?

What I am trying to say is that a company like paradox isn't going to sell it off because as you said there making bad decisions and are going to continue that, them choosing not to sell it from there perspective changes nothing even though it would be way better to sell it.

But there most likely just going to let it languish because to them sense doesn't matter. From watching other companies they tend to do that, the entire game industries is filled to the brim with many forgotten IPs untouched.

As for investors part there stock recently got up by 4.6% and from my experience most investors don't really care about what a company is doing with it's IP so long as the line goes up.

[TyrannicalRabbit]

I am not much for speculating or trying to infer what Paradox is or isn't doing save to say their current actions and silence is weird.

[Nicolas Milioni]

oh man i sure hope the cofd can still continue on some form

[Nicolas Milioni]

i don't suppose one of those thingies,i forgot what are they called in english, would help?
the thingy where we make a document saying the cofd should still made and tons of people sign their names to show their support?

[Heavy Arms]

If you're just trying to tell me that what I wish would happen is unlikely to happen? Reread the first sentence of the post you quoted.

So...

What I am trying to say is that a company like paradox isn't going to sell it off...

Going back to that quote I asked you to reread:

Oh, I don't imagine Paradox selling the CofD off is likely.

Is there a particular reason you feel the need to spend so many words to what amounts to agreeing with me while trying to make me feel like I'm still wrong somehow? It's hard to take you ignoring the start of my posts twice in a row as just a misunderstanding.

--------------------------

i don't suppose one of those thingies,i forgot what are they called in english, would help?
the thingy where we make a document saying the cofd should still made and tons of people sign their names to show their support?

Petition.

[reaperfrost8]

Is there a particular reason you feel the need to spend so many words to what amounts to agreeing with me while trying to make me feel like I'm still wrong somehow? It's hard to take you ignoring the start of my posts twice in a row as just a misunderstanding..

I apologize if this was a misunderstanding I didn't see the top part the part where you were talking about how it would be smarter for the to sell it confused me a bit.

[ArcaneArts]

i don't suppose one of those thingies,i forgot what are they called in english, would help?
the thingy where we make a document saying the cofd should still made and tons of people sign their names to show their support?

Yeah, those don't work nearly as much as people'd like you believe. It certainly doesn't work at the scale we're working at.

[monteparnas]

It being the CEO's pet project, while the company is dealing with a bunch of internal structural issues and minor scandals, does imply a lot of why the decisions around it all are so messy.

That would make a lot of sense, specially if Paradox is already big enough to start forming silos, which is probably the case. Corporations are very complex entities, and the usual struggle of making anything pass through so many heads makes a lot of sense.

As for investors part there stock recently got up by 4.6% and from my experience most investors don't really care about what a company is doing with it's IP so long as the line goes up.

Oh, but we do care. At least those that matter, the ones that share reliable opinions, the ones that work as fund managers and the ones that put a helluva lot of money into it with consistency (angel investors don't count as they only do it until the IPO).

Even if the goal of many investors is to profit with trade, buying low and selling high, instead of living off dividends, those are still the key element to evaluate a company's shares. So we need to understand the company and its market to make an informed prediction on its future revenue and share value.

I'm not saying this specific dead IP in their hands will weight more than other aspects of their business, at the end of the day it remains a relatively small part of it and they can more than compensate with their profits elsewhere. For now. But such a dead weight still isn't a good prospect, and they're not big enough to just brush it aside.

The greatest problem for long time investors here is that tech companies, specially the relatively small ones, have a history of going down due to amateur management committing a few fatal mistakes. It happens all too frequently, with teams that are too good at making tech and completely obtuse at making business. Not rarely they think they'll revolutionize the world by doing business more casually, and they're actually just threading a well known and doomed path.

For those that know this tune by heart, while Paradox isn't necessarily a lost cause already, at least from what we know (and many of the problems have a tendency to only become apparent when it's too late), their take on CofD of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to just sit on top of it is a big red flag.

[Heavy Arms]

Yeah, those don't work nearly as much as people'd like you believe. It certainly doesn't work at the scale we're working at.

They can also backfire if you don't get nearly as many signatures as would matter. 5K signatures from CofD fans is.... not going to matter to Paradox given the normal customer base for their primary products. It would just be telling to Paradox how small the CofD community is; and thus how they're not hurting themselves too badly if they ignore it.

I'm not saying this specific dead IP in their hands will weight more than other aspects of their business, at the end of the day it remains a relatively small part of it and they can more than compensate with their profits elsewhere. For now. But such a dead weight still isn't a good prospect, and they're not big enough to just brush it aside.

And most investors are also going to see this as just part of the larger WW acquisition that cost Paradox millions, and hasn't exactly paid for itself in five years.

For all that people have diverse opinions about the quality of the Star Wars sequel trilogy, those three movie basically brought in enough profits to cover buying the SW franchise from Lucas on their own. So every thing else from then on has been on Disney to make profits for their shareholders (which they're very good at).

Paradox hasn't done that yet with the WoD/Exalted/CofD purchase. Whatever profits any product has actually generated, after taking into account the amount of overhead having multiple full time employees, development teams, and all that, means there's going to be a big red splotch on Paradox balance sheet that's not getting smaller by any real margin any time son. Investors don't like that just sitting there for too long. They expect a return on that money, because for now it's eating into their profits by not making money for the company.

[ArcaneArts]

They can also backfire if you don't get nearly as many signatures as would matter. 5K signatures from CofD fans is.... not going to matter to Paradox given the normal customer base for their primary products. It would just be telling to Paradox how small the CofD community is; and thus how they're not hurting themselves too badly if they ignore it.

Right. As a general point, if you look at Demon: The Descent, Dark Eras, and Changeling the Lost Second Edition (which I would say are reasonably very successful and represent three pretty different stages of the Chronicles Second Edition Boom, where there was a lot of activity and interest), the rough average amount of backers is about 2000, with Lost as the popular one being a stand out at 2,500 (and, on a seperate note, of which Vigil 2nd was only 3 short of, at 1.997 backers).

The fact that your initial guesstimate is for 5k signatures as a thing that would still not matter, meshed with a high assumption that roughly consistent 2000 buyers, under the assumption it's at least always the same consistent 2000, kind of tell you how badly fucked the scenario is. At the most generous reading of all it, you'd need something like five times that number to appeal to the scale of operation and income Paradox would expect. Paradox doesn't even have that with World and Chronicles audiences combined.

WHich is, you know, the problem.....that only makes it weirder that there's really no attempt to fix it.

[Heavy Arms]

I think it's hard to estimate how many signatures would really make Paradox sit up and notice. One of the problems is that TT RPGs have a lot more players than customers; which is very different from the video game world. I honestly think 5K would be low balling what you could get, as I'm pretty sure the relatively consistent 2K CofD backers (unique or not) could each get 3 or more people that aren't backers to sign a petition (it's not exactly a huge ask of time and energy). I might be an outlier, but I know at least a dozen people that never back Kicksters ever, aren't even big CofD fans, but since I play CofD with them, would sign on.

I don't think 10K or even 15K would necessarily move Paradox (even though for pretty much any RPG not named D&D that would be a huge public response, ) despite that though. They know that many signatures isn't the same as that many sales, and they don't even profit of CofD currently by number of sales anyway: they get their money if a book Onyx Path makes sells zero copies or 100K copies, because licensing puts all the risk on Onyx Path. Paradox wants AtLA's Kickstarter numbers because that's multimedia franchise numbers, not spectacular by TT RPG numbers.

[Newb95]

I always thought that the biggest mistake onyx path did was not translating the 2nd edition stuff, I have run a few games with all the splat except mage with various groups and they were all blown away by how good the system and the new lore was compared to both WoD and first edition stuff, a foreign audience would definitely have increased the numbers instead of the few thousands of people who even know what CoD is, a shame really.

[Heavy Arms]

As much as that would be awesome, there's a simple issue (and really look at the lack of localization even from companies with much deeper pockets than Onyx Path):

Money.

First, you need to find a good translator that understands the specific nature of TT RPG texts. TT RPGs exist in a strange limbo between creative prose and technical writing. There are many past examples of translators not understanding how TT RPG's are written resulting in translations that don't actually communicate the original intent. You also have to consider that Every major language has regional variations. You can tell the lead creators of the WW properties were Americans, and writing the WW IP books continues to assume American English over UK, Australian, etc. dialects. But then you run into issues where you don't necessarily have a distinct obvious dialect to focus on. If you're working on Spanish, do you pick a Latin American dialect because you're more likely to find an audience in the Spanish speaking parts of the Americas (and even to keep to some of the Americas base tone of the books), or do you focus on continental Spanish to reach to Spain and linguistically associated areas because they're less likely to be as familiar with American English and thus might be a more important market to focus on.

Second, you need to pay for all of this work. Someone needs to answer the questions above, and someone need to do the translation, editing/etc. and all those people are going to want to et paid for it. Some completely made up numbers: Lets say it costs $5K dollars to get a quality translation per language, and you want to publish in ten more languages. Now you have $50K worth of extra money to make. If you net profit $10 per sale. That means you need to sell 500 more copies just to break even on that investment; when a lot of those customers probably have some English proficiency anyway.

But wait, there's also needing to completely redo layouts for each language as translations are going to cause sections to get longer or shorter, meaning you have to completely redo the artwork, tables, charts, and so on. So more costs, and more books you need to sell to recoup those costs. Then you have to find a place to sell things. You might need to find entirely different digital storefronts because people that aren't willing to just deal with the books in English might not be looking at DTRPG for their gaming books. This is even harder if a local market still focuses on book/hobby stores for sales over digital.

So, this isn't a mistake. This is just an economic reality. There's lots of stuff Onyx Path has said it wanted to do, but the finances of going from being people that worked at the oWW to being their own company just made impossible to do .