BOOM! Swedish Paradox acquires White Wolf

BenPeal wrote:

I personally don't have that information. I'm not trying to hide it - I really don't know. When I met with Steve Wieck, I did ask "What exactly does the Wizards license involve?" but he just mentioned the aforementioned patent and Deckmaster trademark, and that there were likely some other things but he didn't have the particulars handy. By "meeting with Steve Wieck", I really mean he happened to be passing through Germany while on vacation with his family, and Johannes and I met up with them for lunch. So, it wasn't a formal meeting, but rather a casual, friendly lunch and of course we talked about V:TES a bit.

From the point of view of Steve - when CCP refuse to licence it alone for totally understandable "Defending a lawsuit is expensive, regardless of the outcome" reasons - this sort of stuff is trivia. If Wizards/Hasbro were to agree to patent and Deckmaster, this sort of stuff - can I reprint Anson? can I use the "Animalism" symbol? can I use the tri-snake symbol on cardbacks? - is really just nickle and dime contractual addenda. (Assuming you needed Wizards' consent, and that WW/CCP didn't already own those things.)

In the context of a go-it-alone "Well, hmm, do we actually need Hasbro's consent?" - which wasn't the situation Steve Wieck was contemplating, obviously - it all becomes a little more murky. Can I reprint Temptation of Greater Power or Arika? Can Hasbro issue smackdowns for using the Quietus symbol? And so on. If either Paradox and/or OneBookshelf are willing to contemplate that in a world without CCP being involved, it might become more relevant.

jamesatzephyr wrote:

In the context of a go-it-alone "Well, hmm, do we actually need Hasbro's consent?" - which wasn't the situation Steve Wieck was contemplating, obviously - it all becomes a little more murky. Can I reprint Temptation of Greater Power or Arika? Can Hasbro issue smackdowns for using the Quietus symbol? And so on. If either Paradox and/or OneBookshelf are willing to contemplate that in a world without CCP being involved, it might become more relevant.

I'm sure that Paradox would also ask the question, "Well, hmm, do we actually need to make V:TES? Can we make a new CCG with the WOD setting that doesn't involve anything Wizards did at all?" I know a lot of you will say, "Well that won't be V:TES so I won't play it", which is totally fair. You've been buying V:TES cards for 20 years and you want to keep using them. The thing is, Paradox might not see partnering with Wizards as a viable option, so we might not get what we want regardless. Is there a way to remake V:TES that would make this community happy?

Well, that's assuming that a video game company would want to make a card game. It will be interesting to watch what they want to do. They could very well leave the RPG stuff in the hands of Onyx Path, and whoever does the LARP stuff, and focus on making video games with the IP. And making a card game is very different from both RPGs and video games! And considering how much competition there already is for card games these days... I'm not sure I'd want to dive in. Nobody but FFG has really made the LCG model sing for them. AEG tried with doomtown, but it doesn't look like they've had anywhere near the success that FFG has had. And I don't think anybody in their right mind would release a new CCG today.

I guess if I were Paradox, I'd want to bring a little bit of money in during the short-term while I work on the next big game (successor to Bloodlines?).

It's interesting to me that they specifically mentioned that they would be carefully re-evaluating licensing, and they mention "uniting" the community with one World of Darkness. Maybe nWoD is getting the boot...

brettscho wrote:

Well, that's assuming that a video game company would want to make a card game.

Yeah, I'm going to be very surprised if Paradox has decided to branch out into tabletop games of any kind. I really doubt that was the reason for their purchase.

BenPeal wrote:

Is there a way to remake V:TES that would make this community happy?

own goal. The community could get everything it asks for and it would complain about how easy it was.