A common meme running around in my gaming table is that White Wolf is being terribly changed by piracy.
The thesis is: Too many people pirate, therefore WW is not profitable, therefore they are no longer creating new books.
Are they really publishing much less than they used to? Are sales really down? If so, to what extent might these be changes attributable to piracy?
They are publishing much less new World of Darkness than they used to during the old World of Darkness, but it's not necessarily piracy that is causing the change.
They are currently owned by CCP (the company behind Eve Online) and involved in creating the World of Darkness MMO. There has been an economic slowdown in the last 5-6 years, reducing the amount of disposable income available to customers. There were also complaints about the rate of releases in the old days (At least one book per mainline per month, with at least one book from a smaller line on top).
Their focus has moved away from print books to PDFs and Print on Demand. There are arguments which suggest that this would both increase and decrease piracy (and thus revenue). On one side, it's easier for people to buy stuff as soon as they find it. On the other, creating the PDF makes it easier for people to share. The balance of these two probably favours the increase in revenue.
@Okeefe has already mentioned Onyx Path Publishing, which is comprised of former WW employees and has the license to produce both oWoD and nWoD books. They've got a full release schedule coming up, including two brand-new games and revisions of World of Darkness and Vampire: The Requiem. It's not accurate to say that they're no longer producing new work.
I'd like to address the idea that piracy was the cause of the slowdown and eventual cessation of straight-up book publishing. That's not true. The primary reason why White Wolf (and CCP/na) got out of the business of putting books on shelves in stores is the broken nature of the hobby-games distribution system and the decline of brick-and-mortar bookstores and game stores. It made more financial sense to deliver product to the fans directly, and keep more of the money, than to involve middlemen who were increasingly no longer adding value to the process.
That White Wolf stopped publishing has less to do with piracy and more to do with the fact that White Wolf's parent company, CCP, considers tabletop games and White Wolf to be legacy businesses with respect to MMOs.
Some new things are happening, though. They've embraced pdf sales and print on demand. There's a licensed company, Onyx Path Publishing, that's working on new White Wolf content.
It's nothing to do with piracy. White Wolf's focus has moved to MMOs and is less on RPGs now (like at many companies, sadly). And they are doing less print publishing and more PDF - which is always going to be less successful regardless of piracy, given that the average gamer still buys books. If piracy was their big problem, you'd think they'd move to print and away from PDF! Not that either print or watermarking is any impediment at all to piracy (see: any torrent site).
Print has wider distribution, more people buy print; if you are publishing PDF only you can expect a fraction of the sales you would in print. PDF is a great alternate channel but more of the world is offline than we give it credit for nowadays.
To rebut common claims:
"Publishers make better profit with PDF" is not true. Some may - but for example Posthuman Studios at their seminar last Gen Con was asked directly "is it better for you for me to buy your books in PDF or print" and the answer was "we actually get a higher margin off print." Eclipse Phase, $15 PDF $49.99 print. (Not coincidentally, there's a 70% difference between the two prices, a number often cited as how much the printing cost of a product is.) Evil Hat Games releases their numbers too and they also note they make more money per print copy.
"Nowadays virtual sells as much as print" is also false. Looking around for publishers that are transparent with their numbers, Evil Hat reports that the two DFRPG corebooks in Q3 2012 sold 1112 physical and 282 PDF copies.
Now, for White Wolf having PDF sales makes sense especially for the "long tail" of their huge back catalogue, where they make recurring sales at practically zero incremental cost to themselves. But it does discourage more new product generation.
Chalking the reduced focus on RPGs up to piracy is the usual "talking without any data to back it up;" usually one requires proof of an unsupported assertion rather than having to gather proof it's false.
White Wolf is in fact alive and well. They are currently publishing under the banner of Onyx Path Publishing, a company formed by White Wolf Creative Director Rich Thomas. They've simply moved from brick and mortar to digital and print-on-demand format. They've even been doing regular kickstarter campaigns for high-quality deluxe versions of their new releases. From the looks of it, all of them have been very successful.
Their FAQ explains that because of a decline in traditional printing, they've moved towards digital and print-on-demand formats instead. This is not only cheaper for them, but also has benefits for consumers, and for their development process due to the flexibility of digital publishing. With print runs, they would have to guess how well the book would sell, and order a large number of copies. Any left over would simply go to waste. A large-scale print run is a very in-depth process that requires many people to coordinate well in advance. That means that books could get released before they were ready, in order to meet printing deadlines. Digital publishing is much easier to postpone, if need be.
Digital publishing is also good for the consumer. With digital publishing, all of their books can be available to anyone who wants them. With large-scale print runs, once a book print run was ordered, that was it. It was rare to see additional runs. That meant that people who wanted to buy the book later on would have a hard time. With print-on-demand, they can keep their entire catalog available indefinitely.
This is also another benefit for them, because having a full library of titles in stock gives them a regular stream of income, rather than the one-time lump-sum income they would get from brick & mortar publishing. This also allows them to stay more financially stable in-between releases.
WW's management changes, product line terminations and disagreeable changes, the change in market trends (Core purchasers either grew up or Stores closed Thanks to the Likes of Games Workshop & its legal teams, watched this myself in the city I currently reside) and the Company policy resulting in very Bad decisions; that if you weren't a Multi Billion dollar company don't bother even emailing about Licensing IP's for any project conceivable.
Going by the Google searches back in the day, WW Made bad decisions which cost them, duff print-runs resulting in bad reprographics as they pursued Cheap print options (They should have asked Amazon) External Hiring people over internal promoting was a bad idea, hiring people who were purely Economic Hit-men for Vulture capitalist's was a Bad Idea, restricting IP's to Corporate interests and either trying to or tub-thumping Suing people from Hollywood Script writers (See the Underworld movie franchise Fiasco; I know people who burnt their books as a result) who had been trying to sell scripts long before WW was a company publishing its first book, to some College Students who filmed their RPG game (Dramatic Arts Course work) one Halloween and put it on You Tube and gave WW Free Advertising (I was one of those guys who got a Cease and Desist)
All in all, perhaps it's vainglorious, but I hope others Learn the lesson in Business.
