Yesterday, CCP (the company behind EVE Online, and the company that merged with White Wolf in 2006) announced that the long-awaited Vampire MMO project was cancelled. A round of layoffs accompanied this news.
The project felt like vaporware from day one. In spite of reading about a CCP employee's defense of their work ethic in my extended G+ circles, everything about the original announcement and years of delay felt like that sort of guy (you know the one) that promises the moon but never delivers. Of course, this is not how we should define CCP; after all, they made EVE Online, a massively popular and long-running sci-fi MMO, so they have most definitely followed through before. I should rather say that it can be compared to that one guy who has lots of money, throwing huge parties, but when the money runs out (or the guy just gets tired of partying) the lights turn on and a game of musical chairs - with very few chairs - ensues. The rich guy doesn't care, it's just some money wasted, not a livelihood. I'd very much like to think of CCP this way. But more likely, I think CCP thought they could leverage a moderately well-known intellectual property in RPG circles into a game, then dropped it when the IP went stale.
I played White Wolf tabletop games for most of the 90's and a fair bit of the 2000's. I even attended some games this decade. So how does the news of the Vampire MMO's demise hit me? It depends on how you define death. When did White Wolf 'die' - the end of the old World of Darkness campaign? The end of the 90's grunge era? Where along the declining sales curve is 'death'? Does death mean the end of relevance, or the end of sales altogether?
White Wolf was this amazing concept in my eyes in the 90's. Roleplaying, but a modern day setting! And you can be evil! And you can do it in real life like those boffer games! Everyone is magical! In college, we played it every Saturday and Sunday, or even more frequently. It was the 'it' game - high fantasy was old hat (though an occasional D&D game was had) and World of Warcraft had not been invented yet. Everyone was sarcastic, and black t-shirts and trenchcoats were in. The terrorist-influenced 2000's made the aloof, godless monsters irrelevant to our fears and attention.
I felt it, when the vampires started to become irrelevant in me as well. I was 28 on 9/11, and continued to play in the local Mind's Eye Theater troupe for the next few years, but attendance was falling. Sticking with the troupe for so long taught me a good lesson in hindsight - know when to cut bait. I even returned last year to try to get back into it, but a few almost-forgotten acquaintances sitting around someone's living room, almost indistinguishable from a tabletop game, was not anywhere close to the fun I had once had. The grognard suppressed in my head says that I was only pursuing what's popular, and not being faithful to a system that works.
My inner grognard would have its chance. From 2012 to 2014, I ran a Werewolf: the Forsaken game. The game was used quite differently from other White Wolf games I had been in - it was used to tell an insular story. Our gaming group was (and is) almost secretive in our shared game storyline; we aren't connected to other gaming groups, telling each other of our exploits. This is not really the White Wolf game I remember, but then again, that is an issue many old players had with the new World of Darkness - much of the 90's sensibility was gone, replaced with a generic horror - not bland, just non-quirky. As a whole, I approve of the new World of Darkness games and enjoy them more, but the reason that is so is because I needed to escape the past - escape the 90's. It gave me what I wanted - a way forward - but some complained that White Wolf killed the goose that laid the golden egg (old WoD).
The MMO that CCP was making was Vampire: the Masquerade. That's old World of Darkness. Knowing this brought up feelings of remembering the old days, but also a fear of being stuck in the past. Not just me, but also White Wolf. Who - en masse who, not individually who - cares about the old White Wolf, or any White Wolf product in general? White Wolf pushed nWoD so hard when the new line came out, but it turned out to be their last hope before taking a downward turn.
Companies survive by changing. That could mean scrapping everything, or acquiring startups, or making many branches and seeing which ones succeed. White Wolf, like many other companies, may have seemed like their diversification efforts were tepid, but they did have a TV show, other video games, a collectible card game, and novels. The digitalization of media consumption (and the ensuing financial fallout) may have also contributed. They tried many things...but nothing else stuck.
So this announcement was a blip on the radar for me, reminding of a time when White Wolf was popular. I might miss the now-cancelled MMO - but I missed it since the first announcement.
