Yeah, when I use the term 'urban', I speaking more generally to that kind of genre than the setting. There are plenty of small town settings that still fit this bill - it's really more about modern setting, modern anachronisms, and modern concerns vs. lords, ladies, and flouncy dragon drama.
It's also the case that the last major WoD game opening turned out to be a giant turd and there's just no other alternatives at present that aren't fresh or hiiiiiighly problematic.
The application cap - which I think they announced in advance - turned out to be one of the few smart decisions the game owner made. San Francisco was an unfortunate train wreck because its owner is just kind of a spiteful, controlling jackwagon, who depending on who you ask may or may not be a thief as well. That kind of poison in the core of an otherwise promising premise is never going to really recover as long as the association remains. I think if other people were to run it, it might recover but I'm told that's likely never going to happen because the owner won't part with it (but won't run it either) so it lingers into a slow death.
I know Miami has been in forever development but as time moves on and the refrain of 'we're working to make sure everything is really set up before we open' gets fainter and fainter - it does appear momentum has been lost and that chances of it opening are uncertain and looking grim at best.
I have no idea what's going on with Reno-rebranding-to-Portland.
Even if this is WoD adjacent at best, there's a market for WoD and next door to it in resonate feeling in this community because of the theme and in spite of the dense and often bullshitty mechanics and poor prospects at this moment at time.
It's a great time to be offering something along those lines but the start up "capital" to get a game going requires time (people can find that), a place to set up (people can pay for that), and coders who can knit the backend systems together (this is often the hardest part to scale). Because there are so few coders in this community so they have the ability to be choosy about the projects they want to work on and the people they want to work with and the complicated history of a lot of these former partnerships on other past games means that some coders won't work with game owners and vice versa.
Just easier said.
Hard to do.
