What absolutely puzzles me is the sheer amount of incompetence shown by the company so far. Over the weekend I went to one of Toronto's largest and oldest roleplaying stores which is being ran by this guy who describes himself as 'an old wizard'. Kind of looks the part, too. Anyway, he knows everything about every game I dared bring up in his hallowed presence, he's got stories, their history down, behind the scene anecdotes from the time TSR still owned AD&D, which products are on the backburner, everything I could throw at him. It's his job.
Anyway, he had no idea what's happening with the World of Darkness these days.
He basically said they've burned their bridges with their suppliers so they're just trying to keep themselves afloat now; there's no information coming out of there (at least that brick and mortar stores would be aware of) and since even their print on demand stuff are on such loose schedules, with their rebranding causing confusion before these products even come out ('Blood and Smoke! The Idigam Chronicle! No! Second Edition!') and reliance on Kickstarter campaigns based on their much older lines... I'm not terribly optimistic about them.
I dunno, maybe they're onto something, maybe they'll usher RPG gaming into the new millennium with their PDF offerings and whatnot... but I wouldn't bet on it. At this point my only hope is that although they suck as marketing and creating a viable sales network they can at least make good games.
And note that even if they do, even if the 2nd Edition is absolutely fantastic, that's still not enough. Many companies have made excellent products in the past and still died a lonely death, and that was at much better times for this sort of thing, when files weren't put into torrents the day after (... or before) they were released and board game stores were still nexuses of gamer activity.
