If all the D&D players in the world vanished, D&D wouldn't be all that valuable at all. The ancillary material grows off the trunk; no matter how little of the tree is trunk, you can't cut off the trunk.
Since nobody liked the idea of "Fallacy!"-free Friday I'll go ahead and point out that a) you're begging the question here, and b) the assumption that tabletop D&D is the trunk of the D&D tree is a genetic fallacy.
I don't know about Warhammer. If the MMORPG disappeared, Warcraft's name would drop massively. If all the tabletop RPG players disappeared, World of Darkness would be known only by the LARPers.
Well, first, no, Warcraft was a hugely successful brand long before World of Warcraft came along. There's no World of StarCraft or World of Diablo, yet those are phenomenally successful brands as well.
Second, World of Darkness has spawned several successful video games -- particularly Bloodlines, but the Hunter games were well-received too -- with a pretty highly anticipated MMO currently in the pipe. There was also the Kindred TV show, which Showtime was in negotiations to acquire when the lead actor died, effectively ending the series. Tough break, that.
Not yet; they are producing their own line of novels.
And I wish them well. In ten or twenty years we could be having a very different conversation, although from where I sit we've passed the high-water mark for fantasy fiction. There's still plenty of it and it still does well, but not like it did from the 70s to the early 90s.
The movies? The three movies, only one that went to the theaters, and all of which bombed?
Yup, those movies. The ones that got made because D&D is actually a valuable enough brand that folks thought they could make some serious coin with it. And they would've been right, if only the movies themselves hadn't sucked.
Moreover, the movie whose description on IMDB starts "Based on the phenomenally successful role-playing game,"? And that's why the RPG is so important.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc. Let's turn this around: Avatar is the highest grossing film of all time; Avatar does not have an RPG; and that's why the RPG is so unimportant.
The day D&D stops being an RPG is the day video game companies start asking themselves the same thing Fallout did with GURPS; why are we licensing this instead of making a cheap ripoff?
And here's why that analogy is flat out wrong:
1. Interplay never asked themselves that question. The deal fell through because Steve Jackson wasn't okay with all the gore and violence in the game.
2. Interplay wanted to license the GURPS
rules. They weren't interested in a setting.
3. Nobody licenses D&D for its rules. What they're after are the Forgotten Realms, Eberron, Planescape, et al. Worlds and characters: these are where the value of D&D lies. And none of them is dependent on the tabletop RPG.
Now, video game developers have left and will continue to leave D&D behind once they've built a reputation for themselves, like BioWare did. That's just good business. It's also why WotC should really have its own studio and bring video game development in-house.
I don't believe that, for comics either. Comic movies stay alive because they have a hardcore base behind them. Some of that is TV, but most of that is comics. You kill off the X-Men comics, you'll discover that the people like my father--who spent the entire First Class movie not realizing that Charles Xavier was that bald guy in the wheelchair--are not enough to carry the brand.
Yeah, I don't think so. I've never read an X-Men or a Spider-Man or a Batman comic in my life. You have to realize that hundreds of millions of people watch these movies, yet a really popular comic won't even move 100,000 units.
Were comics once the core? Absolutely. They created the initial awareness on which later products have capitalized. Will that awareness magically disappear if the comics cease to exist? Nope. It's there, and as long as it continues to be cultivated in some form, it's not going anywhere.
World of Darkness is a game. No one besides the gamers still remember it or buy the products... no doubt in large part due to the RPG no longer being there to support the auxiliary products. Pathfinder is starting to sell novels, but it'll still only work as long as Golarion exists in the minds of its hard-core fans.
Again, not so much. I've no idea what White Wolf's release schedule looks like these days, but RPG books aren't a necessary condition for growing the World of Darkness brand. Doing
something, on the other hand, is. As long as they've got games or novels or
something good coming out, it's fine. If they aren't doing
anything, then that's a separate issue.