Virtual reality gear? Give Oculus Rift (and competitors) 5 to 10 years. What happens?
What happened with Vampire?
- Thread starter Dethklok
- Start date
Virtual reality gear? Give Oculus Rift (and competitors) 5 to 10 years. What happens?
Balesir
Adventurer
Good example; that might cause a significant shift.
A technological change (new medium), though, will likely benefit already current stuff first. It would be a good reason to constrain the specific rights you license, but not a reason to withold licensing completely.
Wasn't the original premise of this discussion based on the idea that the (then) current market was an extremely difficult one for RPGs?
Yes, the supposition that withholding IP can be beneficial is based on the assumption that it will become easier and more lucrative to publish in the future. But sometimes it's easier in the future based only on the fact that now is bad, not because the future is explosively lucrative.
Also, a big part of this is the cost of maintaining operations. You seem to be focused only on the long term returns, but are forgetting the short term costs. Don't neglect the day-to-day problems of a small company (or division) faced with a decrease in income. A completely valid reason to withhold IP is when you can see that you're bleeding money and lack the capital to make a quality product in the short term. The damage you can cause to a brand by forcing out a sub-par product is substantial; it's another huge topic in this very thread. If you can make the decision to (temporarily) close shop before you go into the negative, you'll be a much better position to start up again later.
The bottom line is that withholding IP isn't all about maximizing profit; sometimes it's also about minimizing loses.
Which can be for the individual product line and/or to avoid cannibalization of your other products.
There are also issues of controlling brand ID, maintaining standards, goodwill, etc.
Balesir
Adventurer
The original premise was that sitting on the IP doing nothing with it was a good option under the conditions of a bad market. However bad the market is now, though, hanging on to it will only ever be a good idea if there is some realistic expectation that the value of the asset will appreciate in value faster than some "baseline asset" (generally taken to be some basket of stocks in the same industry that you are engaged in).
If the market for your product is bad and shows no sign of getting better, you might be unable to get rid of the IP for love nor money, but it doesn't make holding onto it a "good idea", particularly. If someone offers cash for it, in fact, you should grasp the opportunity!
This is sometimes cited as a "reason", but it's very rarely a good idea, as far as I can see from admittedly limited data. Either a product is close enough to another to be effectively the same product (in which case the IP is really shared) or it serves a separate niche (in which case it doesn't genuinely "cannibalise"). Stop the first and you still use the IP; stop the second and a competitor will figure out how to exploit the niche you have abandoned to them.
All of which apply if you are going to maintain the brand going forward, but are irrelevant if you're not.
MortonStromgal
First Post
THIS IS SO TRUE! The story of why Peter hired Lisa is fairly interesting to. My advise to anyone that wants to have the next big RPG is hire Lisa.
TheGamesCollective
First Post
Lisa was around and attended the birth of nowadays most iconic RPG titles 
Vampire: the Requiem just saw a fairly successful rules revision, as did the core nWoD - updates for Werewolf and Mage are being worked on. Two new gamelines came out in the last year, and a new one is in the works. There are several other supplements down the pipeline. I don't really have any numbers, but I'd say the rumours of its death are greatly exaggerated.
