squidyak said:
Mongoose is to blame, not fans or the licensing company. To claim RQ would sell better than D20 is kind of ridiculous, RQ will never ever be the future of gaming. It always has been and always will be a fringe system. I quite frankly don't blame the licensing company for blocking the move. They agreed for Conan to be released using the most successful gaming system to date and would prefer to keep it that way. If sales were faltering, an attempt should have been made to fix it. Perhaps stop producing expensive books that cause you to have expensive prices, adapt to the current economy. Perhaps a cheaper 3rd edition to tide people over until the economy turns around. But a long pause is the touch of death, it always has been and always will be. They had a pretty successful game and decided to abandon it for a less successful system, it's nobody's fault but their own.
I am very sorry, but just about everything you write here is wrong. Allow me to explain;
1. D20-based products, in 2009, sold in pitifully small quantities. Most sold just a few hundred copies, and while Conan had not sunk so low, we could see it was heading that way. People are just not buying 20 any more.
2. We never claimed RQ was the future of gaming. Or Traveller, for that matter. However, Traveller far outpaces D20-based products, and we have every reason to believe we can repeat this with the new release of RQ.
3. The licence holder did not initially block the move to RQ. They agreed to it. They blocked it 7 days before we were due to start writing the first Conan book.
4. I am not sure you can say Conan books are expensive. Over 400 pages for less than $40 (not sure were you get the idea it costs $50 in a later post)?
5. The economy has not touched RPGs. If anything, it has boosted them (see comments tabout this in the recent State of the Mongoose).
6. Conan, relative to all our other game lines, was sliding. Clearly, something had to be done. A new supplement, regardless of content, would not have reversed this.
7. We did not abandon Conan - we took it as far as any company reasonably could. We had to come to terms with the fact that everyone who wanted a D20-based Conan already had it. There were no new worlds to conquer on that front.
What Conan needs is a new system. If another company ends up with this licence, it will be with a new system. Probably a proprietary one, which would be ironic.
As for the other poster who asked, we would not be averse to putting another bid in for Conan. However, I can't see that we would be willing to pay over the odds because of the presence of a film of unknown qualities (having seen what certain films and new releases did for the latter stages of B5). If the licence holders believe they can find another company who can a) pay a greater advance (possible) and b) sell more RPG books overall (really not too many of those around, even less who commonly take on licences - I can think of _one_ who might have a stab at it), then I sincerely wish them the best of luck.
