Remembering Justin Achilli & The Future of White Wolf

[RPGPundit]

The fact is that White Wolf has had pretentious annoying spokesmen who put their foot in their mouth before, and they will almost certainly continue to have more of the same after Justin Achilli.
 
Even so, he did it with a special kind of swinish flair, the sort that not even the legendary Marc Rein·Hagen (that's written Rein·Hagen, and prounounced "rein-isn't my dot pretentious-hagen") could match.
 
Under Achilli, we learnt that:
 
1. no one knows how to correctly conjugate Latin, because its a "thousand years dead language".
2. White Wolf nevertheless hired several "experts" to do just that, and came out with a conclusion that pretty well everyone  who's ever taken a basic latin course concluded to be wrong.
3. Apparently the entirety of the latin-speaking world other than his paid experts are just "random hacks on the internet".
 
And don't forget:
4. Making people pay for the honour of getting to play a World of Darkness game is just naturally right, and anyone who actually thought that buying the book inherently included the right to run it without paying extra to White Wolf are just more of those "random internet hacks".
 
So White Wolf will have to look very very hard to find a swine of his particular calibre. Someone so very capable of that rare combination of extreme smugness and total lack of knowledge. An almost divine ability to say something completely untrue, act superior for saying it, and then try to squirm one's way out of it when caught in the lie, the whole time managing to maintain a strict pseudo-intellectual know-it-all attitude.
 
But what is more interesting about Achilli's resignation is what it says about White Wolf.  A lot of people interpret it as financial problems due to a less than stellar performance by the new WoD.
 
I'm not sure that's the case, really. Certainly new WoD hasn't done as well as the old Vampire, but that's to be expected, its a different market.  I don't doubt that at this stage, at least, the sales are relatively strong, likely to be in the range WoD would hope for. People will buy the new edition core books, to see what they're like.
The real question will be later on, whether they stay with the new game, or whether the reboot ends up bleeding off too many of the old fans and failing to attract new ones.
 
That time has not yet come, but perhaps the foresight into that time coming is what is causing some serious internal friction in White Wolf.  I suspect that Achilli didn't so much leave as was nudged out the door, and that there are some factions inside WW that have very different ideas about where to take both the game lines and the company as a whole.
 
It has already been a year of massive upsets and fuck-ups in White Wolf, with Achilli's resignation now trumping the previous king-fuckup which had been the "pay-for-play" scheme they'd  conjured up in a desperate effort to suck some of the profits away from the LARPers.
 
That, and this departure of Achilli's, both strike me as events that indicate a company in serious instability, engaging in desperate maneuvers to try to redirect themselves. At the very least, a company that is very divided and rudderless about their future.

RPGPundit September 25th 2005