Paradox acquire World of Darkness owner White Wolf, “multiple digital games titles” promised

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Oh, thank goodness. Paradox Interactive, of publishing Crusader Kings, Cities: Skylines and Pillars of Eternity fame, have bought up World of Darkness owner (for those familiar only with the digital sphere, that’s Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines and all of its associated fiction) White Wolf from Eve-house CCP. The move was announced today and apparently involved a transaction in the millions of dollars.

Games from both companies make our picks for the best RPGs.

You can read more about the deal on the new White Wolf frontpage. It’s been set up as a new company headed by Paradox’s previous Executive Vice President of Sales,Tobias Sjögren, a two decade industry veteran. Among the details on there is the key promise that multiple games will be made from White Wolf’s various IPs. If you’re preparing to find a deity that accepts games as sacrifce to pray for an Obsidian-headed – who collaborated closely with Paradox on Pillars of Eternity – Bloodlines 2, you’re not the only ones. In fact, Vice President of Acquisiton at the publisher and actual unicorn Shams Jorjani has hinted as much on Twitter today.

Shams has also been providing some details on the deal. Across multiple tweets he stated that the deal includes everything related to White Wolf and their digital products. This means not only the rights to previous games (Bloodlines HD, anyone?) but any unreleased, unannounced or otherwise buried assets CCP had for games, like their cancelled World of Darkness MMO. He also clarified that the new WW is definitely a seperate company and Paradox will only be publishing non-digital products “if it makes sense.

In an interview with VentureBeat, Paradox CEO Fredrik Westergave some details on setting the deal up and why they wanted to:

“We’ve been negotiating with CCP for the last year on acquiring White Wolf Publishing and the underlying brands. They have sold 5.5 million books, and it’s still the second-best-selling RPG of all time behind Dungeons & Dragons. It adds a lot to Paradox portfolio.”

The same article also details that new games will be targeting older players of 25 and up, who are looking for more “gritty” storylines. The new White Wolf will also be analysing the company’s various current committments and the implication is big changes could be coming in that area. Hopefully Exalted, my personally favoured WW-RPG despite its mountains of flaws, survives any culls and makes it to the land of video games. Infernal Monster Style hack-n-slash, please Paradox. 2018’ll be fine. Got a phone number for Platinum, yeah?

Thanks, RPS.