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With more than fifty years of collective industry experience, WildFire are going to try life without a publisher. The recent collapse of their most recent publisher Sandstorm LLC, marks the end of the fourth and final publisher.
The fan-facing developer is behind the award winning (and brilliantly illustrated) RPG Cthulu Tech and the poo-flinging monkey game Poo: The Card Game.
Players of their succesful H.P. Lovecraft inspired SciFi RPG or their upcoming game “Void” can expect less of a focus on hardcover production. The company assures that fans will benefit from this move to eBooks and Print-on-Demand services via an increase in regular updates and more effective bite-size material.
Matthew Grau, vice president of WildFire, in explaining their rocky history with publishers:
Publisher 1: EOS Press – a small start-up publisher who needed to focus their efforts and limited resources on the Weapons of the Gods license at the time.
Publisher 2: Mongoose Publishing – relationship ends amicably due to a misalignment of business vision and goals.
Publisher 3: Catalyst Game Labs – relationship ends in a hostile termination of contract on our part with a subsequent lawsuit initiated by us and other related parties. More cannot be said for legal reasons, but you can find tons of speculation on the internet.
Publisher 4: Sandstorm – relationship ends due to too aggressive expansion strategy and subsequent termination of business operations.
Matthew adding finally that “[Sandstorm] tried to fly before they crawled.”
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When did Sandstorm cease business operations? Was there a press release I missed?
Posthuman Studios foreshadowed the collapse of Sandstorm back in August with this post about dropping Sandstorm:
“For Posthuman Studios, Gen Con preparation was a bigger challenge and drain on our resources than we originally anticipated this year, in part due to the dissolution of our partnership with Sandstorm just two months before the show… ”
The various companies involved with Sandstorm had problems with publishing date slippage last year. I don’t have any other info. There was no answer from Sandstorm’s email or telephone, and their online profiles are gone or in disuse for a long time (web site down, Facebook since November, Twitter for over a year).
I don’t understand why Wildfire NEEDS a publisher?