Black Industries Closing Shop
Posted on January 28, 2008 by Matt-M-McElroy
The stunning news this morning is the Black Industries Announcement.
Black Industries regret to announce that Dark Heresy: Disciples of the Dark Gods out in September will be the final product to be released from Black Industries.
Needless to say, I’m a bit stunned by the news. Dark Heresy sold around 20K copies this past week and Purge the Unclean looks to be a strong seller as well.
Tags | industry news, warhammer
From one perspective, that is to say in comparison to other rpg companies, the fact that Black Library is closing down the Black Industries label is pretty shocking. They had good sales in both WFRP and the new Dark Heresy line, and had the DC superhero license in the bag. This doesn’t even include the success of the recent Talisman reprint, or their deal with Capcom to do an Xbox Live version of Talisman. Those are pretty big successes.
But…looking at it from that perspective alone fails to take into account both the success of their Black Library media tie in novels (which are aid/are aided by rpg success) and the success of their new Solaris line of SF/F books. In fact, I think it is the success of Solaris that might have them looking away from the rpg industry.
Let’s look at the two models. First, they distribute their rpg stuff stateside through Green Ronin which has to dilute their profit. Second, they have a permanent development staff for their rpg stuff which is an ongoing cost. Third, paying an SF/F author to write a paperback isn’t as expensive (take Gail Martin’s Chronicles of the Necromancer series) and has a higher profit margin, one that requires less staff time devoted to development.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not happy that BI will be closing shop, I was very much hoping for the DC game to be published and am a big WFRP fan, but when I look at their success with Solaris and the BL book lines I understand. They really would have been having to choose to commit to rpgs as a “minor profit” leader.