WizKids
Who saw the collapse of WizKids coming? Perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised. The company was bought by Topps some time ago and it’s really difficult to see what it was that Topps saw in the company other than the, then, nascent collectible baseball game WizKids produced that tanked. I am hard pressed to think of a single thing that WizKids did last year that was positive and it isn’t for the lack of talented people at the company. Talented people who must have been chomping at the bit to try and save their particular franchises since some of the brand managers of Heroclix immediately formed a new company, Pinata Games, and made moves to acquire Heroclix from Topps.
People don’t do that when they are burned out and empty of ideas. That says to me that they spent the last two years having their ideas shot down by management and are now eager to show what they can really do with the property.
And there must be a lot of people that have ideas for the various WizKids titles because the announcement of the closure of the company was also immediately followed by announcements from Catalyst Game Labs and Pinata Games that they were attempting to buy the WizKids games. Clearly Catalyst was moving to secure the Classic BattleTech and Shadowrun lines but they also, to my surprise, were moving for all of the WizKids game properties.
Catalyst and Pinata have since announce a joint effort to obtain and work with the WizKids properties (a move I think is nothing short of brilliant and a great idea for everyone involved) but their eagerness to obtain games that appear to be moribund makes me think that they lack of success in recent years of titles such as Heroclix is a result of management and not the creative people working on the ranges. David, Randall and Loren at Catalyst are amongst some of the sharpest people I know in the industry and if they think that the Pirates pocketmodels is a good title to have then I suspect that they have some clever ideas. And I for one can’t wait to see what they are so lets hope that Topps agrees to sell them the rights.
Интересно, что как причину падения компании указвают прежде всего на менеджмент, а не на творческий потенциал.
