West End Games - Bankruptcy

Bankruptcy

Despite the company's early phenomenal success, in July 1998 West End Games went into bankruptcy. Various reasons for this decline have been debated, ranging from the general deleterious effect the growth of the collectible card game hobby was having on the entire role-playing game market at the time to poor financial management to a series of extravagant but failed game lines which West End Games had launched in an attempt to match Star Wars' success (the Masterbook family of games in particular, including Torg, Shatterzone, and Masterbook itself) and continued to support well after it was clear that they had failed to find audiences. This problem was exacerbated by the fact that many of the failed lines were based on various high-profile licences, including Men In Black, Xena: Warrior Princess, Hercules: the Legendary Journeys, Necroscope and Tales from the Crypt. None of these licences performed as well as the Ghostbusters or Star Wars RPGs had, and the additional cost of acquiring such licences in the first place meant that the failed licences were even more financially damaging to the company than they would otherwise have been; furthermore, the reliance on licences meant that when West End ran into financial difficulties it had to give up the licences, decimating the West End product line. By the mid-1990s there was also a perceived decline in the quality of West End's homegrown RPG lines; the "Fifth Edition" of Paranoia, and the later supplements for the second edition, were so badly received (critically and commercially) that when a new edition of Paranoia was produced by Mongoose Publishing the designers jokingly declared that the products in question were "unproducts", and simply didn't exist for the purpose of the setting's continuity.

Another contributing factor to the failure of West End Games may have been the company's failure to establish an internet presence even after most other game companies had done so years earlier; the company's only acknowledgment of the web-based community was a contact e-mail address through America Online. Although these might have played a part in weakening their market position, the culminating event involves mismanagement between West End Games and its then parent company, shoe importer Bucci Retail Group. When the parent company filed for bankruptcy, West End Games could not survive the process and had to go under as well.

No longer considered stable, all of West End's licenses to produce work based upon various settings were terminated, most significantly the Star Wars license which had produced most of the company's business. West End was forced to liquidate most of its assets, including a large backstock of unsold books. Ironically, the company finally created a web-site while in bankruptcy proceedings in order to facilitate the liquidating of their stock.

To add to the company's issues, court proceedings began between Palter and the original designers of Paranoia concerning the rights to the game; although in interviews at the time Palter considered the case to have little merit, it is notable that despite planning to release a new edition of Paranoia in the summer of 1999, West End Games would never have the opportunity to, and eventually the rights to the game returned to its original authors.

However, despite appearances West End Games did not disappear. A European company invested in them, and produced a game using the D6 mechanics for the Metabarons setting, a popular French comic story. Unfortunately the game (The Metabarons Roleplaying Game) never found a following with American audiences and did not lead to a resurgence of the company.