f13.net

I have often wondered why there are no Ravenloft or Dark Sun based RPGs?  It seems like the worlds would be great for RPG development and the early games including Stone Prophet, Shattered Lands, and Wake of the Ravager seemed to be fairly big hits for their time in computer RPG gaming.  Most people speak favorably of those games even now as well.  So it has really got me wondering, why haven't developers taken a look at D&D settings outside of the Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk to do RPGs in?

Thank you to the developers/insiders in the know in advance.

I would guess that there are expectations for a D&D title - both from WotC and D&D fans. Ravenloft and Darksun don't really fit those expectations, both are too 'non-canon' for the D&D faithful. Same with Spelljammer or Council of Wyrms.

WotC doesn't support them currently, which is probably the main part of why they're not licensing them, and also means there are very few people out there for whom these settings would be big purchase drivers. Might as well make up your own IP rather than paying for one that doesn't really come with any customers attached. There also may be some exclusivity clauses in the contracts with the people who *can* make D&D-branded games right now stopping WotC from licensing D&D stuff to other companies as well.

Also I think you might be overstating how successful those games were. My recollection is that they were pretty weak and only tenuously connected to the D&D brand.

/obligatory.

Planescape.

We don't have a :pourouta40: emote.

There was a Dark Sun CRPG and an online version as well.

I find that interesting because the non-canon label wouldn't that be more liberating for a game designer?  Doesn't this essentially give you creative freedom within the world?
 

Edited:
Sorry Purgatorio looks to be dead

It would but freedom is the enemy of IP. Why licence an IP if you intend to create most of it from whole cloth anyway? Also from WotC's pov, why would they licence the D&D brand without leveraging that as far as possible - to most people D&D is classic high fantasy not gothic fantasy horror or eco-lecturing.

And even more, it is the underlying game system. WotC has a pretty strong interest in maintaining the D&D settings as something tied to whatever their current mechanics are.

The Planescape IP required a cool 5 or 10 million as of '02/'03; the latter strikes me as the # that I was told by someone that looked into it (hint: the City of Doors) but I could have easily altered it in my mind since then. 

Had I the money, I'd buy it.

Same.  That'd be one of the few IPs that I'd consider hazarding the MMO industry again to work on.

Wizards has been sitting on viable dead IP's for years.

They only want games for the active properties, which makes sense. It's my hunch that they don't want the other old ones to come back and compete against theirs, so why sell them and all that.