Green Ronin's DC Adventures... Another Flushpoint Casualty?

In the past couple years, I've taken interest in two role-playing games based on licenses I enjoy. One of these, Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space (Cubicle 7) has had all its products delayed by 11th Doctor rebranding, leading many to lose confidence in the game. The other, Green Ronin's DC Adventures (based on Mutants & Masterminds) looks to be going down the same road. The much-awaited Heroes & Villains volumes 1 and 2 were both supposed to come out last year, and only volume 1 has seen the light of day, albeit only as a pdf document for now (released late June). When DC's promised Who's Who failed to come out, I at least had the satisfaction of knowing that DCAdv would fulfill my need for a compilation of DC characters.

And now, even though Volume 1 should turn up in hardcover soon, I have to wonder what kind of enthusiasm the game designers will put into volume 2 and the equally announced "DC Universe" book when that universe is about to be rebooted. DC has just made Green Ronin's job a lot more difficult. How do you sell RPG background material that has suddenly become almost all out of date? Do players coming into the game want to play in the so-called "old DCU"? Will changes to at least some of the products cause even more delays? And if volume 2 does suffer NuDCU changes, how will those mesh with volume 1? The eleventh hour decision to reboot the DCU (which looks more and more like corporate interference to get DC movies to somehow compete with Marvel's momentum in that area) has really made a mess of things for license holders. Is that any way to do business?

Green Ronin would do well to discuss THEIR DC universe as a trampoline from which players can continue the story of pre-Flushpoint Earth without fear of new events changing the world or the characters. Not that their license is likely to allow them to have any fun witht he idea, of course. While I went on record saying that DWAITAS' delays didn't really bother me, I can't say the same of DC Adventures'. Why? Because DWAITAS is a supremely low-grit system where people and threats are easy to stat out in a small amount of time (even on the fly). Not so with DCAdv's system. Character creation is quite complex and detailed, making a splatbooks of heroes and villains extremely useful, not just as usable PCs and NPCs, but as examples on how to reproduce certain powers and tropes. It was one of the more important factors that shut down my attempt at a campaign last year, a campaign that's harder and harder to resurrect as the game's setting is about to be thrown into chaos.