Put me in the "I hope they don't do anything to bring back the disenchanted" camp.
The simple fact is, you're going to lose some people every time you switch editions.
And you're going to gain some people.
I'm very worried the Essentials line is going to try too hard to bring back the lapsed DnDers and end up changing the game in ways I myself no longer want to support.
Why wouldn't you want more customers for WotC? Honestly that doesn't make any kind of sense at all to me.
I agree with you that you will lose people/gain people with every new edition, but if a company can minimize it's customer base lose during that switch why wouldn't that?
If WotC spent any manpower/money on releasing new material for older editions that would be splitting the market . . . and it would be a bad business decision. ...snip...
The only split in that would be on the R&D side of the house. Those who refuse to go to 4E, aren't part of the current customer base now. Catering to their whims even at say one module a year (1 per year for each prior edition released quarterly), could actually be the small token of goodwill that pushes them to try other WotC products that are offered just on an impulse buy.
Licensing is a possibility, but WotC has already made the decision that licensing aspects of D&D to other companies is not a direction they want to go anymore (Dragonlance, Ravenloft, Kalamar, Hackmaster, Oriental Adventures). I wouldn't mind if WotC did produce material for older editions either themselves or through a license, but I don't begrudge them for choosing not to do so (not that you are, I'm just saying).
The question though is, are there any companies willing to subject themselves to WotC's licensing departments after the fiascos of the past? And outside of two or three companies, who has the money, the interest, and the skills needed for it.
One thing I'd love to see that I think would work would be for WotC to have a unique license with Paizo for Pathfinder to use any official D&D 3e material and have some sort of low-key "Official Classic D&D" logo or phrase or something like that. I'm not sure if Paizo would want to do that, and I doubt that WotC would, but I think it would work out well for WotC, Paizo, and the consumers. And I dig it.
To me that would be the spliting of the market, as Paizo is an outside company with it's own version of the game. You want those Paizo customers to be WotC customers, not give more ammo to Paizo in which WotC customers become Paizo customers instead.
But, I play 4e, so WotC doesn't have to win me back!
Then really the thread isn't for you.
I think that the call for older material in electronic form works on 2 levels:
- It satisfies the drive for ease of storage & use as more players become increasingly technophillic
- The rebuilding of corporate goodwill that was lost in the waning months of 3.5 and the early months of the 4Ed rollout. Many people didn't like the way WotC handled the expiration of licenses with other companies, the way 4Ed was marketed, and clearly, the removal of downloadable legal PDFs.
The second point is important. The mere fact of the PDFs returning to the market may soothe enough people that they continue to patronize WotC's site- the reason for
their "boycott" would be over.
Plus, as noted before, it lets them continue to profit from extant material.
PDF's are the cheapest and quickiest way for WotC to garner 'boycotting' customers back.
Think about it, they already have the PDF's. They already still have the saved web pages that contained them for sale. There only additional cost is turning it back on and maintaining the e-commerce site for them.
To come back into the fold, I'd need WotC to:
1] Re-release pdfs, particularly of older edition materials.
2] Ditch 4th edition and go back to D&D's roots to create a game that strongly resembles the D&D that I've played for the past 30 years. There is room for innovation and streamlining (I'm thinking of d20/OGL games like Star Wars: Saga Edition and Castles & Crusades) while still keeping the classic D&D tropes.
The following would sweeten the pot, but aren't requirements:
3] Make the DDI a repository of all D&D goodness, including the Dragon Archives, the AD&D 2nd edition Core Rules, all D&D pdfs, and so on.
4] Make the pdfs and both Dragon and Dungeons magazines available in print through a print-on-demand partnership with Lulu or a similar outfit.
As I said number one has the easiest ROI (Return of Investment) for WotC.
Number 2, though is just unrealistic at this point. You would sooner see a 5E come out than a return to 1E days.
Number 3, your right, it would sweeten the pot so much it would get tooth rot.
Even if they went the PCGen method and just created the shell with the directions in how to create your own datasets, the goodwill and ROI of this could be much greater than expected. Add a release method of one book per month to be added to it, you will have continous customers for it.
Start with the 3.0E/3.5E books first. Like I said earlier this is your more likely greatest return area.
I'm hardly a staunch Wizards defender and I disagree. I don't even play 4e. I've never even read 4e, or played a single trial game of it, or anything.
That said, I think most of the complaints about Wizards' PR job come from spoiled, entitled fanboys with wildly unreasonable expectations. The interenet is one of those funny things where a handful of people willing to make a lot of "noise" can give the false impression that there's some huge blunder happening, when in reality most people are either indifferent, or even happy with the state of affairs.
I happen to be one of the indifferent ones. But most gamers I talk to are the happy ones.
The PR blunders to me are pretty straight forward ones. Many of them smelled of rank amateurness. D&D is one of those hobbies where there is an abnormal amount of 'nerdrage'. Add in the fact many of us are technoweanies, you will get the 'large outcry'.
Examples:
PDF's - Pirates have existed always. When WotC said they were stopping PDF's because of Pirates it was laughed at by them. What the first book that came out, was found in whole bad scans by day 3 and by day 7 there were high quality OCR'd/bookmarked PDF's available. WotC in the meantime loses all the possible legal customers they had for said PDF.
Gleemax - we all loved Gleemax didn't we. Heck even their new forum format there is something I don't like. I think I might log on over there once every few months and leave rather quickly.
4E Release - Really the only thing wrong here is with the DDI release not living up to its hype. Many had been burnt on Vaporware before (looking at you Code Monkeys) and were quite cynical. Even now there are things that were promised that haven't appeared yet.
Far as a WotC presence wanted here, yeah that would be great. But really does that suit their interests of bringing us all into there world (forums). Technically we (EnWorld) is a competior for them (EnWorld Publishing/Forums).
That and as I said before, we have raked WotC employees over the coals around here. I'm guilty just as well of it. So any WotC official presence here would have to go through a legal mother may I before it is ever posted anymore.
Now someone mentioned how much of a customer would you be for just the PDF's.
My answer, unknown really. I might buy 2, I might buy 50. I don't have a lot of holes left that I know of, luckily.
), but I could only resist for a day (I'm so weak
