* Lots of new editions of existing products without an obvious must-buy factor (witness how many of the publishers you cited specifically told people they didn't need to buy the new version of their products in an attempt to soothe their outrage),
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I didn't read ALL of your response and then I did so this is the rest of my rebuttal... I didn't say the above. I said they WEREN'T doing that because it would be shooting themselves in the foot.
<bold>MMORPGs have gone up in total subscriber numbers non-stop since their introduction. Waiting for MMORPGs to stop being popular is like waiting for the Internet fad to be over. If anything, MMORPGs are going more mainstream, with the exploding popularity of XBox Live, Disney coming out with their second MMORPG next year, and so on.
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And Magic continued to climb in sales for several years as well. Trust me, people will get tired of staring at a computer screen and go out again...
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The current products cost too much. The answer isn't to throw up their hands and say "woe is us, we are helpless!" The answer is to change the products.
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Who said that?
<bold>Given that there's a thread on this message board about whether or not a certain high-end product is available on Amazon, I'd say the secondary market is not just in existence, it's pretty well-known. Now, Amazon (and the like) will have massive impacts on the gaming industry, but I wouldn't say that they don't exist as a secondary market. They're the same market as the comic book industry's -- in fact, in most brick and mortar chain bookstores, you'll see the RPGs shelved adjacent to the graphic novels.
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You soooooooo don't understand what I meant. I wasn't referring to discount retailers etc. In comic books, the floppy, monthly issues are published as loss leaders and the trade is where the real money is at now. RPGs do not have that luxury because there is no guarantee that a first printing will have a total sell through in order to go to a different format for the reprint like comics can go into.
<bold>Wow, this simply isn't true. I can go down to Best Buy right now and pick up EverQuest I along with 25,000 expansions in a single box for $20 and not pay squat for a month. You sure can't do that with D&D. You can almost do it with World of Darkness, if you're going to be satisfied with playing an unpowered guy getting killed by the vaguely defined stuff at the back of the mortals book over and over (although I think dice will take you over $20, if you even could get it the book for that little at this point).
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You just restated my point about MMORPGs. The expansions come out and then a few months later the price goes down!!! RPG books can't do that unless its a used product. The publishers can't afford to cut the cost of the release in half a few months or even a few years later because books etc are more costly to produce.
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World of Warcraft, still one of the most expensive MMORPGs, by virtue of its astounding success, still has half the initial start-up cost as D&D and, again, you can play like a fiend for a month without paying any more. If you got a 10-day guest pass from a friend, you can go 41 days without paying anything other than the cost of the box. (And, in fact, Blizzard really doesn't care if you don't own your own box -- they really want your subscription fees instead, so you can sign up for an account without owning a box; that's what they're trying to enable with the free guest passes.)
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And look, AGAIN you restate my point!!
<bold>Huh? Sony Online Entertainment repackages the core game, plus all but the most current expansion, in a big almost-all-in-one package every time they squeeze out another expansion. That's like going to the store and picking up the three core books and discovering that everything 3.5 that was released before August of this year has now been crammed into those three books.
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And AGAIN!!!!!!!
<bold>You're right, you can't get the last expansion for $20. You can get it for essentially free, if you decide you don't need it when it first comes out.
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Talk about SAME PAGE and DEFINITELY making my point.
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Give us a true Basic Game (in the OD&D sense), including dice, and enabling months of play, for under $20. Make the books black and white, give us only five levels of advancement in the four core classes and three core races, whatever. Those rules can be contained in 16 pages. The only barrier to doing it that way is desire.</bold>
Dude, I've been asking for the same thing for years. It has happened... we call it Castles & Crusades. The core book is 20 bucks and the monster book is 20 bucks, which is CHEAPER than what Basic D&D would be if released today.