When did I stop being WotC's target audience?

[TerraDave]

I almost agree with snoweel. Interesting.

JW: if you have all of the many books and minis released for an edition that is the best for you, its not surprising you have little interest in the new one.

 

[Halivar]

The problem with RPG's is that any profit you might derive from a gamer is only once-per-product. You buy one (maybe two if it's core) book, and the revenue stream begins and ends with that purchase. In order to keep the stream flowing, you have to keep printing new books. Eight years later, you've got complete market saturation. The only people buying your previous books are new gamers, and new content for old gamers is hard to come by.

Think of it like a book or a video game; you put it out, and millions enjoy it. After a while, everyone that wants to enjoy it has enjoyed it, and your revenue stream declines. What do you do? You put out a sequel. It's new! People don't have it, yet! They give you money. The metaphor breaks down, though, because RPG's don't have diminishing consumer value like books and video games. This makes the situation even harder on RPG publishers. WotC must make drastic changes per edition because they are competing with their own previous edition. They can't just say, "well, 3.x was good enough, so we'll stick with that." Good for the consumer? Possibly. Good for the grognard? Heck, yes. Good for WotC? If all they cared about was supporting the target market as it currently existed, they would have simply folded shop long ago; work's done.

 

[xechnao]

As much as we like to think that its just Hasbro enjoying being evil and stomping on us we can't ignore some basic truths.

1) Hasbro is not out to "get" anyone.

It is out to "get" people that find value in the products it can produce. People have needs and people get caught up by their needs. Because people can not produce by themselves as efficiently as Hasbro can arguments among people and Hasbro are guaranteed.

 

[Jeff Wilder]

JW: if you have all of the many books and minis released for an edition that is the best for you, its not surprising you have little interest in the new one.

You'd think, and yet I'm very interested in Pathfinder*. I don't think 3.5 -- er, the second most-recent edition -- is perfect, not at all. I am almost certain WotC could have kept me as a loyal, crazy-spending customer, by fixing that edition, rather than creating a new game. That's why I'm so confused about why they didn't.

* Note that, like another poster upthread, I'm becoming a little concerned about Paizo's vision for changing, uh, the the second most-recent edition, too, however.

 

[Halivar]

The PHB (in my opinion) was deliberately scaled back so that customers who wanted the "core options" they had in the past now needed to buy additional installments of the PHB....To me it seems like 4th edition offers less bang for the buck by design.

Disagree completely. The number of classes may have been scaled back, but each class has gone from a two-page write-up to twenty pages (or whatever... it's a lot more). Fewer classes, more content per class. If you like playing paladins or fighters, 4E offers much more bang for the buck.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

But that hasn't really turned out to be the case, has it? 4E fractured D&D fandom, sure, but many people who bought many 3E books have started in again with 4E books. Right? Also, I'm relatively certain that if 4E had been an evolution of 3E -- fixing its problems, introducing some new systems -- I'd still be buying.

I think here is one major point - the WotC designers and many 4E players probably thinks the changes are an evolution of 3E.
But you don't. Could Wotc or its designers predicted this and find a different route? (And both is required - if they knew the "Jeff Wilders" of this world will be lost to us but couldn't come up with a way to keep them, this couldn't change their course of action.)

WotC put out "test samples" of 4E - did you enjoy the Bo9S? Did you like the Warlock or the Reserve Feats? Did you look into Star Wars Saga Edition? How did you feel about the skill system?
I suppose WotC put these out and saw that people liked this. And so they eventually they felt safer with the system ideas they had in mind.

But each of these individual aspects might have been a subset of what you didn't like in WotC material. Maybe you bought Bo9S, but found it one of WotC weaker products. Maybe you didn't like Reserve Feats or the idea of "always available magic". But you still bought these products because before you personally saw them, you wouldn't have guessed that these rules weren't to your liking - or because other aspects were.

I recognize that it's very subjective, but I honestly feel that it's not that I decided to stop buying WotC products, but rather that WotC decided to stop making products that I want to buy.

I don't know how much this was a conscious decision on WotC, but I suppose they decided to create products that turn out not to appeal to you.
It wasn't a decision of "Let's no longer appeal to gamer type X" but more "Let's appeal to gamer type Y" or "the market is changing to more gamers of type Y". If we were to create Venn diagrams, there is an overlap between "Gamers of Type X" and "Gamers of Type Y" and 3E covered a little of both (but not all), and now 4E covers a little more of Y and less of X.

I suppose WotC hope is that the extra part of Y is larger then the part of X that got lost...

 

[Philotomy Jurament]

WotC and I parted ways pretty early on.

I bought the three 3.0 core books. I bought one WotC splat book, and two WotC adventures. I liked 3.0, but I wasn't impressed with the splats or the adventures. Most of my 3E purchases went to third-party companies. By the time 3.5 came out, I was realizing that 3E wasn't my cup-of-tea. I didn't buy any of the 3.5 books. I checked out 4E (but didn't buy); interesting game, but not what I want out of D&D.

 

[Noumenon]

4) The D&D IP has value, and roleplaying games have a much lesser value (in $$). The splitting of the two was inevitable from the moment Hasbro acquired the rights. Some far seeing individuals saw this coming and created the OGL.

That's sure an interesting assertion -- that WotC employees hoodwinked the company to ensure the survival of the game. It might have worked out that way, though!

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

They have also pushed Dragon magazine buy having this e-zine offer previews of these "missing" options. To me it seems like 4th edition offers less bang for the buck by design.

This is an idea I've heard before.

The fanboy in me doesn't want to consider this possible, but I think it might be true.

In a way (I am still a fanboy).

If I look at the "splats" and other supplements I bought for 3E, most of the material found in them was never used by me. I really just didn't care for it most of the time. At least half of the PrCs are too specific to my taste or just plain underpowered, many feats to fiddly or too hard to qualify for, and the core book spells cover most of my needs when creating an interesting spellcaster. Most of the monsters were unused by me, since I build a lot of classed NPCs in my own campaigns and preferred that to monster-fighting.
Yet I bought all this stuff that never was really useful to me.

It might be too early to tell, but I tend to believe that the "extra" material that I can now find in supplements or the Dragon are worth it far more. And they are even easier to add into the game (gain a level, retrain a feat or power!) then ever before - by design.

I don't know if WotC is intentionally reducing the "content" or if it's just intentionally building only well-tested and useful content, and thus needs more time to get it done. Maybe that is a little to idealistic.

But it seems to me I thing the signal to noise ratio has gone better - but the volume might have gone down, too.

 

[rounser]

WotC must make drastic changes per edition because they are competing with their own previous edition.

Don't make out that it had to be this way. They could have just come out with a refined new edition of D&D (refinements being what new editions are generally about), rather than a mostly new game mislabelled as a new edition. Mechanics overhauls would have been enough, but it's not even thematically similar, they had to have their way with that as well. No campaign of mine will feature "dragonborn warlords".