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Message: <blockquote data-quote="giant.robot" data-source="post: 5431984" data-attributes="member: 93119">There were three nails and you hit two of them on the head. The third was the emergence of CCGs of all stripes. A ton of gaming/hobby money that went into D&D in the 80s and other TRPGs was redirected to Magic and games like it as soon as they hit the scene. While CCGs as a gaming experience are not a replacement for TRPGs they're still a game and something that eats into people's time and monetary budgets. Magic alone boasts several times even the best estimates of the number of D&D players.The gaming explosion and subsequent market saturation of the 80s was largely from a new market opening up. This is a situation that isn't likely to crop up ever again, the market exists and now the players have to fight for a portion of it as its days of massive growth are largely over. A component of this was video games finally started to live up to their promise of being truly immersive in the 90s and have only gotten more so since then. D&D great in 1982 when the alternative was Ultima or Wizardry on the family Apple II or Commodore 64. You needed as much imagination to picture your Drawf in D&D as you did your avatar in Ultima.Gaming is also something that requires a bit of free time on both the part of the DMs and the players. In high school and college it's way easier to find a group of people with the time and inclination to play D&D than it is once you're graduated and working. When I was younger I never realized how much free time I had (and often wasted). D&D is a game for suburbanites with free time and will be until you can viably get by without a live DM.I think WotC realizes these three things on some level. They're not going to compete with WoW, sex (or masturbation), or Magic in popularity. They're not going to ever relive TSR's glory days of the 80s and 90s. While its disappointing to see them drop print products off their schedule they're trying to make money. Splat books don't sell anywhere near as many copies as core books do.With pure splat books DDI makes a lot more sense than a dead tree version. It costs them next to nothing to publish it and people need to keep up their subscription to access the content. Things like the Character Builder obviate the need for a character option splat book. They can add a new module to the CB and blamo, everyone has errata'ed classes and/or new options. It sucks for me since I don't have a DDI subscription but if the content was there I might think harder about getting one.While the game is likely to have more online components going forward including entirely online play I doubt they're ever going to remove the "Print" button. A lot of gaming will still take place at tables in living rooms and basements and they want people in FLGSes to buy things like Dungeon Tiles and Fortune Cards. They want the D&D logo in places where you find the Magic and Warhammer logos. They want the kids coming in to drop tons of money on a case of Magic cards or some additions to their Warhammer army to instead pick up some D&D books and Fortune Cards and then subscribe to DDI. They've worked to get the Red Box back into big box stores because it's stocked right next to the Magic and Pokemon cards. They need to get the kids with lots of free time to pick up D&D and get DDI subscriptions.</blockquote>

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