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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 5971449" data-attributes="member: 17106">So instead of making D&D they should be merchandising it and rehashing it? Creating products that at best are insubstantial trinkets or tangential add-ons, and at worse are garbage that drags the brand down?The problem with trying to make WotC into a "content provider" is that providing content really isn't the role of any company. Characters, stories, and even rules are handled best by individual players and DMs. There is a content market for people who lack the time or ability to create their own, but that isn't much for a company the size of WotC to base a business model on. Moreover, the better the rulesets that are out there, and the better that people understand them and can use them to create content, the less demand for settings/adventures/etc. there is.This is an inherent problem with rpgs as a business. With most hobbies, as people become more avidly invested in the hobby, they spend more time and money on it. However, with D&D, people generally spend more time and less money on it as they get better at it.From a business perspective, this is an unsolvable problem. The hobby itself is predicated on individual creativity, so content providing won't work. D&D is archetypically a game played in private space with minimial equipment that lasts a long time; there's really very little way of monetizing it. Mechanical innovation sells products (along with branding, art, and other peripheral things), but this is a path with no clear direction or endpoint. Simply revising and improving the rules was deemed unsuccessful, so they tried reinventing them (to put it nicely), angering a large part of their customer base without really expending the hobby to new audiences, causing them to decide that this was not a success either they needed to radically change something (again).So if you (@Neuroglyph or anyone else) want to say that 5e isn't a solution, I agree. And I do think that there is some room to republish old material or sell it online and to create edition-free setting products, but that's not going to make money on the scale that selling the substance of the game (the rules) does. It's not a solution, either. However, if there is a solution to make rpgs a functional business model in the long term, I have not seen it.</blockquote>

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