NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="radferth" data-source="post: 5451428" data-attributes="member: 5791">Wow, this is my favorite new thread in quite some time.  To address the OP, I am not sure sure if it is important for WotC to have a single, well-supported setting, but I do think think they are hurt by the relative dearth of setting material and adventures available for 4e.  I know not every DM uses either of these, but I know they are a big part of the draw for me to use a given system.Maybe it isn't specifically the lack of setting materials, or adventures, but the lack of variety of stuff available.  IMHO, WotC has never been great at putting out adventures.  There a few 3.x adventures a like, and that second one for 4e seems pretty good, but they have never put out many, and only a subset of those are very good.   Under the OGL, this didn't particularly matter, and there were plenty of 3rd-party adventures, as well as splatbooks, setting books, and whatever else you wanted.Now many (most, I would say) of these 3rd-party products were crap, but there were still quite a few that were good.  If you are someone who says "I like a system that has X available for it," chances are 3.x had that.  Fast forward to today.  If X in anything other than company-approved splat books, or delves, you are out of luck, and are probably playing something else.  (Although I admit, if X is computer support, 4e has that much better than 3x in its heyday, although less so than 6 months ago).Now, I can certainly understand why WotC would have wanted a more restrictive license this time. They were probably happy to have Goodman and Necromancer and Paizo making adventures for their system.  But I am sure they saw variant d20 games like Spycraft and Green Ronin's Mythic Vistas line as folks taking a free ride at best, lost sales at worst.  But they made it so restrictive (and released it so late), it gave even the module-producers second thoughts.  And something about the system (tight integration? constant release of new feats and powers?) chased away the third-party splatbooks as well.The end result is a system where WotC is making all the potentially big-selling items, but for which no one is making all the other stuff.  I don't know if they meant to chase off the third-party guys quite so thoroughly, or if it was just a case of "think you used enough dynamite there, Butch", but in an effort stop losing sales to third-party products, they put themselves in a situation where they are losing sales by having a system that is "not as popular as it could have been" because it lacks those very 3rd-party products.Given that they pulled PDF sales, and pulled the character-builder online, they seem almost obsessive in trying to make sure no one freeloads off their IP, whether it be due to piracy, infrequent DDI subscribing, or lazy 3rd-party products.  We have no way of knowing whether this was a conscious decision by Hasbro to have tighter control over a possibly smaller segment of the market, or just someone higher up the corporate ladder tying WotC's hands in a very short-sighted way.I'm not entirely sure where I am going with all this, I guess just that given WotC's business plan of a tightly-integrated game system with limited 3rd-party support, 4e is about exactly "as popular as it could have been."  Whether Hasbro expected those results or not, only they can say.</blockquote>

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