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Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="chernann" data-source="post: 5437465" data-attributes="member: 87838">Now, D&D pre-paints going out the door, that's pretty surprising.  I can understand why 4th edition was made miniature centric, kind of a table top combat oriented MMO rules focussed on balance.  I'm guessing 3.5 sales hit a plateau and being part of publicly listed entity meant generating new growth, especially when compared against the success of Magic.  If they released 4th edition in the vein of 3.5, they wouldn't see any growth because to play an RPG you basically need 3 rulebooks shared amongst 4 to 6 people ($100 / 6 = $16+ per participant for the product lifecycle, not so hot). So forcing miniatures play makes sense because then accessories would be required.Since TSR's revenues were about $30 million at their peak, it probably wouldn't be unreasonable to assume that Hasbro would expect that as a base to grow from.  The only other model to emulate would be GW, which has revenues of $150 million mostly due to miniatures sales (with some royalties from game deals).  They picked miniature gaming as a way to generate growth while still keeping their RPG identity.This is all sensible from Habro's point of view, a public company needs to constantly demonstrate growth to justify a large multiple in their share price.  Unfortunately, it's not so great if you're a subsidiary in a market with demonstrated saturation and difficulty in opening new territorial markets (China, Japan etc may be good opportunities but with no history of table top gaming, let alone RPGs, a tough sell).  In the end, the decision was made to give it a go with miniatures apparently.What's super surprising is that WotC has abandoned this strategy completely. Unfortunately, WotC can't go back to non-miniature style play since Paizo has gobbled up the market they left behind with Pathfinder.  I suspect D&D may undergo a few more strange mutations as Hasbro insists on growth before either pigeon holing it as a stable product (unlikely, since it will require an R&D budget to compete with Pathfinder and other RPGs; Monopoly doesn't require R&D and sells just fine), or being jettisoned and sold off.  This isn't that far fetched, it isn't simply about whether a subsidiary or division is profitable, but how profitable it is compared to other parts of the same company; a $6 billion company obviously has a lot of talented management.  An hour spent managing D&D is an hour not spent on something that could be far more profitable. Any executive tasked to look after D&D will look like an underperforming tool compared to whoever is looking after Star Wars or Transformers toys, or even Magic the Gathering. Niche subdivisions in huge mass market companies tend not to last very long (Apple server division just got killed by Apple, for instance.  And why not? If you can't make iPads and iPhones fast enough, being told to manage the XServe division must seem like career hell).</blockquote>

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