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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mlund" data-source="post: 6170370" data-attributes="member: 50304">I share the opinion that keeping a bunch of the fluff would've helped ease the continuity breach brought on by the necessary discontinuity in the crunch.I disagree with the notion that "enough people did to cause 4E's failure." Failure depends on your goals. The revenue goals Hasbro put on the D&D brand were failed, certainly. There wasn't enough money in the RPG market to meet them, period. By those standards every RPG brand in the market is a miserable failure. I think that speaks to corporate thinking in terms of what they are trying to squeeze out of this brand and how compatible that is with a traditional D&D model of trying to turn a profit selling the same people splat-books until they burn out and tune out.If we're talking about how long the edition lasted, I guess 3.0 was a failure. It had to be replaced in 3 years and revising the edition to fix its problems nearly resulted in an unseemly end involving pitchforks and torches. 3.5 went 5 years before 4E. 4E runs 5 years before the release of D&DNext. :shrug:I don't think that's a mistake from the company's perspective. In fact, it highlights the fact that the biggest mistake they ever made in regards to their business model was the OGL itself.The business model we've seen since the TSR days that holds true to today is a simple cycle:1.) Sell PHB / DMG / MM2.) Sell splat books3.) Stop producing new content for that Edition4.) Repeat steps 1-3 with a new edition that's not fully backwards compatible so people buy your new line to use new contentThe OGL broke that cycle horribly. The owner of the brand couldn't end-of-life the market's support of for-profit OGL content. That meant for the first time ever D&D's owners couldn't use the "exclusive new content" carrot to prod people into moving on to the new edition.No OGL means no Pathfinder, no 3.75, no new commercial splats or adventures for 3.X products. The lines reaches end-of-life.Instead Wizards/Hasbro stuck a knife in that business model as it relates to 3.X IP with their OGL. OGL competes with their new product lines for market share and doesn't put any money in their pockets - no license fees, no royalties, nothing. It's like building a restaurant, running it for 8 years successfully, then building a new restaurant across the street and leaving the old one just standing their for anyone to take, complete with all the old furnishings, recipes, and equipment. Sure, they have to change the sign over the door but they don't even need to change the drapes or even pay for their own building. They get what you paid to build! Yeah, that's not exactly a recipe for success.It seems like the OGL situation made that sea-change mandatory. Anything too similar could basically be copied over with cosmetic tweaks for minimal cost by any competitor. It isn't like complex open-source software where you're trying to create a revenue stream by providing enterprise-level support and customization others can't. The D&D model was always closed-source software that hits end-of-life.3.5 wasn't sustainable over the long haul. It went 5 years and the revenues started to sag enough that they had to bail out. You can only print so many splat-books.Precisely.On top of which, the actual revenues generated by Pathfinder aren't anywhere near adequate to meet the revenue goals Hasbro set for the D&D brand.The problem they are really faced with is that the established player base wasn't worth enough money to keep the brand alive. It was a choice between doing something new that could potentially obsolete the OGL content and get that monkey off their backs or let the Dungeons and Dragons brand get put on the Hasbro back-catalog gathering dust for years-on-end while everyone went looking for new jobs.Until Hasbro changes their expectations, sells the brand, or allows Wizards to adopt another revenue-model for the D&D Brand (game sales can be low-revenue if ancillary sales like novels, toys, movies, boardgames, etc. are driven up by the main game) the problems will linger.- Marty Lund</blockquote>

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