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="deganawida" data-source="post: 9226615" data-attributes="member: 67836">Likely. If you’re given an impossible task at work, fail to deliver, new industries start taking your potential customers, and it looks like a competitor might beat you, heads start rolling, and those who survive the cuts begin panicking. An over correction was inevitable, based on the sales target and conjectures made earlier in this thread or in a different one (cannot recall, sorry) that the entire RPG market was less than $100 million. There really was likely a confluence of factors, a perfect storm, if you will.1. $100 million annually mandate from Hasbro.2. World of Warcraft taking the spare time of the market of people who like any kind of RPG (P&P, CRPG, JPRG, MMORPG).3. Breakup of gaming groups due to (2). Remember, WotC had advertisements telling people that only D&D could provide the opportunity to play a real elf.4. Poorly handled marketing.5. GSL scandal.6. Paizo catching a break with (4) and (5) to great acclaim with Pathfinder.7. A tremendous amount of material for Pathfinder released during 4e (miniatures, terrain, and so forth). Anecdotally, my DM never bought WotC miniatures when running 4e, just bought Paizo’s stuff.8. The Great Recession, which affected the ability of customers to purchase 4e’s breakneck speed releases. Again, anecdotally, but I bowed out of 3.5 fairly quickly in part due to rules, but also largely due to content coming too quickly, with too much power creep, and thus value dropped.9. Going back to (2) and tying in (8), $50 one time plus at most $14/month was for WoW was far more palatable than $90 for first 3 PHN, DMG, and MM, with the subsequent “core” books and power source books rapidly behind.10. Next we come to the VTT and Gleemax failing. 11. The official forums switching due to (10)  likely had an impact, to an extent, as people don’t like communities changing.12. The VTT failure caused WotC to offer those of us who were early adopters lifetime subscriptions to D&D Insider, which had to cost a pretty penny.All these combined? It’s a miracle that 4e sold as well as it did, and that D&D wasn’t moved to a mothballed status within the first year.</blockquote>

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