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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 5663137" data-attributes="member: 22424">Indeed. At some point, WotC will decide to go with 5e. Until that time, they should focus on making 4e as good as it can be.(And I say that despite not being a 4e fan. But I'd rather WotC thrive having left me behind, than see them try to sell me stuff and end up failing.)Actually, I think that may be the crux of it. How many people play D&D (all versions, including Pathfinder)? How many play 4e?My guess would be that there's probably somewhere between 1.5m and 2m people playing D&D on a regular basis (based on WotC's numbers of last year, allowing for some growth), and I would further guess that of those about 45% play 4e, 40% play Pathfinder, and 20% play older editions/retro-clones. (The numbers don't add up to 100% because there's some overlap - I for one play both 3.5e and 4e.)So, one might indeed be tempted to look at that, conclude that "more people play non-4e D&D than play 4e", and therefore conclude further that one should seek to 'support' older editions.But...Even if it is right that more people play non-4e D&D than play 4e, there's still a big gap between playing the edition and buying books for the edition. After all, a lot of the appeal of the retro-clones seems to be the "do it yourself" mindset. And, what's more, anything WotC does produce will inherently be a high-end luxury product. Of the subset of a subset who do buy things for old editions, how many are going to be in the market for a $35 book of monsters, and from a company that doesn't have a track record in the edition?I can certainly see WotC making the PDFs available again. I can just about see them redoing the PDFs in higher quality versions. If they do that, I can then see them offering print-on-demand as an option. But I really cannot see them doing new products for old editions (beyond the occasional eDragon article), and even if they do I cannot see them making a success of it.</blockquote>

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