But here's the thing, Mercurius... I don't think WotC wants you to buy the books. What they want is for you to subscribe to DDI.
Publishing a hardcover Revised Player's Handbook might be wonderful for those small amounts of people who can only play the game if they have a solid dead-tree book in front of them (but who doesn't want to have the old one and a stack of printer paper with the errata printed out). But there aren't enough of those people to justify the printing, shipping, and shelf space cost to give them what they want. As far as I think WotC probably feels... like Spengler says, 'Print is dead.'
As an aside, at first I thought you meant Oswald Spengler and I thought, "Wow, that's an obscure reference," but then I realized that "print is dead" would have been a bit premature for OS, so I googled the quote, thinking maybe you mean Marshall McLuhan. Then I realized you were talking about Ghostbusters! LOL.
The monthly subscription fee is a much better (for them) economic model than printing books and then hoping against hope that people buy them. Now if they HAVE to do it... they're doing it a more economical way by going the softcover route. They probably wish they didn't have to do it at all... but if they had to, this was cheaper for them to do. And on top of that... by spreading things out the way they are... it's like they are trying to DARE you to switch to DDI. "Yeah, fine, we'll print revisions to some of the stuff in the Player's Handbook I if you really want it... but we can't include everything, and wouldn't you be happier getting a DDI subscription where you CAN get everything, PLUS a character builder, monster building, two magazines and an online database of rules? Wouldn't that be a better idea? You sure you don't want to do that?"
Anyhow, back to topic, I hear you. I'm probably one of those consumers that they don't like: I purchase a one month subscription to DDI every six months to a year, get all the updates, download Dragon magazines, then unsubscribe. I pay $10-20 a year on DDI, and thus don't have to buy the Power books.
But what makes sense to me is that WotC would focus on getting people to subscribe to DDI, perhaps through having different brackets of subscription, a "Platinum" for $20 a month and all content, a "Gold" for $10 a month and what we have now, and a "Silver" for $5 a month and more limited use; they would also have more exclusive content, content that Platinum subscribers get right away, Gold has to wait a month, Silver longer. And perhaps there would be no need to print books like
Arcane Power 6, or maybe only as a digest book.
But even in that model there would still be room for hardcovers. Maybe even they could institutionalize revised versions every few years to include errata, updated info, etc.
Eh... I don't know.
I mean reformatting sure, and some new bits sure... But Have any of the changes wrought by Essentials really forced anything in the game to b re-worked to exist per RAW?
Again, I'm not saying 4.5 but 4.25, thus the one criteria being filled but not the other (which is what you are asking for).
To put it another way, I think there are two criteria that must be fulfilled for a line or revision to be a genuine ".5" edition: One, there has to be a new line of books, new printings, revisions, errata-ed, etc; basically, new product that looks slightly to moderately different. Two, there has to be some degree of severance with the ".0" edition that makes backwards compatibility problematic (although I would say that many people that complained about 3.5 overstated its incompatibility with 3E; I've heard of plenty of folks using 3E PHBs with 3.5 splats). So a .5 requires some degree of conversion, but not as much as an entirely new edition.
What I am saying is that Essentials fulfills the first but not the second. In some ways I am reminded of tricks Marvel and other comic companies used to play (and probably still do, but it has been 15+ years since I collected), with variant covers, endings, extras in different versions of the same issue, etc. Or CDs with "special editions" that have an extra song. What WotC has done with Essentials is take old material, add a bit of new stuff, and re-package and re-format it so that it is close enough to 4E not to be needed to play and thus piss people off, but just far enough that many 4E players will be tempted to buy it.
If nothing else I can say, well played, WotC - you'll make some money off of this; you've already made some off of me. But will it work in the long run? That remains to be seen.
