Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lord Zardoz" data-source="post: 4148782" data-attributes="member: 704">Nope.  I think your way off.First, Wizards is communicating by continuing to release information about the new edition.  WoTC Employees are still showing up in threads on Enworld.Second, Paizo is not really in a position to influence the success or failure of 4th edition to any great extent.  They are a great company with a great product, but they are also playing to a Niche but vocal audience.  The pathfinder system might do well, but I would be very surprised if Paizo manages to end up in a dominant position with respect to the D&D market.Consider this:  Regardless of what WoTC thinks of the Pathfinder effort by Paizo, what do they have to gain by responding to it directly and officially?If they try to come out against it, that will just cause a whole lot of Paizo fanboys to show up in forums quoting parts of a press release making claims that Wizards is afraid of Paizo.Anything they say about the system in an official capacity is just going to draw more publicity to it, even if that publicity only takes the form of a minor boost in Google's page rankings, and in people looking for 4th edition news finding news about Pathfinder.I look at it like this.  The people who buy into Pathfinder are probably customers who are very unlikely to buy into 4th edition anyway, and Wizards probably lost them as customers by annoucing 4th Edition in the first place.  On top of that, the most vocal "I hate it" crowd from 4th edition are like people who show up in StarTrek or Battlestar Galactica forums and write posts about "I hate this episode, it sucked for all 18 of the times I watched it.  They totally did it wrong".  Beneath all that vitriol, they still watched the show, and they still talk about the show.The upshot of Pathfinder for Wizards is that I am sure there is a segment of the current player base that would become lapsed customers again, and leave gaming for a few years.  If Pathfinder keeps them at the table throwing d20's, then Wizards wins in the long run.I also think that the change from OGL to GLS is just a result of the OGL making more material public than had originally been intended.  I recall reading comments a few months back from companies that said they would end up with people posting nearly all the crunch of a recently purchased product, and making it difficult for the smaller 3rd party publishers to make much of a profit.  While supporting the customers is a great thing, Wizards does need to protect the interests of 3rd party publishers.  If 3rd parties cannot make a profit making material, than they simply will not make any material.  Holding the copyrights closer to home may not be a bad idea long term.And if it turns out otherwise, they can always be told of the error of their ways by militant fans.  Who knows, they may even listen.END COMMUNICATION</blockquote>

Verification