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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Beginning of the End" data-source="post: 5343547" data-attributes="member: 55271">Which is problematic, because that wasn't what the BECMI Basic Set was designed to do back in the day: The BECMI Basic Set was a fully functional game; not a disposable, pay-to-preview advertising gimmick.WotC talked a good game, but the new Starter Set isn't the spiritual inheritor of the Red Box. Instead, it's yet another product taking its inspiration from AD&D's First Quest: Try to get people to pay $20 or $30 for a demo version of the game that's designed to be stuck on the shelf and never looked at again once they buy the real version of the game. (And maybe if you load it up with enough bling, they won't notice that they just paid for advertising.)Justin Alexander talked once about the <a href="http://www.thealexandrian.net/archive/archive2009-03d.html#20090319b" target="_blank">lack of a gateway product for D&D</a>. And he recently followed that up with a discussion of how the Starter Set <a href="http://www.thealexandrian.net/archive/archive2010-09.html#20100928" target="_blank">perpetuates that track record of failure</a>.As for the ad? Stinks of failure. (1) There are ways to appeal to nostalgia which will also be accessible to people who don't share that nostalgia. This ad, AFAICT, is completely inaccessible to anyone who isn't a current or past D&D player.(2) The ad is bafflingly incomplete. The D&D website currently has the full tagline of the advertising campaign: "ATTEND YE GODS, THE BOX IS BACK". The key element missing from the ad itself is "THE BOX IS BACK", which is kind of problematic since it's the only thing which makes the ad at all explicable.(3) On a similar note, they seem to have gone out of their way to make it difficult for people to figure out what they're selling. (Without actually going so far as to make it mysterious enough to intrigue on a viral level.) They show the box at the end, but manage to obscure the title. And including an HTML address in a funky font doesn't make up for it.</blockquote>

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