D&D New Version

[Beolveig]

D&D lightbulb broke...gonna buy me a Pathfinder one.

Sure. But stick to that in the wrong market and you'll go bankrupt.

I agree it's almost always less expensive to keep a customer than to acquire a new one. And that works great for light bulbs and such, since your customers will have to replace your product on a regular basis, generating consistent sales.

But what happens if you sell your customer something they never have to replace?

Once someone bought the core books (or just downloaded the SRD for free), they didn't need to make a single additional purchase from WOTC. And those who did buy other items reached a point of diminishing returns - the first splat has value, the fifty-first splat far less so.

So even if WOTC keeps all their original 3.x customers (not likely), their revenue from the system was bound to dry up. They were selling the equivalent of light bulbs that never burned out. For a while they convinced people to buy new light bulbs with different colors and shapes, but what happens when every serious customer has 50 light bulbs that never burn out?

Paizo seems to be doing awesome selling the light bulb that doesn't have to be replaced as they found other things that we can spend out money on instead. I really hope 5E is an awesome game, but I fear 4E killed D&d with no chance of a successful saving throw. No matter what they do now nobody's going to be happy. If I were them I would have just focused on making better quality products and support for 4E as they are the only fans they have left. The only way I'll go back to D&D is if 5e reverts back to the old school flavor (which will piss off and alienate all the 4E fans). In short, I think it's impossible that everyone will be happy with 5E...in fact, now they risk losing all their fans. Now in order to get my money they have to make a light bulb that doesn't burn out AND it has to burn brighter than Pathfinder. It is my money after all, and WotC can't tell me how to spend it. The onus is on them to court my cash as I'm not too keen on giving them my money just because I feel sorry for them because they won't make any money unless they keep trying to make their previous products obsolete so you have to repurchase everything. I think I'll go to the game store now and buy some more awesome Paizo products. Gotta love a free market economy!