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Message: <blockquote data-quote="sunshadow21" data-source="post: 6299524" data-attributes="member: 6667193">For the final audience, neither means much at all. Where they mean a great deal is with the investors and people funding the projects, and this is where WotC has a problem Marvel never really had. Marvel has always been a producer of multiple comic books, each with it's own level of success and publicity over the years. For them to leverage a character like Iron Man into a profitable movie was not all that challenging; the investors understood why the better known characters weren't available, and they understood that the only real difference between Iron Man and those more popular characters was the amount of resources spent on getting and keeping them in the public eye. The core Iron Man product was already there; the core Marvel brand was already there. It just took some dollars to infuse the Iron Man product line. D&D is not nearly as easy to work with. There is no single definition of the core brand that WotC can sell to investors, and no really strong product line (in this case, world or character) inside the brand that would be attractive enough to an outside game developer or movie producer to justify selecting it over their own original story or world that they wouldn't have to pay a licensing fee for. When you take away the rpg from the center of the wheel, there is nothing left in the center to solidify the brand. A few interesting, but far from truly great, worlds, a handful of specific monsters, and the concept of a party taking on dragons is not a sellable product; all of those things are things that any decent developer or producer could replicate on their own. Forgotten Realms is the closest thing that they have to being a sellable subbrand, and even that falls well short of what is needed unless WotC is willing to take a formal "D&D=Forgotten Realms" stance, and even that would be a hard sell without WotC first producing a true hit of a game or movie to show that there is a built in audience for that particular world. The biggest problem with the comparison with Marvel is that Marvel simply needed a bit of extra cash to get an already refined story out while D&D needs a great deal of shaping before it's ready to be effectively put before the eyes of the general public. A smash movie right now that happens to include the D&D logo would do very little to help the brand as a whole, either for the final audience or the investors that WotC needs to be come knocking at their door asking for licensing deals.For better or for worse, at least initially, Next as a tabletop game must still sit at the center of the brand; there is simply nothing else that can occupy that space right now. For WotC to be able to shift that away from the center and create something else in it's place at the center, the tabletop game itself first has to be truly beyond a shadow of a doubt successful, which right now has a 50/50 chance of happening, and something that D&D fans see as being truly D&D, something that 4E never really achieved, and they must have a solid plan in place from the very start on how to capitalize on Next's success to allow them to shift the perception of the brand away from the tabletop game to something else. This usually requires a consistent management team to design and implement, something that WotC has not had for a great while now. It is entirely possible that they finally have all the pieces in place that they need, but it's a little premature to say that it will happen as planned, given their past record on that very same goal with past editions.</blockquote>

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