Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Khaalis" data-source="post: 3755963" data-attributes="member: 2167">I just have to throw in a few comments after all this in this thread.[rant on]Yes WotC is a company, and there objective is to make a profit. However, how do you make a profit with a product? It must be a product that will sell and that is well received by the consumer. How do you improve sales? You improve the product.This holds true in all consumer product industries, the most common analogy being the software industry. When we produce a piece of software, we as a company and as developers think the product is sound, viable and does the job we intended it to do. All is good, we sell the product. Over time however, we tend to find bugs (unintentional features as we call them) and come across better ways to do the intended job as well as receive feedback from users on what they would like to see in the product (new features). Additionally, as is a fact in any industry, product sales tend to level out as the market becomes saturated with the product. There is a point where you basically cannot sell any more product. We listen to the users and start writing the next version of the software. This takes time and effort - corporate resources. This costs the company money. In the meantime the market is becoming saturated with the old product, making it time to push hard on getting the new product finished. Once we do, do we give away the new product for free or do we charge? Of course we offer the new product as a new version. It is up to the user to determine if they want to upgrade or not. If we weren't going to make money, we wouldn't make the product in the first place. This doesn't mean we don't want to improve on what we have created.This is the same scenario with D&D. 3X has been around for years. It was the best game the designers could make at the time and they thought it was sound, viable, fun and innovative. It was light years ahead (IMHO) than 2E. It was a good system. Consumers liked the product, bought it and played it. All was good... for a while. Then the users began to find bugs and started asking for new features. There are millions of threads and posts just between here and the WotC boards on House Rules, Alternate Systems, "How to Balance the X Class", Spellpoints, etc.  If people were so joyously happy with 3X, these things wouldn't exist. However, the general indication from these millions of posts, was that 3X needed revision. It had issues. There were better ways to accomplish the goal. Also, the market has become saturated. There are not many D&Ders who do NOT have 3X. There are also only so many "add-ons" one can create for the system. People have been complaining for at least the last year that they are tired of the "splat books". (Granted some people complain just to complain.)WotC has seen all of this. They have seen the good and the bad to come from 3X. And yes they have watched sales and marketing trends. They have analyzed all of this and answered all of those situations and demands by creating 4E.As someone else posted in this thread (too lazy to go back and find the quote)... "Improving the product and making money are NOT mutually exclusive". You can and DO achieve both hand in hand. I hate to say it to all the "WotC are the devil for wanting profit" types, but money is the reason any company is in business. I find it incredibly unfair to attack WotC for selling their product when the same said people are obviously fine with spending money on other gaming material, or that "upgrade" anything else in they own.Do you upgrade your PC? Do you upgrade software? Do you upgrade your cell phone? Do you upgrade from VHS to DVD or DVD to BlueRay?  Do you upgrade from corded to wireless? It is all the same basic premise. Do I personally think 4E is the "greatest thing since sliced bread"? No. First off I haven't seen it. Secondly, its a highly complex product to produce. There are ALWAYS going to be parts of it that people don't like or think could have been better. This is always the case with intellectual properties. What I do think is that I see a lot in what we already know that makes me think there will definitely be some improvement over 3X. I am intrigued. I will watch, listen, and research to make an informed purchasing decision when the time comes. I am not going to sit here at this early stage and say that 4E is crap or fantastic, or that WotC is evil for coming out with 4E. Thats just nonsense IMHO.As for Dave's Blog, I really can't see how people could react so negatively to it. The analogy is a good one. 4E IS like cloud watching. It is coming in May one way or the other. Whether you buy it or not is up to you as the consumer, but that isn't going to stop it from being released. The research that has been conducted (and trust me a lot of market research has been conducted over the past 3 years) has indicated it is a viable time for 4E, and that the market will not only bear the release, but make it a profitable release. We as consumers cannot control that 4E is coming out, nor can we control its release date. However, what we CAN do is influence the form in which it comes out. WotC is listening to the consumer. They are gaging what we want to see in our game system, and how we think the system can be improved. This is a good thing. They could simply have ignored us (can we say TSR, Paladium, etc.)[rant off]JMHO, YMMV.</blockquote>

Verification