Design optimism, marketing pessimism

[jeffh]

I keep falling back to how the DDI will be a stable inflow of money, providing WotC with better cash flow, more accurate financial planning, better business plans and profit forecasts. Given all this, its clearly in WotC's best interest to make the DDI as necessary to 4E as possible.

Not necessarily.

There are (at least) three relevant groups - people interested only in offline 4E, people interested in DDI but not 4E (the rules-neutral gametable seems to be something a lot of people want), and people interested in both.

The first group is the one where your assertion is the most plausible; making DDI more or less necessary to 4E might bring some of these people onto DDI. But it's just as likely to alienate them entirely, driving them to other systems or getting them to stick to 3.5 or some earlier version of D&D. So the strategy you think is "clearly in WotC's best interest" might get them a few additional DDI customers from this group, but at the same time lose them 4E customers. Even granting that DDI is probably more profitable to them, this is at least not a pure win.

The second group is the most overlooked thin the various discussions of the issue, but I suspect WotC is very interested in luring them in. And if they're not, they should be. They can't do that if DDI is too tied in to 4E.

The third group shouldn't care which strategy WotC goes for.

So it's not obvious that it's in WotC's best interests to tie 4E and DDI together too tightly. Rather, the issue hinges on the relative sizes of groups 1 and 2, and the prevailing direction of any movement within group 1.