NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shemeska" data-source="post: 5266194" data-attributes="member: 11697">I don't think WotC even considered the possibility that 4e would be anything else but a smashing success. Given past history, they probably didn't need to, but they didn't seem to consider that such a radical departure from D&D up to that point in history might not fly with many people. The PR goofs in the runup to the game didn't help either.Clearly things didn't go fully according to plan (and if I can't get you to accept that assertation of mine -even if nothing else- we're on different planets), and I can't help but read various recent developments with WotC as being suggestive of some increasingly nervous jitters and some "ahhh crud..." moments. I suspect that they've lost market share to other games (20, 30, 40%?), and are really at a loss of how to cope with it without alienating the people that genuinely like the 4e game, their own professional pride in the game that they created, and pressure from up top if the line falls below projected income.The development of the Essentials line being rushed to market seemingly ahead of other things and having gone from 'getting new people on board' to backtracking and marketed increasingly as more to get non-4e adopters on board with 4e. Reorganization of the design team and big name layoffs, some books being cancelled or being pushed back, layoffs not during the annual Xmas-time layoffs, and even little things like some new 4e books recycling art at an almost 50% level (Demonomicon as an example) suggesting tighter budgets all around (and if no new DDI programs are announced at GenCon that too would be telling), point me to not all being well in the state of WotC's D&D segment (as well as that being a horribly long sentence).If Essentials doesn't do well to bring 4e back up to where they expected it to be in the market originally, I see big changes in the future. But of course, I could be entirely off base. We'll see in a year or two.</blockquote>

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