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Message: <blockquote data-quote="WalterKovacs" data-source="post: 4757214" data-attributes="member: 63763">It likely would be a bad idea to have waited until things were as bad as 2nd editon was before going into a new edition. By having a new edition as 3rd was starting to show signs of age (instead of when it's obvious a change needs to be made) means they aren't spending a long time with dwindling sales of 'lame duck' product, or having to convince people to come back instead of convincing them to change over. They cold have tried harder to keep existing players, but from a perspective of wanting a new edition to be succesful they need to: (a) Make the potential market for the product larger than the one for the previous edition (why bother with a new edition if you are going to compete directly with a previous edition by making it a 'new flavor' of the same edition?) (b) Do it early enough to avoid an uphill battle of convincing dissatisfied customers to return (in the case of 2nd edition, it was a different company, with the jump from 3rd to 4th, it's still the same company, so you'd be marketing to people who still like 3rd and would resist the change, and those that abandoned 3rd, who would resist a new product from WOTC). So they make a new edition before 3rd has completely run it's course, and they make it different enough from 3rd to be able to market it to people who weren't playing 3rd, and making it a true alternative system to 3rd, instead of a variant. They still split the gamers, but by offering different systems instead of similar ones, they have a greater chance that the combined group targetted by both games is larger. While there are some players that would be happy playing either game, there is likely groups that wouldn't want to play 3rd or 4th.  Using something similar to your X/Y/Z example: A - Players that would play 3rd, but not 4th (or prefer 3rd)B - Players that would play eitherC - Players that would play 4th, but not 3rd (or perfer 4th) At the moment, they are 'giving up' on A, and splitting the B group. If they were to make a new edition that was very similar to 3rd, they would completely ignore the potential to bring in C, and fight with the previous edition over the combined A+B group. Considering that a new edition, even one very similar to 3rd, is going to start at a disadvantage of lacking a lot of the expansions that provide additional classes and races, it would be difficult to convince at least some of that group to come over. So they still end up splitting their customer base, except they aren't even trying to grow their base, only trying to convince the same base that they targetted when 3e was first released to buy in to a new edition.</blockquote>

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