Has 3.5E "failed"?

[Mr. Lobo]

*shrug*

If it was a failure, I'm pretty sure it wasn't a financial one.

It could be that WotC just didn't like how much this alienated a lot of the community. It divided and fractured the market along edition lines again -- perhaps the transition didn't go as smoothly as they could have hoped, and it really irked some of the crowd.

Sure. What exactly is the measuring stick? From the reading I've done on these boards I get the impression that companies don't really like to give out sales figures and other similar data. So we may never know on a financial front how well WOTC's expectations were met or not.

Then there is the embracement of 3.5 by the DD community as mentiontioned above. I guess it depends on your point of view as a consumer or a producer.

What I do know is that I am not going to buy 3.5E and am going to be really suspect about 4.0 or any new edition releases. After perusing the changes in 3.5 I just wasn't satisfied enough with that product to purchase it.

WOTC can check that off in their failure box if they want too.

 

[francisca]

How many people still play 1E? 2E? Not very many.

Just out of curiosity, I'd like to know, but we never will, because who is going to research an out-of-print game?

3 out of the 5 I play 1E with play 1E or 2E with other groups, so I'd guess that's at least 15 people I directly or indirectly know of who still do. I'd say a lot of people still play the old editions, when viewed in the light that they are out of print. And if you consider Hackmaster to be the non-d20 3E, then it may be a lot by any count.

 

[francisca]

*shrug*

They may have wished the market hadn't fractured. And thus, they may be MUCH more careful in releasing revisions in the future.

Or, some stuffed suit may decide that a new edition is exactly the way to repair the fracture and get everyone back on the same page.

Remember, their business model is based on selling PHBs. When current sales dry up, look for a new edition.

I'm usually not much of a doom sayer, but I am willing to bet that Wiz/Hasbro won't be publishing D&D by 2010. They may hold onto the rights and farm it out, such as they have done with settings and Gamma World, but I doubt there is enough money in it to keep Hasbro's attention, despite revisions and new editions.

 

[dreaded_beast]

What all does the Gift Set come with? Is it just the 3 Core Books in a slip cover? Or are there other goodies involved?

Just the 3 Core Books in a slip cover. Nothing else that I could see. I keep my old 3.0 Books in the slip cover now, heh.

 

[Treebore]

Hasbro/WOTC release sales figures as well as sales projections. IT is required for their stockholders. It is also available wherever you can find stock portfolio information.

Think you can find the info now?

IS 3.5 broken? That is a separate question from the sales practices of Hasbro/WOTC. 3.5 does exactly what it is supposed to do, so no it is not broken.

Was 3.5 done with profit in mind? Yes. Was it done with the kind of ethics and consumer sensitivity we should expect? No. Does that make what they did wrong? No, because we have the choice of buying it.

Did WOTC doing a 3.5 shaft the gaming community? Only those who bought it because it was there to buy, and didn't like what they paid for. I didn't get shafted because I hadn't bought anything 3.5 until I could get it second hand, or when the spine on my PHB split.

Now I will be buying 4 new PH's and 2 new DMG's. One PH for me and each of my 3 kids, and 1 DMG for me and one for my kids to use. I have bought them from Wal Mart on-line for $18.76 each, plus almost $5.00 in shipping. Since I live in CA, Walmart had to charge me 7.5% in tax. Which is fine, I would have had to pay it at the end of the year anyway.

So 3.5 isn't broke and WOTC didn't rip me off, because I didn't buy 3.5 books until I had a NEED to do so. This desire of mine to keep from being ripped off also broke me of being a completist. Now I do not buy every book put out by WOTC. I only get it when I have a use for it. Which means I haven't bought a lot of books I would have before they ticked me off with 3.5.

So I am glad WOTC ticked me off. It has made me a much smarter buyer.

 

[diaglo]

How many people still play 1E? 2E?

i would play 1edADnD or 2edADnD or 2.5edADnD over the newer editions in a heartbeat.

 

[Zerovoid]

I haven't bought the 3.5 rule books, and no one in either of the 2 groups I game with has either. I like most of the changes to the character classes, but I really don't like alot of the changes they made to the spell lists. Especially lowering so many of the 1 hr / level spells to 1 min / level. Its not the money, its that I'm just not interested.

 

[Desdichado]

Hasbro/WOTC release sales figures as well as sales projections. IT is required for their stockholders. It is also available wherever you can find stock portfolio information.

Think you can find the info now?

Yes, but they don't break it down to that level of detail on their public statements. You can't even break out WotC sales projections from the Hasbro sales projections, IIRC.

So 3.5 isn't broke and WOTC didn't rip me off, because I didn't buy 3.5 books until I had a NEED to do so. This desire of mine to keep from being ripped off also broke me of being a completist. Now I do not buy every book put out by WOTC. I only get it when I have a use for it. Which means I haven't bought a lot of books I would have before they ticked me off with 3.5.

That's kinda true for me too -- although it may just be that 3.5 coincided with a sort of saturation point in terms of d20 -- I've gotten to the point where I don't need that much else, so I only buy stuff that really interests me. 3.5 didn't interest me at all.

 

[Mr. Lobo]

Treebore wrote:
Hasbro/WOTC release sales figures as well as sales projections. IT is required for their stockholders. It is also available wherever you can find stock portfolio information.

Think you can find the info now?

Probably, but...

I should have been more specific in my earlier post as JD pointed out.

Of course what I would like to see are the number of units produced and actual sales. Also of interest would be the sales projections made by WOTC and what they decided their bottom line margin of profit was acceptable.

I believe that these are the data that companies don't make publicly/readily accessable. I remember reading a post by Clark Peterson of Necromancer Games about this very subject and giving a few reasons why companies don't get into this kind of detail.

But even if these figures were readily available the only people who are really in a position to judge if 3.5 were a financial failure or succes are the investors themselves. And this may be totally different than a consumers view of success or failure of the same product!

 

[Ranger REG]

A good way of doing it. Unfortunately, the 3.5E books were so shiny and new I couldn't resist buying them...

Yeah, I know about impulse buying. I do that a lot in my twenties.

I really don't believe the people running WotC are stupid enough to think that everyone playing 3E would buy 3.5E!

The jury is out on that. Even I have question some of their past business decisions. For me, 3.5e came out way too early -- although there is a rumored conspiracy that the revised project was already in development way before the ink of 3e books have dried -- which led me to speculate whether they have somehow albeit temporarily ran out of creative juice (what with the layoffs of great game designers and all). It is also have been wildly speculated that 4e is not far behind. Such panic -- albeit premature and unsubstantiated -- have been a factor in many current PHB owners' decision to buy the new rulebook.

If 3.5E adversely affected the ongoing sales of D&D (thus, instead of the 100,000+ copies of the PHB Ryan Dancey mentioned were sold in 2002, only 10,000 copies of the PHB were sold in 2005), then that'd be a big problem.

I don't think it does but one should expect that whether or not they sell 3e or 3.5e, it has been nearly 4 years since the launch that at this time, the sale have slowed down. We'll have to see if WotC managed to sell 100,000+ copies of PHB in 2005.

I think the introduction of a new campaign setting, Eberron might spark interest in some of the newcomers of this game and hobby. After all, I started playing AD&D in the 80's but did not quite catch on to Greyhawk. But when Forgotten Realms came out in 1987, I was on it from the beginning, and have been a Realmsfan still.

The next big thing for D&D will be the new Basic set, of course.

Funny, how we're repeating history. You might as well add "Advanced" back to the 3.5e/3e core rulebooks. Hehehe.

But we all know the new boxed set is basically an intro to the core ruleset, not a variant that Gygax once spawn off with a different setting to boot (Known World, aka Mystara). Ah, I remembered my boxed sets.