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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DracoSuave" data-source="post: 5374400" data-attributes="member: 71571">To resort to a D&D analogy:Intellegence, Wisdom, and Charisma are three different things.  Being smart with academia, being saavy with consumer products, and having good taste in recreations are three completely different things, and having proficiency in one doesn't make you immune from being an idiot in the other two.Look at how many people with doctorates and masters call in to tech support with the dumbest questions.  No offense intended, but PhDs don't include 'Immunity to enjoying mindless cash grabs.'As an example:Look how many educated people in this and other threads actually believe the consumer base for D&D would want a complete digital package?  Newsflash:  Games are better touched than downloaded.  D&D has miniatures and boards and physical hardware for a reason... any game which involves some form physical manipulation is more involving.  Ask many salesmen:  It doesn't matter the product, you multiply the chance of selling the product if the customer can hold on to it.  Books are tactile, and portable, and relatively cheap.  E-readers, and computers are not relatively cheap, nor are the files tactile.  Microtransactions are convenient for music, for computer programs, for video games, sure.  But these are things you can't touch, so you have to resort to other methods to increase revenue.  Going to a free-to-play, microtransaction model is about reducing the barrier to entry.However, for physical games, it is not ideal:  Having the customer touch your product is far more effective in the long term.  Yeah, what ever happened to Magic: Online anyways?  That had such potential.....Oh and that Eberron video game thing that's free to play these days.  I suppose that doesn't qualify as a success either, what being the most popular free to play game ever...[/sarcasm]How's this, instead of coming to a conclusion that fits your thesis, how about coming to a conclusion that fits the premise:Wizards is capable of taking tactile products into the digital realm with success.  D&D (the game system itself) has proven difficult to do so, due to it's nature of not being composed of digital objects, and due to the lack of ability to play it through their digital offerings.  See, all the digital forms of the books in the world won't change the fact that you still need physical dice on a physical table with physical miniatures resting on a physical game tiles.  It's a game designed around the physical presentation, losing a big part of its game mechanics if you cut those out.  Physical books are the best way to integrate that into the majority of groups... the best you can get out of digital offerings is a handy way to put together characters.  Without that digital game table, making the game wholy digital is only cutting off their own foot and saying it'll make them faster in a running race.That's too expensive.  I can get 8 classes, 5 races, and a panoply of feats and other stuff for less than that in paper.  A dollar for a monster block?  How is that even a good deal compared to buying hundreds of monster blocks for 40 dollars?And don't get me started on the inability to properly preview stuff in advance.  That's the thing with digital offerings:  I can't crack open the book at the store, see what's inside, and decide if it's worth picking up.  This is not good for any consumer.</blockquote>

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