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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9166816" data-attributes="member: 8461">I noted before that I'm not a business executive, so if I'm using that particular term wrong, mea culpa. As I remember it, the term was used in a seminar I attended by an ex-TSR/WotC employee who used it as I have here, to refer to the idea that a company wasn't looking at whether or not they made more money than they spent as a determinant with whether or not to continue producing a particular product line, but as to whether or not it was hitting their projections for how much money they expected it to make (or rather, needed it to make in order for them to feel it was worthwhile to continue putting money into).For 3.5, my understanding (as per the seminar with Ben Riggs about why WotC changed editions to 4E) was that 3.5 wasn't hitting the ROI that WotC/Hasbro had set for it (which they blamed on World of Warcraft), and that was why the decided to make a new edition. Which is to say, it's not that 3.5 was losing them money, but because it wasn't making them enough money (and as per old quotes from Ryan Dancey, we know that the target number was $100M per year).Given that, as per the link I posted before, a statement was made that the pace and content of 3.5's releases were losing WotC money, and that's what caused WotC to move away from 3.5 (and 4E). That, however, isn't the case; they weren't losing money, they just weren't making enough for those editions to be something they wanted to invest in. That's important to keep in mind, because I see parallels drawn between the 3.5/4E era of WotC and TSR, when in fact the circumstances of the two companies (both of which had voluminous output at times) were very different.</blockquote>

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