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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 6060242" data-attributes="member: 22424">Depends when you asked. It was a key plank of the d20 strategy that WotC wouldn't do anything beyond minimal adventure support - they'd let the third-party providers fill that void for them. The reason for this was simple: adventures were relatively expensive to create for relatively low returns; the money was in selling PHBs.After a few years, of course, the third-party publishers mostly came to exactly the same conclusion. Whereupon they promptly abandoned their own adventure efforts in favour of their own splatbooks and OGL games. (At least, mostly - there were always a few companies doing adventures.) At that point, WotC felt they had little choice but to get back into adventures. And I suspect you're right - at that point, they would have made the "quality vs quantity" argument you outlined... they would also have been wrong.Yep.It's an interesting one. My guess (and it's just a guess) is that most groups who do play through their APs will start playing "whatever's current", and will get the APs in between for reading purposes. So, they might have played Runelords, and only bought Crimson Throne and Second Darkness, then played Legacy of Fire, and only bought Council of Thieves and, um... and then played Kingmaker... and so on.If that's the case, I think their model might prove to have surprising longevity - although on the face of it the group has "more than they will ever play through", the ones they don't play get forgotten. And, because the commitment is sufficiently low, people are happy to sign up and then forget about it.But we'll need to see, obviously.Yes. My advice to anyone starting a new RPG company (other than "don't!", obviously) would be to consider how you're going to get to a point where you have 50,000 subscribers. Once you've got there (or some similarly high "magic number"), you get the freedom of knowing your company is more or less secure - and can do what you want to do. Until then, you're stuck either always doing the book that will sell (whether it's actually any good or not), or stuck ploughing money into a loss-making venture.It gets brought up, but because the answer for all of us is "we don't know", it's impossible to do any meaningful analysis.My guess (again, just a guess), is that 4e is considered a failure by WotC, but made them money across the piece. Furthermore, in the hands of any other company, including Paizo, it would have been considered a runaway success. Simply because WotC have higher expectations - when held up against "Magic" and "Transformers", it just doesn't look too good. And that's not fair... but that's life.And you're also right - sales of physical product, and especially physical product in brick'n'mortar stores is only a piece of the puzzle, and an increasingly small piece. DDI subscriptions, and likewise Pathfinder subscriptions, are critically important (and will become more important). Sales of electronic versions of the books are becoming increasingly important. And, of course, there are the licensing rights - TV, movies, video games...So, we'll see. Right now, I think I would rather be the guy in charge of the Pathfinder RPG than the guy in charge of the D&D RPG. But if I could choose to be the owner of one of the brands, D&D is still the winner. Of course, it would be even better if they could just get those movie rights back. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />(Oh, and finally... it's really not a good sign that WotC can basically put out no new product for nine months and still be solidly <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/usertag.php?do=list&action=hash&hash=2" target="_blank">#2</a>  in the industry. I mean, it's good for WotC I guess, but it surely shows just how weak the marketplace really is.)</blockquote>

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