Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="WizarDru" data-source="post: 6004543" data-attributes="member: 151">Personally, I think there are three things WotC needs to do make D&D Next a success...which in turn will help the industry overall by virtue of network externalities, as Dancey calls them.  <ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Quality Electronic Tools</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Some variant of the OGL</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Effective modern communication</li> </ol>I consider D&D 4E to almost require the use of the D&D compendium and character builder, just to make some aspects of the game less tedious.  I think that D&D Next needs to have effective, portable tools for players and DMs.  To do otherwise is to alienate customers and leave money on the table.  It is RIDICULOUS that in 2012, we do not have iOS and Android clients for the character builder and compendium.  Oh, there have been fan projects, but they have all been kludges.  WotC's total failure from the very beginning in this realm needs to change.  Dramatically.  Let's be clear here: single-person developers have already created tools like this.  Which is also why there should be the second item, a new version of some sort of the OGL, allowing much better third-party content and development.  WOtC should put a program in place to allow some developers to license some of their content (such as the protected content from the OGL days) and allow it into circulation, either for a fee or for something like what some game-makers have done: demand that said developers must release their content for free.  3E's massive surge of quality materials is directly owed to this and made 3E compelling.  4E's almost total lack is the same problem.Communication is a tricky one.  WotC was doing podcasts prior to 4E.  They had websites.  They had forum reps.  I'm sure they probably have twitter accounts, facebook pages and maybe even G+ hangouts, for all I know.  But WotC needs to better engage it's customers than it does.  Too often it feels like WotC doesn't entirely understand their audience, even though they know them 10X better than TSR ever did.And that's a fair assessment for a consumer.  For Turbine, however, it's a different matter.  DDO ran for 3 years as a pay service, so it was hardly a failure....and you need to remember, they practically invented the free2play MMORPG space.  Quite a few people found DDO a game worth spending money on occasionally, even if they didn't think it was worth $15 a month regularly.  The larger point is this: it's very unlikely that DDO, with a subscriber base of around 2 million, was going to harm or hurt the installed D&D player base of potentially 6 million world-wide.  Consider the fates of Temple of Elemental Evil and Dungeons and Dragons: Daggerdale.  The former was so buggy that it was mentioned in virtually every review and it sold relatively poorly.  Daggerdale was almost universally panned.  One was released and the height of 3.5s popularlity, while the other released well into 4E's lifecycle...and from what I can tell, neither had much impact on the tabletop game.  Nor did the far more successful Neverwinter Nights 1, Neverwinter Nights 2, Demon Stone, Dragonshard, D&D Tactics, D&D Heroes or even the D&D facebook game (which may have more players than DDO, for all I know).I get your idea that such things could all feed back into the popularity of tabletop gaming and D&D in specific....but I think that's the tail wagging the dog.  The original Star Wars RPG wasn't driven by movies or books, for example...but by Star Wars fans who also played RPGs.  The new movies didn't suddenly make later versions of the Star Wars RPG (such as WotC's version) an equal of D&D, even though it reached far, far more people.  For that matter, the D&D movies didn't hurt WotC and that was seen by far more people than probably played the MMO.  It came out right when 3E was barely six months old and was panned pretty badly.  That didn't hurt D&D at all, as we now know.  For the most part, game sales and the industry are more affected by other factors (like the rise of CCGs, the sudden popularity of minis games and Euro-games and things like MMOs and Xbox-Live).   People who play WoW might try the WoW card game...but it's probably far more popular with people who were already playing Magic: The Gathering.  THAT is why D&D is more concerned with attracting Pathfinder players (the D&D equivalent of 'lapsed Catholics', if you will). And that's the greater issue, one the Dancey originally discussed in his now famous post about the state of TSR when he first investigated them after the acquisition.  Prior to WotC, no one had ever even bothered to try and gauge this sort of stuff.  And currently, ONLY WotC has the ability to do so.  I would wager there are no other RPG producers with a staff of over a hundred out there.  WotC has one.  They have brand managers.  They have marketers.  And they're all gamers, pretty much.  But marketing these games and to gamers is tricky business, especially in a market like this one with so many decent alternatives.I suspect the very nature of what WotC sells is going to need to change at some point to continue to be successful...or they're going to have to become a brand first and game second.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":P" title="Stick out tongue    :P"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":P" /></blockquote>

Verification