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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 5762403" data-attributes="member: 22779">For those who wanted a DDI with 3e or earlier editions, how do you realistically think that WOTC could have done it?  After all, between the OGL and OSRIC, any tools that they put online would be copied, for free, within days, and 100% legal.  Heck, that Italian site, ((with the girl's name that I can't for the life of me remember right now)) produced a character builder for 4e that had virtually all the functionality of the DDI within a month of the DDI going online.How long would it take for a free clone, a la The Hypertext SRD, to hit the 'net if they included 3e in the DDI?How could WOTC possibly make money out of this?  While I realize that the OGL is seen as a great thing, it just doesn't play very well with any sort of subscription model.  You'd have a free suite of DDI tools within a month of release.  There's a reason that Paizo hasn't tried to make any sort of DDI tools for Pathfinder.  Their subscription material is nice and safe behind non-OGL walls.Someone upthread considered 500k subs to be a success.  Holy crap.  How much material do you honestly think that gamers actually buy every month?  A well selling 3e/3.5 book was making maybe 50k copies.  At the outside.  Yet, you expect 10 times that number to sub for 4e?  That's your benchmark for success?  Good grief, only the top tier MMO's hit that kind of number.  100k is a very solid 3rd tier MMO which makes sense given the size of the markets.I really wonder at what people think is a reasonable goal.-----------Edit - S'mon, my group is in the same boat as yours.  In 3e, I was the only one with a Dragon sub (plus a one year sub to Dungeon) and a couple of players bought books (certainly not me).  Now, 5 of the 6 at the table have DDI accounts and people still buy about the same amount of books.  My group certainly spends more on 4e than it did on 3e.</blockquote>

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