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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 4750800" data-attributes="member: 907">There's one thing from the ancient past that shows the difference between old-school and new-school WOTC.Wizards started as an RPG company (their first product was The Primal Order, a system for playing gods that could be added on top of other systems, with specifics for how to adapt it to about twenty different systems in the back). They then happened to get a HUGE boost from Magic, and they went on something of a buying spree. They bought up the rights to a number of other RPGs, including Ars Magica and Talislanta, and made some of their own like Everway.After a short while, WOTC realized that it didn't really make business sense for them to keep making niche RPGs (which take a lot of development time to do right) instead of focusing on Magic and, to a lesser degree, some of their board games and other card games. However, instead of just closing down the product lines, they went to great effort to sell those games to other companies. This, I think, is the act of a company who cares about the industry as a whole, instead of just looking at the bottom line.When Alternity was cancelled, on the other hand (after Hasbro had bought the company, but Adkison was still on board), WOTC just closed down the product line. I do not know whether that was because they wanted to use parts of it for d20Modern, or if they just didn't want anyone else to have it, or maybe no-one was around willing to pay what they wanted for it.I have no doubt that if 4e doesn't match up to expectations, current Wizards management will likely just close down the product line. I'd be very surprised if they sold it off, instead of keeping it around in order to produce the occasional novel or tie-in product.</blockquote>

Verification