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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 6527002" data-attributes="member: 87792">What do we know? The 4e PHB2 sold extremely well, <a href="http://community.wizards.com/forum/4e-general-discussion/threads/1989836" target="_blank">hitting the top 15 on the WSJ bestsellers list</a> (and spending multiple weeks on the list), and the PHB3 didn't sell remotely so well but was somewhere round #50. (Not bad at all, all things considered given it was a pretty awful book IMO - out of six classes I hard ban three, soft ban two, and ban Hybrids, leaving just the Monk).So. Prior to Essentials, 4e was selling pretty well. And the only quarter Pathfinder caught it on the ICv2 lists was the one where the released book was Psionic Power - the splatbook for the three PHB3 classes I hard ban. On the other hand the business model was coming to the end of the road. What else was there to release after the three PHBs, and a splatbook each (plus the excellent Martial Power 2) and two Adventurers' Vaults? (Other, of course, than some actually good adventures).Enter Essentials. 4e's lovely internal edition war of a product. I'm not aware that despite being cheap either of HoF* made the NYT or WSJ bestseller lists. The shift in character builders to the online-only Silverlight thing which was both a bandwidth hog and had reduced functionality caused subscriptions to be cancelled. The design principles of HoF* (Heroes of the Fallen Lands/Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms) were not those of the PHB - they were ones that didn't attract non-fans, and quite seriously pissed off a lot of 4e fans (most notably bringing back Wizard Supremacy and dumb fighters). Several of the classes in HoF* were badly made; they didn't scale properly and were unable to do their job. (Slayer without external feats, Sentinel Druid, the Knight had a weakness vs forced movement, Hunter, Hexblade had issues).I know literally no one who started buying D&D because of Essentials and a lot of 4e fans who stopped subscribing over Silverlight, and stopped buying 4e at HoF*. Shortly after HoF*, 4e was confronted by its first cancellations (Class Compendium, Mordaniken's Magnificent Emporium) - both of which were meant to support Essentials. And while the (critically panned) Heroes of Shadow was largely Essentials based, the subsequent Heroes of the Feywild and Heroes of the Elemental Chaos were more classic 4e than Essentials. Pathfinder also caught 4e for the first time the quarter Essentials was actually released (Q3 2010), and overtook it about six months later (Q1 2011).Yeah, I'm pretty sure that Essentials really underperformed.<img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=64741&d=1414244496" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " data-size="" style="" /></blockquote>

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