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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6527205" data-attributes="member: 2067">It's a bit apples and oranges, isn't it? Essentials books didn't even have a strong theme, and the reasons they didn't sell well seem from here to have had more to do with their attempt to be brand new core books and their half-measures in trying to appease some of the people who lost in the 3e-4e transition than their "themed"-ness. I think the team was starting to think in terms of "uniting" even before Essentials dropped (which is probably where some of the half-measures in Essentials came from), and these early articles seem to continue with the idea that whoever was playing the game in 2008-2010, they were feeling the loss of folks from earlier e's. I imagine a lot of convos in WotC's offices during this time showing the strength of the D&D brand on the one hand, and the sales of the D&D RPG (4e at the time) on the other, and trying to figure out how to get more people who know the D&D brand to spend money on things that WotC gets paid for. And it was clear that it was going to take more than Essentials to do that, even then. I think the key here is well...in comparison to what?In comparison to other RPG books at the time? Sure, that's nothing to sniff at.But in comparison to what 3e was doing 2 years after release? In comparison to the number of people who are aware of the brand? In comparison to the number of people who played a D&D videogame at some point in that span? The PHB2 wasn't getting pulped into cage liner en masse, but I'm not so convinced that it was meeting WotC's bigger goals just because it wasn't a commercial failure. It's possible what we're hearing here in some of these early articles is Mearls re-thinking the entire idea of selling splats in an edition death spiral over and over again to an ever-shrinking audience, forcing re-boots and re-brandings and such. If your goal isn't to just reach "everyone who plays 4e," but is to reach "everyone who might play D&D," your metrics for success and failure change pretty dramatically.</blockquote>

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