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Message: <blockquote data-quote="dmccoy1693" data-source="post: 6195613" data-attributes="member: 51747">While I don't think that Wizards is lying (or even misleading) how well the 4e PHB1 sold, I highly suspect that the 4e PHB 2 and 3 sold nowhere near as well, not to mention all other supplements and cards and so forth. I also suspect that it wasn't D&D's profits that allowed them to take the time to develop 5e but rather Magic's since MtG is Hasbro's #2 property. I imagine that profits from that game alone allows them to fuel the rest of the company, no matter how well anything else sold. Also, since the start of 2012, they have release 21 D&D fiction titles (plus 1 more coming later this year), 2 D&D Board games and 1 expansion, 6 dungeon command sets, collectors version of all their major versions and released much of their back stock as PDFs. So they have managed their property quite well to pay the bills and keep the money coming in while working on the new version. Besides, no company would just stop releasing for 2 solid years if they had a choice. The way a company would want to do it is the way they did the 4e transition: produce material for the old version until the minute they switched over. They probably looked at a cost-benefit analysis and discovered it would cost them less money to focus all their people (not working on the above mentioned products) on a new version instead of splitting their people between coming up with more products and developing a new edition. From a business prospective, this is the most logical answer.</blockquote>

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