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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6195700" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't know of any particular evidence that 4e was not bought "in good numbers".I don't see why WotC would have stopped publishing 3.5 and started with 4e if they didn't think they could improve their sales. And as [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] has indicated, they did. I think it's pretty clear they didn't reach their $50 million target. Is their evidence that their D&D revenue stream in (say) 2011 was significantly different from the D&D revenue stream in (say) 2007?Do we know that PF has generated more revenue over its lifetime than 4e over its? [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] has said that we don't know these things. I think he's right.Does WotC subsidise D&D via MtG? I've never heard this said before, which isn't to say that it's not the case. But I thought each product line reported as a distinct item to Hasbro, and that that is why D&D has to aim for a $50 million target on its own.Are you seriously suggesting that these games sold better than 4e? So the conclusion that a corporate executive would draw is:Use the OGL =>Give customers a sense of ownership =>Customers are happy =>Higher sales.</blockquote>The conclusion I would draw from the 3E/PF/4e debacle, were I a WotC executive, is that pissing off your fans in a niche hobby market, in an environment in which you have granted all your competitors a royalty free licence to try and capture your customer base, is something to be avoided.I would therefore look for a way to avoid pissing off my fans without granting my competitors a royalty free licence to try and capture my customer base. The D&Dnext "big tent" rhetoric seems to be one element of the "avoid pissing off my fans" part of this strategy.The OGL is not an obscure marketing tool. It is a royalty free licence to your IP, which - for a publishing company - is one of your most valuable assets.As a corporate executive, my job would include working out to leverage my assets to generate maximum revenue over the near- to medium-term. (I agree the long term tends to be disregarded.) It is going to take a fair bit to persuade me that the best way to do that is to give all my competitors a royalty free licence to exploit those assets.I more-or-less agree with [MENTION=1]Morrus[/MENTION] upthread, though I'd put it in terms of "customer preferences" rather than "quality". 4e is a game that seems designed to people who like (i) gonzo fantasy, (ii) highly technical action resolution, and (iii) a high degree of indie-style player protagonism achieved via metagame mechanics. In these respects it overlaps somewhat with Burning Wheel, though BW is less gonzo and more gritty and thematically "serious". WotC - whether guided by Heinsoo, or Mearls, or Slavicsek, or Ron Edwards, or whomever - seemed to have thought that there was a big market for this sort of game which Luke Crane had not yet tapped but which they could. It turns out they were wrong. (Though I don't think they really had the best go at it that they might have - their GMing advice was so-so, and their pre-packaged adventures were bad.)Misjudge your customer preferences like this, in an environment in which your competitor can continue to publish material for the ruleset that you've abandoned, and you won't do as well as you had hoped! The idea that people who hate fighter dailies, and "player empowerment", and "everything is core", would have happily played 4e if only it was released as OGC, strikes me as somewhat fanciful.[/QUOTE]

Verification