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<blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 5788232" data-attributes="member: 32740">Hmm...&nbsp; If the ultimate goal is to bring them under the new big tent then I doesn't strike me as a very brilliant and devious move to make it easier for them to stay under their own little old tent.&nbsp; I think WotC might be capable of being especially devious but I honestly and truly don't believe they getting this deep into second guessing the motives of gamers and manipulating them like Machiavelli.&nbsp; Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and all other things being equal the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.&nbsp; I think they published these at this time for simple and straight-forward reasons:&nbsp;1) Players of 1E have been begging for this for a decade or more and are almost certainly the largest demographic of OSR.2) By the trick of this being a limited/exclusive release only to your FLGS they don't have to guess at how many they can sell over the next X years and keep selling - they print a limted run, distribute it to stores and never have to see it again, and pocket the money.3) If they have some means of monitoring how many get sold out of stores and how fast, then they get a one-shot of useful data on how much support there REALLY is for a) reprints of old stuff and b) a new set of game rules that hearken back to older approaches.&nbsp; Or at least they get a read on how many B&amp;M retailers are still out there willing to grab stock like this and flog it.&nbsp;One of the simplest explanations and thus more likely to be correct.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Man in the Funny Hat, post: 5788232, member: 32740"] Hmm... If the ultimate goal is to bring them under the new big tent then I doesn't strike me as a very brilliant and devious move to make it easier for them to stay under their own little old tent. I think WotC might be [I]capable[/I] of being especially devious but I honestly and truly don't believe they getting this deep into second guessing the motives of gamers and manipulating them like Machiavelli. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and all other things being equal the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. I think they published these at this time for simple and straight-forward reasons: 1) Players of 1E have been begging for this for a decade or more and are almost certainly the largest demographic of OSR. 2) By the trick of this being a limited/exclusive release only to your FLGS they don't have to guess at how many they can sell over the next X years and keep selling - they print a limted run, distribute it to stores and never have to see it again, and pocket the money. 3) If they have some means of monitoring how many get sold out of stores and how fast, then they get a one-shot of useful data on how much support there REALLY is for a) reprints of old stuff and b) a new set of game rules that hearken back to older approaches. Or at least they get a read on how many B&M retailers are still out there willing to grab stock like this and flog it. One of the simplest explanations and thus more likely to be correct. [/QUOTE]

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