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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jimmifett" data-source="post: 5427830" data-attributes="member: 55006">I look at it with a set of financial glasses. Everything is hurting since the economy tanked. I think wotc/hasbro saw this coming and decided changes needed to be made to weather the economy. Lets look at essentials. They wanted to entice back players from other editions that initially balked at 4e, but more importantly, lower the entry cost into the hobby. New blood and all. DDI i'm sure has been a sore spot since a bunch of thier promises fell through and players could purchase a single month every now and again to get all of the updates. The makes for a very poor content subscription model. While i keep hearing negative things about the new CB (and as a programmer think they were nuts to go with silverlight and sending images to be printed instead of xsl:fo generated pdfs), it makes sense financially. You don't need a tool to build your characters, but if you to use this one, pay the monthly fee. I personally don't feel the current cost is justified (after having been a subscriber for 2 yrs) until the VTT is ready. The dungeon and dragon mags are nice, but they alone don't currently make up for what I feel my money should be getting me. Not compiling dungeon and dragon, not a big deal, I can do that myself. But it is a hassle I could avoid and I would expect that to be part of my subscription cost, esp if i'm not getting a VTT. But they do have a point, if articles are being downloaded more individualy than compilations, why spend the resources involved in compiling. Minis: Lets face it, when the economy tanked, these were the first to be scaled back. First the quality went in the dumpster to save on costs. Then the cost to R&D stats for new minis into the DDM game got DDM killed. Low quality and small mini per box yield turned off already low sales from customer trying to pinch pennies. Minis aren't Wotc's core business, paper based products are. And since their core business is paper based products, lets see what HAS been working for them in a down economy: MtG. I don't know the first thing about this game, other than it's an expensive hobby if you go long term, older cards get retired, forcing you to buy new cards, and turnout for FNM is freaking HUGE. So, packs of paper cards seems to be working. Essentials seems to have worked, with cheaper books and tokens; Boxed sets can get you into more stores such as TRU, Walmart and Target; and optional card packs for Gamma World and now Fortune Cards for DnD seem like they are apply cheap to produce/potentially high return products to supplement the bottom line. Some may not like the card approach, but as stated in other posts, it's good business for stores. Once customers have the books they want, what else are they coming to your gaming store for? Space in which to play. Thats generally not very profitable if they aren't continuing to buy product. Sure, you may sell some snacks and drinks, but you'd rather be moving product. Dice are a great impulse buy until you have more dice than you need. Minis have tanked in quality and quantity, so you don't want to buy them (and thus they get killed), RPG books are expensive, and unless you have a good store like the one I frequent that has near amazon pricing, you are likely to hit up amazon to save 10 bucks. So what does a store like? $3-4 impulse items like... Paper Cards! Magic, Pokemon, Yugioh, Versus, WoW. They all have a large value/ space ratio. If you have a box of say, 24 packs of booster cards, that takes up maybe a square foot by 3-4 inches tall for a closed box? valued at $4 a pack or so? thats $96 in a compact space that you can sell in small bites.Stack two or 3 sealed boxed underneath the open one, nearly $300 in the space of a 12 inch cube that you know your customer will keep coming back for more. Versus books that cost $25-35 a pop, take up much more space, and once a customer has 1 copy, they don't need another. A gamer with $10 in thier pocket will think about passing up lunch for 2-3 more packs of cards. They have immediate gratification. Same gamer will have to save up and generally plan a purchase of a book. During that time, they could change their mind or spend the money on something else, further delaying thier purchase. If it takes paper cards to subsidize books, so be it. I plan on getting some of them any way. It all comes down to money. Wotc, during good times, ventured into tangent products, during lean times, they have to trim poor performing products to stay alive.</blockquote>

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