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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 5428782" data-attributes="member: 58197">And if you list off a bunch of information about a now-defunct company that only insiders had access to before the company's dissolution, you can then note that we non-insiders have heard no such information about a still-existing company, and therefore no comparison between the two is valid!Suppose this stuff were occurring at WotC right now. What would you expect to hear, different from what we are hearing? We do know that WotC has had round after round of layoffs in the RPG department, to the point that the yearly Christmas layoff has become a grim joke around here. We know that they are unexpectedly canceling products and making big bets on new material. We know they're making a push to branch out into new media like board games, and releasing gimmicky products like fortune cards. We know there's a lot of fragmentary and imperfect evidence to suggest 4E sales are lackluster and the player base is deeply split, and very little evidence--fragmentary or otherwise--pointing the other way.Obviously the comparison should not be taken too far. I doubt very much, for example, that WotC has a warehouse full of 10-year-old material being used to prop up the stated value of its inventory. And I also doubt they are selling product at a loss. The point is that the company's output looks similarly erratic, suggesting a product line in deep trouble and management unable to formulate a coherent strategy to deal with it.The companies are different, of course, and if D&D is indeed in a death spiral, the ultimate endgame will also be different. Hasbro is not about to go out of business and neither is Wizards (they still have Magic to sustain them, which is by all accounts going like gangbusters), and they won't simply abandon the D&D IP. But it could well end up becoming a sort of "ghost town" game, with no new content being released, until a few years down the road someone comes up with a plan to revive the brand with 5E.</blockquote>

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