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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5429090" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, nobody really knows with any great accuracy. I'm going by what bits of industry analysis that I've seen. Doesn't mean PF overall has sold as much as 4e, just that apparently they are selling at a similar rate right now. Notice though, that says nothing about profit either. From what I can see the PF products are mostly adventures, which are infamously small money makers. I don't see where Essentials is more of a bet than any average couple of splat books. You produce the books you think will sell this year. As I've said elsewhere every book is a bet. Essentials got a lot of good press, which is about as much positive information as we can possibly have about a D&D product. I don't know what the details of what bugs the CB has in it right now has to do with anything else. It indicates some issues in SQA, which surely should be fixed and might create a problem, but it seems likely to be independent of anything else. Management comes and management goes. If it was a shakeup, which is perfectly possible, it is as likely to be over the future direction and not the past performance (which in any case is pretty far past at this point). It doesn't have to involve any big disaster going on with 4e. They pushed out 4e, got obviously a pretty decent bump in sales over what 3.x was doing in say 2007. Now things have gone back to business as usual and corporate was promised more, so they put in a new guy. As I've said, I don't think you need to postulate some kind of giant crisis. Between the fact that we know the RPG industry generally has been on a slow slide for the last 10 years or more and ANY substantial presence of PF competing with 4e it seems unlikely to me that just putting out 4e itself brought a radical long term change by itself. I think I'd look less at book sales and such being some kind of disaster vs just "this industry needs to change, who has the vision to do something" and Bill Slaviczek and this new MMO guy apparently have some ideas, which obviously involves DDI. Honestly the only part of the story of the last year that at all gets my notice is the clumsy handling of the CB thing. Given that DDI logically almost has to be the wedge into the 21st century of gaming I find it telling that they have basic process issues at this point. Those are things you can fix though, they are just management details.</blockquote>

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