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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Libramarian" data-source="post: 6068096" data-attributes="member: 6688858">Whenever someone says that D&D is dying, or 4e failed, or some similar doom-saying, someone doesn't believe it and says the numbers are made up by DDi subs, or the market is just switching to PDFs instead of printed books, or forum traffic isn't a good measure of the number of people playing, etc.This to me is the proof: <a href="http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=dungeons%20and%20dragons%2C%20d%26d&cmpt=q" target="_blank">Google searches for dungeons and dragons and D&D</a>As you can see, there has been a remarkably steady downward trend since  2004. There was a spike in interest in June 2008 (release of 4e) but it  quickly dropped off. Right now the Google search volume for these terms  is less than a third what it was in Jan 2004 (this is as far back as you can look at, btw).WotC has to do something really, really different with DDN from what they've  done in the past 10 years to have a chance at reversing this trend. I don't think there's any point to approaching this project as a continuation of the previous edition, or the half-edition previous to that. Another way of putting the data is even if all of the current interest evaporated, they would only need to regain half of what they've lost since 2004 to make up for it.</blockquote>