Cergorach
The Laughing One
At any one point in time there are no new customers, in the future there will be new customers. There are no untapped pools of customers such as wizards no has with dnd players. Loans is were the big money is to be made, and that is a very tricky business, a bank absolutely does not want to provide a loan to everyone, even at the legally maximum rates.
WotC might not be making every product for every gaming table, I will say again, the more I see of the Essentials line, the more it seems that it completely replaces the current line of core books. It's using an unfamiliar format, smaller books, boxed sets and raising the dnd startup fee drastically. The PHB is essential split up between two books, for a total of $40, the dmg is now also $40 but does come with adventure and screen, mm is the same price with another adventure. So besides the red box the bare minimum starting price for players has gone up by 33%, for dms 22%. Presentation did change and you get all te content more piecemeal, but your still hit in the head with all thirty levels at once. The core rules seem to have been made unusable due to the amount of errata in the last two years, so folks will be happy to buy an updated version. But I imagine that the new format will repulse many old 4e customers, not something that would seem like a good idea for a game that has been hemoraging customers. A fun fact is that in the secondary market there are far more 4e core books then 3.5e core books, especially the 3,5e phb has become very valuable. If 4e was doing well i would say there wouldn't be such a high demand for older dnd books...
WotC might not be making every product for every gaming table, I will say again, the more I see of the Essentials line, the more it seems that it completely replaces the current line of core books. It's using an unfamiliar format, smaller books, boxed sets and raising the dnd startup fee drastically. The PHB is essential split up between two books, for a total of $40, the dmg is now also $40 but does come with adventure and screen, mm is the same price with another adventure. So besides the red box the bare minimum starting price for players has gone up by 33%, for dms 22%. Presentation did change and you get all te content more piecemeal, but your still hit in the head with all thirty levels at once. The core rules seem to have been made unusable due to the amount of errata in the last two years, so folks will be happy to buy an updated version. But I imagine that the new format will repulse many old 4e customers, not something that would seem like a good idea for a game that has been hemoraging customers. A fun fact is that in the secondary market there are far more 4e core books then 3.5e core books, especially the 3,5e phb has become very valuable. If 4e was doing well i would say there wouldn't be such a high demand for older dnd books...
