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Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="WizarDru" data-source="post: 5342402" data-attributes="member: 151">What does it tell us, though?  It tells us that Hasbro wants to see how much the D&D brand exists outside of it's core niche audience.  That doesn't tell us anything about their business goals or aspirations.  It doesn't tell us if they aggressively pursuing market expansion, deeper support for existing customers or abandoning the market entirely.  WotC has done a LOT of surveys: a survey of common players, a survey of what DDI customers are looking for and so on.  Sometimes we can glean meaning from them (like the DDI survey) and other times, we can't get more than the vaguest notion of their intentions.We don't even know at what level such decisions are made.  We assume WotC controls their own destiny, but Hasbro may be more hands-on than in the past.  They may decide that the entire WotC line is a loss-leader, just to keep D&D in print or the name in the public-eye.  They may be focused on merchandising or future opportunities.WotC's biggest survey, which Ryan Dancey himself made famous, was the 1999 Segmentation Study, which was the first serious baseline to D&D players ever done.  WotC followed that up more than once to track how the demographics shifted.  I'd wager they still do, however unobtrusively.  But that survey was so old, it only listed MMORPGs under CRPGs and found only 8% of gamers played them...a number I'm sure that is drastically different today.  WotC has always spent some money on market research...and I doubt Hasbro made them stop.  If anything, they may have tapped Hasbro's wider resources in performing them.All of which is a long way to say that we really don't know anything about WotC's business model from surveys any more than we do from amazon ranks or returned PHBs.</blockquote>

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