innerdude
Legend
I don't know what WotC should do because I think it is out of options, but I'll tell you what I think it will do which is the same thing I said it would do 2 years ago now. Hasbro is going to shop the brand in part or in whole to see if it can find a buyer for it. If it can't find a buyer at the price point it wants, it is going to shutter the brand or at least the PnP line. The reason I think that is that honestly, it's what I would do as the CEO. It makes no sense to keep the brand going in the present circumstances and too much damage has been done to the brand to recover. There is no path I can see from A => B anymore, at least not through the traditional PnP route. The only likely buyer of the brand at this point is Paizo, but if I was Paizo I'm not sure I'd want to buy the brand unless someone just shoved it on me and said take it. Paizo's on Pathfinder brand is increasingly valuable in and of itself. It doesn't need its historical parent anymore.
Honestly, the only way to reform the brand might be to move almost entirely in to some other product line - something like Skylanders although obviously not Skylanders but something equally innovative - that would create interest in the brand and renew it for a new set of customers. The problem with that is that there is no market for the brand to make that sort of move due to the severe damage that the brand took during the '80's occult scare. D&D as a brand has negative value in the kids market. D&D lost most chance to appeal to a larger audience outside of geekdom decades ago, and it doesn't help that D&D has (as a consequence) become synonymous with neck bearded basement dwellers in most people's minds. In short, D&D is dead, 5e is either vaporware or a rasping death rattle, and this is more interesting as a discussion of how to mismanage a brand than anything else.
There's a lot here that resonates with me here. Even among the geek niche-within-a-niche that plays RPGs, D&D as a "brand" is hardly universally liked. WotC has taken reputation hit after reputation hit the last five years. Maybe it's just my own personal inferences and observations talking, but it feels to me that "defenders" of D&D have become fewer and more far between, simply because 1) there's less need to "defend" D&D anymore, since "D&D" can be so many different things now, and 2) the D&D product itself has been increasingly less worthy of being "defensed."
It's interesting, because I bought the Pathfinder Beginner's Box for 3 of my nephews two years ago, but to my knowledge it has gone mostly unplayed. My sister asked me, "What is this you're buying them?"
And I paused for a minute, because the easiest answer was, "It's basically D&D." But I didn't want to say that to her, because of all of the negative stigma attached to "D&D" culturally. But in the end, it was just easiest to say, "It's like D&D."