So it's finally happened? D&D reduced to board games...

[Solvarn]

Bob is right

Havent you really answered your own question there? Without a bag of cash at the end, which corporation in its right mind would pick it up?

TSR went backrupt, WOTC wont. Why? Because they know how to expand there market.

On the other hand, D&D could be run by a "fringe" group, but watch the quality drop through the floor and it become more and more of a closet hobby with an ever shrinking base.

Like it or not, reality has to come into this somewhere.

Bob is totally right.

In the 3.5 days there was an awful lot of crap that floated around, but I really think they threw the baby out with the bathwater by changing the 4.0 OGL to such a degree. Now they are trying to make money and expand their market but there are a lot of gamers out there that can't have their needs met with D&D compatible products to the extent they could with the older license.

The real problem with what they are doing is by and large thanks to a more restrictive OGL is that they have limited other publisher's ability to put out niche products with smaller production values that will appeal to different groups. This has and will hurt the hobby overall, and will negatively affect WotC's bottom line in the long term. A proper stakeholder analysis might have led them to this conclusion. Marketing research is only one piece of the puzzle.

 

[Puggins]

From the 4e forum:

Hello all. I just recently got back into playing D&D, which I have not really done beyond a starter kit adventure here and there for almost 20 years. Playing the Castle Ravenloft board game with a small group of friends and my two sons led to an impulse purchase of the Red Box and now it has just snowballed into an all out campaign.

Reading the whole message, it seems that the guy bought (at least) the DM's Kit, both Heroes books and the PHB2. So one Ravenloft board game sale just generated over $170 of revenue and five new D&D players for WotC.

There is NO way that this was unintended. The boardgames aren't a replacement for the RPG, they're an advertisement for the RPG that people pay money for.