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Message: <blockquote data-quote="BryonD" data-source="post: 6514447" data-attributes="member: 957">My recreational and highly under-informed opinion:They are not really mishandling D&D.  They are simply somewhat risk-averse and they somewhat don't really care.They have a solid ballpark on the revenue they can generate from the game.They have a solid ballpark on the cost to maintain new material and the increased expected revenue for new material.They have some benchmark for the long-term value of the D&D brand.The game and us as a market are nice.  They like us.  They like our money.  We are not changing their world.  But we provide a nice side income.The amount that they can really move the needle on revenue isn't really enough to get worked up over.  But doing just enough to keep the name out as a leading player in the market is important to maintaining the long term brand value.As much as they would be quite happy to beat Pathfinder in Q3 of this year, their real concern is being more recognizable as the "geek fantasy" brand than Pathfinder in 2020.  In our little teapot full of edition-war tempests, PF kicked D&D butt.  Out there in the real world Pathfinder made some very real handholds into being recognized as the "geek fantasy" brand.  But that is all, just handholds.  For the moment 5E has given D&D enough boost to maintain the head and shoulders advantage in being recognized by the populace at large.   And the lead is still sufficiently overwhelming on that front that they can easily maintain it without major investment.So they are not investing in getting your dollars.  They are investing in using a reliable flow of your dollars to protect the brand.Even if more investment in product would be profitable, it probably doesn't offer the same return on investment as some of their other properties.  So spend the money there.  Pay a few people to keep churning out a steady trickle content.  Even if they put a solid fraction of that content is given away, the brand value is provided and you don't have to worry about up front costs for printing and distributing, etc, etc...  (Again, not saying they would lose money, just talking relative margins)As to the OGL, it matters to the brand.  There is a lot of talk that Pathfinder beat 4E because of the unfair advantage created by the OGL.  People will play the game they prefer.  If they had a preference for D&D, they would play D&D, OGL or no OGL.  But, the OGL did leverage a jumpstart of a new-name into a grey zone of D&D's dynasty.  Regardless of where we swim in out teapot, Pathfinder can be perceived as connected to the history of D&D and part of that legacy in a way that GURPs certainly can not.   That may not bring the brand down, but it does create a threat.  So they are not spending a lot of time worrying about how an OGL release of 5E would hurt their planned products for 2016.  It would probably be great to have someone else supporting the core system and carrying all those printing costs.   But they don't want yet another game hogging the claim to historic legacy, or possibly even worse, a Pathfinder second edition using parts of 5E to becoming even more recognized as a mainstream idenity of "geek fantasy".</blockquote>

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