NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 6517012" data-attributes="member: 58197">From <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?315975-WotC-DDI-4E-and-Hasbro-Some-History" target="_blank">this 2012 thread</a> (emphasis mine):Gee, that sounds... exactly like what's happening now.IMO, what we are seeing is Dungeons and Dragons: The Mothball Edition. Hasbro brought down the axe; the budget has been cut to the bone and the tabletop game will receive minimal investment from here on out. Everything points that way--the drastically reduced staff levels, the outsourcing of everything from minis to adventures to e-tools to splatbooks, layoffs even after what has been by all accounts a smashingly successful launch, Mearls's comments that they don't expect to do 6E for a very long time if ever, the plans to take 5E OGL.The thing about D&D is that it depends heavily on a living community of players. Whether or not Hasbro understands this, the guys at Wizards surely do: If you just shut the whole brand down, your chances of ever reviving it again are next to nil. The community will die out. (Pathfinder might prevent that, but what happens if there's another downturn and Paizo goes bust? Unlike Wizards, Paizo doesn't have a cardboard crack empire to fall back on.)So if you're told to "put D&D on a shelf," what do you do? You plan out a strategy that will allow you to keep that community alive and support the game with as little Wizards money as possible. That means licensing, both traditional and OGL. It means a game designed to appeal to the broadest possible segment of the existing community. It means making old edition material available again. In short, it means giving the community everything you can, so they can help keep the flame alive. Eventually, the legal fight over the D&D movie rights will be settled. Sometime after that, Hasbro will start gearing up to make a blockbuster. (The blockbuster will almost certainly suck, but it might still bring in a good haul on the basis of fight choreography, cleavage, and CGI.) At that point, they'll bring the TRPG brand out of hibernation. Till then, it's on us.</blockquote>

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