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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dungeoneer" data-source="post: 5455312" data-attributes="member: 91777">Yeah, the PC game market has changed profoundly in the last ten years.  It's no mystery why PC game sales have plummeted - they aren't making as many PC games anymore.  It just makes more economic sense to develop for a stable platform, like a console.  It also makes a lot of sense for the consumer, who doesn't have to buy a new video card every six months or become an expert at building their own PC.Certain kinds of games still make sense for a PC, and so niche markets have flourished (if you want to call World of Warcraft 'niche').  MMOs and strategy games are the PC's forte.  For everything else, there's Steam.  Steam is a brilliant example of the Long Tail strategy.  I buy a bunch of classic and indie games on Steam that I would never have purchased any other way.  Thanks to Steam, the Monkey Island series is still making money and that's alright by me!  The fact that the 360 may get the latest and greatest shooter before PC owners bothers me not a whit.Generally, the point is that what's happening the PC gaming market is specific to PC gaming and probably not applicable to TRPGs generally.  I didn't get all the way through the OP, but I would point out that all these supposed numbers remain purely speculative.  We have no idea how much money WotC makes, how many subscribers DDI really has, whether net book sales are up or down, or any of that stuff.  WotC does a lot of different things with the D&D brand (rightly so) and it's clear they don't measure success simply in terms of books sold (even in that arena they sell books in more places than anybody else, which means even those numbers are difficult to capture).The main trend I see with WotC is a move towards a more hit-driven model.  It definitely seems like they're only interested in pushing books and boxed sets that they know will be big sellers, and that they're cutting out their more niche titles.  I don't really see this as a positive trend, but clearly it makes sense for them at this time.</blockquote>

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