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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rygar" data-source="post: 8074518" data-attributes="member: 6756765">That is a fair question, and under any other circumstances, I'd agree, but from what I've seen the leadership team on the D&D RPG side is fantastically incompetent.<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">First there's 4th edition itself, any business that makes that big of a mistake, doubles down on the mistake, then encourages and supports vigilante groups of fans to attack the fans of their previous products on their own forums isn't a business cursed with an abundance of skill.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Then they hinged their product line's entire future on digital product lines, and couldn't recover from losing two engineers.  I can't think of any other business with WOTC/Hasbro's market value that isn't able to execute on a business plan because they lost two employees.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Then they tripled down on 4th edition after another company took their customer base, and released essentials, which anyone could've told them wasn't going to bring back all of the customers.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Then they launched 5th edition and still can't figure out they could be making huge amounts of money by releasing frequent periodic content like they did with Dungeon magazine.  Instead relying on random people to sell things on a website that the average customer has probably never heard of.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Then they tied themselves to phones/tablets as a poorly supported content delivery platform...failing to notice that "Ebooks" plateaued years earlier at a 20% market penetration.  So basically, they decided they weren't going to bother with 4 out of 5 customers.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Then they rejected a sequel to one of their most popular video games by the guy who lead the original (Planescape) when they weren't doing anything with Planescape, had no intention of doing anything with it, and could've just basically received free money.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Then they made a huge amount of noise about player demographics...except they have no way of knowing player demographics since you're not required to self identify when you purchase a D&D book or identify all of the friends you share it with.  So how they expected anyone would believe those numbers is mind boggling, anyone with any business sense would say "Guys, wait, no one's going to believe this.  It's obvious it's impossible for us to have this data".</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">I'll also throw in - They still keep repeating the old bit about "TSR failed because campaigns fragmented the market" without any evidence of that.  The premise hinges upon every D&D player being required to buy product even if they don't like it, and by removing product lines those players would've bought others.  To put it another way, it's saying that every person who bought Birthright would've bought Forgotten Realms if Birthright didn't exist, and no person who bought Birthright also bought Forgotten Realms.  It's another example of how they don't have anyone who understands metrics.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Even the Magic the Gathering side demonstrates the same flawed business sense.  They decided they needed an intro product for MTG, so they made portal...and it didn't sell.  So they made portal 2...and it didn't sell.  So they turned the core set into a beginner set...and it stopped selling.  So they turned it into an even more beginner set...and it sold even less.  Then they cancelled it.</li> </ul>So yes, superficially it might sound like a conspiracy theory, but all available evidence indicates that they really are that clueless and as such, it becomes very plausible that they really don't have any idea why the 4th edition books didn't sell.</blockquote>

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