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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EditorBFG" data-source="post: 3468106" data-attributes="member: 24719">Alright, I wanted to theorize a bit and and state the obvious and see if people agree or disagree this is the likely basic sequence of facts and events:It has been stated the Open Gaming License was created because WotC believed they needed to have adventures but they themselves did not belive printing adventures was profitable.After their initial slew of adventures, WotC left it up to the 3rd party publishers. Not finding Dragon or Dungeon profitable enough, they licensed them the magazines out.The pdf market emerged, proving that people will pay for downloadable material.Creating digital content costs less than printing a magazine.Not everyone subscribes to magazines; many people only buy them on the shelves. Some of those people don't buy every issue, only the ones that look good on the shelves.Recently WotC has returned to printing a few adventures, but aside from these the only "official D&D" adventures have been in Dungeon. Dungeon did decent numbers for Paizo, but not enough to justify the cost of printing it to WotC.If, however, the only way to get "official D&D" adventures is by subscribing to a website (thus ensuring WotC all their profits beforehand and continuously rather than per issue), and if they can reclaim a substantial portion of Dungeon's  readership, and a substantial portion of pdf purchasers as well (though obviously many people may be both pdf fans and Dungeon fans), adventure publishing is suddenly profitable again, because web content don't cost much.Also, people will pay for other kinds of D&D content online, as proven by 3rd-party pdf publishers, who did not publish nearly as many adventures (as opposed to other products) as WotC had predicted/wanted.Therefore, WotC is getting rid of Dragon and Dungeon.If we can accept these as the basic facts, I make the following predictions:1) We will soon see free content at wizards.com decrease to nearly none.2) In fact, free content may soon only be previews of the digital initiative materials.3) In addition to subscription, WotC may have some individual pdfs of digital initiative game content available, but only at a very high price relative to how much one would get from just subscribing for, say, a year at a time-- or perhaps no set time, with one only being able to cancel by going through process as difficult as, say, getting rid of AOL.4) Wizards will soon (if they don't already) see third-party publishers as real competitors taking money out of their pockets, and will market and publish accordingly.5) While I do not think 4th Edition is imminent-- I believe it will appear summer 2010, maintaining a (rough) 10 year pattern between Editions-- nor am I one of these "sky-is-falling/WotC-is-evil" types, I guarantee you "4E" will not be OGL in any form.6) 4th Edition, while not OGL, will be just different enough from 3rd to make non-WotC products hard to convert to 4E. This will be designed to eliminate third party competition-- and will likely succeed to a great extent.7) Whatever version of the RPGA exists for 4th Edition will be subscriber only.I could speculate a bit more, but the above seems like the stuff people I talk to sort of agree on. So I expect a lot of people to respond with "Well, duh."But what I want to see is who disagrees or has a different slant.And whatever the consensus, the larger reason I am compiling these theories is to see who thinks WotC's future plans are a good thing, who thinks they are bad, and how people around here think the RPG community will respond; further, to see how people wish the community would respond.Because, one way or another, WotC is trying to change the way you and I experience role-playing games-- the question is, for the better or for the worse?</blockquote>

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