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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Delta" data-source="post: 3470575" data-attributes="member: 40269">I agree that Wizards has got a bad case of World of Warcraft envy. Ryan Dancey said as much (or rather, argued in favor of it).But that is like a poison pill if Wizards tries to pursue it. First, they're simply not in that business. The D&D product is not an online game, and in addition Wizards/Hasbro doesn't have the institutional competency to make massive software projects. They've actually explicitly demonstrated several times in the past years that they can't do it (simpler projects, even).Second, the MMORPG business is already a deathtrap for businesses, even for well-established software game makers with years of experience. I read a book a year or two book (forget the name) on the business side of producing of such games, and the majority of them lose money -- usually tens of millions of dollars, because it takes an extended design production cycle of many years and much larger staffs than other computer games. Everyone looks at Blizzard enviously, and in some sense, only Blizzard has been able to accomplish the feat that they have. Many, many experienced software game businesses have skewered themselves reaching for the same thing. Turbine's DDO game is the best shot they ever had at such a thing -- if that's not a raging financial success story, nothing that Hasbro internally puts out will conceivably come even close.Third, if Wizards tries to make D&D sit in some middle-ground between tabletop and computer game (computer-supported tabletop game?), what precedent is there for such a beast? Will new players even be able to understand what such a thing is? ("You need a computer to set it up, but you play it with dice & paper at a table.") Will they bother when they could snip half the complexity out by just playing a raw computer game? I suppose we had the same thing at the advent of D&D ("a game with no board and no way to win?"), maybe there's a brand new world for D&D to morph into, but I highly doubt it, in the age of otherwise well-developed computer games.If I had an ear to the business side of Wizards, I'd strongly recommend that they run from thinking about World of Warcraft as fast and hard as possible. Pursue the mass market with a simpler (I'm talking OD&D, Holmes book-simple) game pushed primarily in big-chain book stores. Make it a game like poker that anyone can pick up and understand. My concern with their recent moves is they're doing the opposite of growing the gameing community -- wittingly or unwittingly they're actually set up to milk the old intense gamers for all they're worth (in greater complexity, subscriptions, more supplements, pricey miniatures) for some number of year while the hobby tapers off.</blockquote>

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