The cut throat conspiracies he said are all in the minds of the fans...
Oh, I'm happy to assume there was no malice behind these things. It's just business, after all. But, yes, I do think they could have handled things better - if nothing else, doing so might have prevented the development of the conspiracy theories in the first place.
I'm curious, what would you have done differently in the cancelling of the print magazines? Or the licences? Or in pulling the PDFs?
Firstly, I would have been a
lot more prompt in providing the GSL to interested parties, most notably Paizo. Ideally, I would have liked to be in a position where Paizo and/or Goodman could provide GSL-compatible 4e-compatible adventure products on the same day 4e is released. Having high-quality adventure support can only be a plus.
(Delaying the GSL essentially forced Paizo to go ahead with Pathfinder, which in turn gave those disaffected with 4e a genuine alternative. The radical changes to the game led to a significant minority looking for such an alternative. And some of the more controversial marketing would have pushed at least a few people into seeking the alternative, where otherwise inertia may have kept them 'in the fold'. Is the D&D hobby strong enough to lose a significant minority? Will it still be strong enough in a couple of years, when the new kids who came in when 4e was 'the new shiny' get bored and move on? Probably, but it would also surely be better not to lose that significant minority in the first place.)
I would have strongly considered not cancelling the print magazines, and instead leaving Paizo with the licenses. The e-magazines don't need to have those names - the DDI will sell itself on other features anyway. And the positive buzz surrounding the mags at the time they were cancelled was very strong - a brand new 4e adventure path starting the same month the game is released would also have been a very strong selling point.
However, if the decision was taken that we would be cancelling the mags, I would make damn sure to have people out there on the net talking to customers. Basically, the first customers should be hearing of this should be direct from WotC, not starting as rumours on the ENWorld message boards, and then confirmed by checking with Paizo.
The same applies to Dragonlance (and, to a lesser extent, Hackmaster) - I would strongly consider leaving the licenses in place, but if not, I would make sure to be out there selling the message clearly.
It's the same story with the PDFs as well. But with that one, I would also have put in place a (much) longer grace period for people who had purchased PDFs to download them before they were pulled. (In my particular case, I was offline over the weekend where all this went down, so by the time I heard about it it was already too late. I lost some old edition modules as a result.)
The PDFs issue was actually the worst-handled of the bunch. Did we ever get any official word from WotC that this was happening, never mind an explanation as to why, and why now? If I recall correctly, the news was actually delivered by Paizo (and other online stores), and chewed over at length here, but was delivered with deafening silence by WotC themselves.
