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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 6201535" data-attributes="member: 177">I'm not convinced that this is really important.  This site has a whole lot of long-time gamers.  And sure, they'd love to see continuity.  But, I'm not sure they are a large enough segment of the market for this strategy to be crucial.If you keep the game backwards compatible, those old gamers don't need to buy new core rulebooks.  They could continue buying supplements and adventures, and just adjust a bit for the revisions, sure.  But, they can be saturated - if those same old gamers are homebrewing adventures, and already have so much material for that old edition that they don't need new supplements, they aren't a strong buying force.  Catering to them ceases to be an imperative, in a business sense.I like the analogy to comic books.  My recollection is that, for comic book readers, there's a window of a couple of years (usually during junior high and high school) in which a particular person pics up comics, reads them pretty fanatically, and then drops off - the average reader has a lifetime of only a couple of years.  Maintaining plot continuity on timescales longer than that is not a business imperative.  In fact, shaking up that continuity will tend to hold readers for a little while longer.  Thus you see continuity changing and world-shaking events in comic book lines every couple or few years.I imagine the same likely goes for RPGs.  There's likely a window during which a player is a major customer, buying up huge amounts of content.  But once he or she has bought as much as they need, they may still continue the game, but as a customer they tend to drop off. In addition, maintaining continuity is a major design burden - it means you cannot adjust the game to take advantage of new ideas and designs, which is a major handicap.</blockquote>

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