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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jer" data-source="post: 7749014" data-attributes="member: 19857">I could answer this with sarcastic jokes, but it's worth thinking about why almost all of our pop culture right now is remixes and adaptations of older material.  Partly it's nostalgia - the people with disposable income right now are the Gen-Xers who are now in their 40s/50s.  There's also crossover with the late boomers who are in their 50s as well.  So we see a lot of movies, TV shows, games, etc. all kind of revamping older properties.But a lot of it is the risk-averse nature of large companies.  Movie studios and TV studios spend a lot of money on their products and the guys in charge want something "safe" that will return their money to them at a profit.  Big companies in general are unlikely to do much that is "new" - there's a reason that they heyday of character creation in Marvel comics was when it was a young company perpetually on the verge of bankruptcy and new characters have come out in a trickle ever since.  TSR burned through one idea after another and taking lots of risks when they were a young upstart company (and make no mistake - even at its heyday TSR was always a tiny upstart compared to the Parker Bros and Milton-Bradleys of the gaming industry), but Wizards is one of the largest and most profitable gaming companies in the world - even though they have more capital at hand, their success makes them less likely to take risks on crazy ideas.  (And of course TSR went bankrupt, as do many companies that take a lot of risks, which is why successful companies generally become more and more risk averse as time passes - they have more to lose).And then there's Wizards own recent history - they had a big bomb of an edition a few years ago and they had to invest a lot of time and effort (and money) to rebuild their cred.  The perception is that the edition bombed because it went too far outside the box for D&D, so the risk-averse move is to try to be the most D&D-like game that you can be.  And that means putting out a setting that is new and different is a risk.Also too - and this is all just my opinion - I'm not sure the hunger is there for new D&D settings like there was back in the 90s and during the d20 explosion of the early 2000s.  There are so many options available now setting wise that a new one really would need to bring something truly different to the mix.  The 90s was a big experimental time for D&D when it came to settings - how far can we push this game engine designed for vaguely Dark Ages fantasy game play.  Can we do fantasy space?  Can we do fantasy horror?  What about fantasy Victorian horror?  Does it have to be European - we had an Asian supplement in the 80s, what about Arabian Nights style?  What about different kinds of fantasy - can we push the game engine to handle a pseudo-Renaissance level of tech?  Can we do weird other-dimensional fantasy?  Can we dial it back to its roots and still do John Carter of Mars style fantasy?At this point a new setting would need to bring something new to the table and not be a rehash of what's already out there to be worth doing.  I think there's a reason that we only really got one major new D&D setting in 3rd edition - Eberron - and it's because Eberron brought something new to the table (investigative pulp fantasy).  And even there as much as I love Eberron I'm not sure if it were released today it would be seen as "different enough" to be a successful new setting.  I think any new setting would need to fill a niche that isn't already being filled, and it's tough to see an empty niche that would be large enough to justify coming up with a totally new setting.And finally - I also think that when TSR was exploding settings left and right they were also book publishers and had an eye towards putting out novels in those settings.  Also most of those settings generated tie-in video games through TSR's partnership with SSI.  I think Wizards was still thinking the same way when they developed Eberron.  The setting was more than just a place to play games - it was a brand in and of itself that could generate a lot of revenue for the company.  Wizards doesn't publish books anymore, and to be fair the market for tie-in novels isn't what it was in the 90s either.  And Hasbro's always had problems with their video game licensing.  Now the setting has to stand by itself as a game setting without thinking of it as a "brand" and that makes it harder to justify the investment.</blockquote>

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