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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rygar" data-source="post: 7658585" data-attributes="member: 6756765">I would argue that there's two possibilities here.  The first as you describe.The second possibility is that WOTC's business plan is flawed.  WOTC made the decision to remove XP from adventures and put in its place "Level now",  this is an exclusionary change.  If I prefer XP systems,  a product like that means substantial extra work for me,  and makes the product less interesting to me.  If they'd done it the way it had been done for years then its trivial to remove the XP system for those who prefer XP-less systems.  Just ignore the XP and announce levels where you like.It's indicative of the type of thought that had got them in so much trouble previously,  "You'll all play this way".Their other self-limiting decision was not bothering with Dragon/Dungeon on release,  and then making it a PDF only thing again.  During a time period when tablet sales are stagnant to tanking and physical books are outselling E-books by a very substantial margin.  Choosing to sell products to only a small fraction of your market never ends in success.  D&D,  and any RPG,  needs adventures people can buy.  Many people are time-limited and/or imagination limited,  and the only way to acquire them is through purchasable adventures.  If I'm someone who doesn't have much time or isn't very good at coming up with stories the D&D products aren't terribly enticing to me.  Especially if I'm a fan of XP,  there isn't a product on the market that I can use to play D&D and there won't be.They've made decisions that limit their potential customer base,  possibly to a substantial degree.  Making decisions that exclude customers,  perhaps 70%-80% of your potential customers (Based on E-book penetration) isn't a sign of a market decline,  it's a sign of a company that shot themselves in the foot through what appears to be just laziness.  I say laziness because their excuse for XP-less modules was primarily "It takes work to balance the critters through the module and instead of doing that work we're going to sell you a story and you can do the work".  Their excuse for PDF only Dungeon/Dragon is even worse,  some meaningless statements about the archaic magazine market while ignoring that all they have to do is direct sales like their competitor who is growing at a rate of 20% a year from what I've heard.IMO this isn't a sign of a market decline it is a sign of a company who isn't terribly interested in capitalizing on their product.  For it to be a sign of market decline I would argue that WOTC first would've had to have made an effort to acquire customers.</blockquote>

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