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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6942093" data-attributes="member: 996">All depends on how much money you put into it and what kind of RoI you expect.PF, for instance, is probably successful as long as it keeps Paizo solvent.  It was plenty successful to that standard getting it's (probably lion's) share of the 12 mil (?) in revenue there was to be had at at the nadir of the hobby in 2013 (with no competition from D&D).4e, for the other extreme, needed to bring in at least 50 mil to justify its existence to Hasbro, at a time when the whole industry was pulling down maybe half that in a good year, before the 'great recession' hit.We haven't heard so much as a rumor about the RoI or revenue goals for 5e.  But, WotC is signing fewer paychecks to produce D&D than Paizo is to produce PF, so there's probably a very comfortable margin between what it must bring in to stay in print, and it's (lion's) share of the recovered 30 mil industry.  It's a much more familiar and traditional system.  It is also, strictly speaking & judged as written, a really bad system, in a technical sense - because it's not written to be a technically good nor even a smoothly functional system, but, rather, to be a good starting point for an Empowered DM to build and awesome campaign, whether it bears much mechanical resemblance to the next guy's or not.  Well, and also to be comfortingly familiar to fans of 20th century editions of the game (which, since the game was primitive back then, rather precludes it being all that technically slick or 'elegant' by modern standards).Aside from the massive nostalgia factor and return to familiar, traditional design approaches, 5e also represents a seismic shift from 3e RAW-worship & rewards-for-system mastery player-focus and from 4e's tight balancing & ease of DMing (both also, actually, supporting more player-focused styles), to a very DM-centric approach.  All of those things contribute to 5e's success, IMHO.  And it even manages to be refreshing along with nostalgic, IMHO, because of 'em.  But it's till all correlation, not proof. For other correlations, though, Battletech, D&D 2e, and Storyteller were all enormously successful from the late 80s through into the early oughts with very rapid release schedules focusing on setting over crunch.  D&D/d20 was successful with a rapid release schedule focusing on crunch.  The nadir of the hobby came not when D&D was spewing out the most product, but, in 2013, when it was absent from the market, with only 3.5-clone PF carrying the torch.We did get some pretty strong evidence that going to an OGL was good for the broader hobby, in some ways (tough on some in the industry, though) and that edition warring was particularly bad for the hobby.</blockquote>

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