William Ronald
Explorer
No one will know as they will all have gouged their own eyes from the sockets in their burning skulls . . .
D&D XP 2012 with a June 2013 release date target, IMO, but that's been my suspicion for some time. Edition cycles are shrinking. I'm surprised it has taken this long considering the amount of controversy over it, the rise of Paizo, the marketing fumbles (including gnome-alienation, "The Game will remain ZEE same!", the OGL/GSL debacle), etc. The game takes up such a small portion of FLGS space and all roads lead to DDI, so I'm not sure why they bother waiting between system overhauls. It's amazing, too, how they can manage to keep any retailers on board since Amazon canabalizes so many core and supplement book sales and the DDI subscription base generally eats into 4E players' discretionary spending funds. Yet retailers remain convinced that they should still fight for some table scraps by running what are essentially demos for players who stop in, play, then go home and jump online to make their purchases. I wonder what place retailers will hold when eBooks become the norm, virtual tabletops replace buying maps or minis, and the only way to get a hardbound copy of the rules will be through print-on-demand shops.
I suspect that your time table is a reasonable one. WotC has pressure to be the market leader once again in RPGs. However, I am not sure how retailers and customers will react. Most of the local retailers who carry WotC's Dungeons and Dragons products say that they have sold a lot slower than Pathfinder products.
As for the place of retailers, they may decide to have some print on demand shops or find other ways to survive.