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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5534132" data-attributes="member: 82106">Right, it isn't history repeating itself. Certainly not exactly. OTOH there's still a good bit of validity to the idea that every version roll produces angst in some part of the fan base. How much of that is 4e in particular and how much is just editionitis is hard to say.I don't know this actually. That is I don't know either thing to be true. I'd say 3.x was pretty tapped out as far as new material, sure. I actually don't really know how popular PF is in relation to any other system. It is reasonable to guess that PF is similar in popularity to 4e, but I don't even KNOW that. Again, you have very few facts. I have very few facts. You interpret them to get the answer you like, and frankly I probably do the same thing.Again though we do not know what 4e is making, nor what PF is making. Maybe both of them are doing better than 3.5 ever did. Maybe both of them are doing much worse. The bit we know seems to indicate they're both doing OK, but we have NO way of knowing what the market would be like without either 4e or PF in the picture. I'm going to pretty much guess that truth is the vast majority of players out there don't really give a knob about PF vs 4e. I think 3.5 might have been not making WotC a lot of money, but my observation is that PLENTY of people were playing it. Heck, it is still quite popular.</blockquote>I certainly am willing the go out on a limb and presume that WotC's plan was NOT to split the market and they hoped, and expected, to continue being the single 800 lb gorilla.  Wouldn't you agree that is a reasonable guess despite my ready concurrence that we truly don't know anything on that?4E is not "failing".  I don't claim it is.  But the market is deeply split and D&D could have been doing MUCH better and when 4E was first given the go the plan and expectation SHOULD have been that it would do much better.[/quote]I don't know about that. My feeling is that what WotC saw was that 3.5 was slowly winding down, partly due to just being a saturated market and natural tendency for gamers to go on to the next new thing, but also because the whole RPG market HAS shrunk. In essence I think 4e was more of a strategic move than just a 'refresh' like 1e->2e was. They COULD have tweaked 3.5 and made effectively a WotC 'PF'. The problem with that is all it achieves is AT BEST selling a new set of books to the same people. They wanted to create a system that they can leverage further, to get new players. To bring in the people playing other games, kids, MMORPG players, etc. A 3.5 rehash would have zero chance of doing that.The WERE willing to take the risk of splitting the market or leaving some of the fan base behind. I agree, I don't think they anticipated Paizo doing what they did, but I'm not convinced it is actually that big a deal for WotC. Paizo has the same problem NOW that WotC had 3 years ago. A system that only appeals to a diminishing fanbase and if they want to fix that they'll have to do the same thing WotC did, make a new system. Except now WotC has 3 years head start on that. Even if 4e itself DOESN'T get them all the way where they want to be, the competition is going to have to go piss off their fanbase to produce a modern game that MIGHT still be viable in 5 more years. 4e is there. Maybe it still needs another iteration, and maybe the quest for a bigger market is hopeless, but if it can be done it isn't Paizo that is likely to be able to do it, it is WotC and it will be done with substantially the game they have now.There's no objective evidence as to how they are doing financially or sales-wise. Nobody ever claimed it isn't obvious that PF is a popular RPG. There's simply no evidence that it is doing some kind of number of 4e. We don't know how much either makes, we have only a nebulous idea about their sales at best, and we have no idea of how many people play each one, play both, etc. MOST OF ALL we have no evidence that 4e isn't doing everything that WotC expects of it and wants it to do. None at all. We have no idea what their sales projections are/were, costs, expected return, or any of the other numbers we'd need to know that.Oh, I think PF was born from a desire by a certain segment of the market that basically wants to keep playing 3.5. That's obvious. I think the error is in thinking that when 4e was dreamed up that WotC was ignorant of the fact that a lot of people would continue to play the old game and there are always plenty of fans of every earlier edition that gripe on the new one. It wasn't a big deal with 2e->3e simply because there wasn't a choice, WotC needed to put out something and 2e was dead. Anyone at that point who was annoyed with the change was no longer a customer they could have pleased. I think they were fully aware that 4e would split the fan base. Surely they weren't anticipating PF, but then again that die was cast LONG BEFORE 4e was even dreamed of with the OGL terms. What nobody has shown me any evidence of is that 4e has been seriously hurt by PF.Lets see it then. LOL. I hear all these statements about how people 'know this' and 'know that' and yet somehow delivery of evidence is always astoundingly lacking. I mean I laid out all that I know of that can be garnered without some kind of insider info that I have yet to meet anyone who can prove that they have it. "I know things" isn't squat. This is the Intertubes, talk is cheap, lol. I don't mean that to sound offensive. It is just the reality, there's lots of talk and vanishingly little substance going around.Well, I never said that I thought 4e sold as well as or better than 3.5 did in its heyday. I don't know actually, but I suspect ALL RPGs sell less now than they did in past years. However, more choice for customers is better, and if having 2 games that are both interesting keeps more gamers engaged AT ALL, then both games are relatively better off. If say 4e would be selling 30% below 3.5 at its 3 year mark and because of PF it is only 20% off that, then wouldn't that mean 4e benefited from the existence of PF? Sure it would. Now lets suppose that PF was quite appealing to newbies and brought droves of them into the hobby, it could sell 10x better than 4e and still be a good thing for 4e. Honestly though 4e APPEARS to be quite a lot more friendly to new players than 3.5/PF to be honest, so the question is really how effective is it at bringing them in? That seems to be (by WotC's own admission) job #1 for 4e, get new players. Yeah, I was just stating what I see too. Well, it sure sounded like to me you were interpreting Hussar's example to mean all he could find was PF games and that was some kind of evidence of something. That was what I got from what you said. His example seemed utterly generic to me. He could as easily have swapped the names of the two games around and made the same point. Maybe I don't understand what you were trying to say there, and this exchange has gotten long enough now it is hard to even sort out who said what, lol.As I said, there's a trade off that WotC apparently feels compelled to make. They could have made something just about like PF and gotten the same sort of response (and had Paizo doing support for it). The problem is that doesn't work in the long term. It might not even work in the medium term. PF is a 3.5 refresh, everyone buys the shiny new, and then what? It is basically the same game. You can repeat that endlessly but the customer base gets smaller every time. WotC decided to break the mold. They're not after the 3.5 fan base, they're after a whole new market. Did they want to lose customers? Of course not.Here's the thing though. What, aside from making a game that is not warmed-over 3.5, has WotC done that is so terrible? Really? Produce a fine and high quality line of books for 4e? AWFUL! lol. Create an online offering? Wow, terrible! lol. Paizo produces good books too, but I'm sorry I don't buy this whole WotC is a bunch of incompetent boobs, watch them fail silliness. They're doing some new things and taking some serious risks so they do run into issues. What is Paizo doing? Publishing nice books. They can both do that. Could Paizo do a DDI Compendium, a Character Builder, or a Monster Builder? A VTT? Hunh, don't see a single sign of any possibility they can do those things. Are those new things perfect? Nope! They're just things you can buy or not buy depending on if you like them, but hey, apparently 50k+ people are dropping at least $6 a month in WotC's pocket for DDI. Who's actually doing the better job here?But it would not fulfill their long term goals, so that would be useless to them.And they did. Now, maybe they're tilting at windmills and there's really no possible way to grow the fanbase all that much. There's no way we'll ever know if that is true or if they simply failed to do it right. That is assuming they fail...And again with the "but it didn't work" CITATION NEEDED. This is what we're talking about man. You can make these statements all day and all night, but you HAVE NO EVIDENCE TO BACK THEM UP.[/QUOTE]

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