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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 5988621" data-attributes="member: 87792">Money matters, and to Hasbro (and thus to the success of D&D Next), money is the only thing that matters.And financially there are three effective levels of fans.  A casual fan who comes to the table and plays - and may have the core books but will have very little else.  A customer - who picks out the books he likes on a case by case basis.  And a subscriber who puts down money for products before seeing them (D&D Insider members and Paizo AP subscribers come to mind).A subscriber is worth massively more  than a customer - and a player who doesn't buy books is worth little  more than someone who doesn't play at all.  A subscriber is a direct  income stream straight to you and it's a reliable income stream - it's  not only more lucrative (especially as many also buy the books), it's  much better for planning and budgetting.  So you have vastly fewer overheads.  A subscriber is therefore  worth many times an oridnary player to the company.  At present, two  groups have demonstrated that they are prepared to become subscribers -  4e players and PF players.For the sales targets, D&D Next needs both.  An audience that was  only as big as PF's won't cut it.  4e was outselling PF until they  stopped producing material for it.  So we can say that the fanbases are within an order of magnitude of each other.  The question is what of the untapped fanbases?Current 3.5 (and even 3.0 fans) need to be heavily discounted when  it comes to potential sales projections - either is worth a whole lot in  sales than a current 4e or Pathfinder fan.  Both groups have  demonstrated (a) that having a currently supported game is not relevant  to them.  And (b) they aren't prepared to put money in to get an  objectively improved game - instead preferring to stick with what they  know.  And I do believe that PF is an objectively better version of 3.5  than 3.5 is.  So by sticking with 3.5, current 3.5 fans are declaring  that neither ongoing support nor an improved game are worth their  money.  This is not a market likely to buy a new and different game.   Almost all current 3.5 fans are people who have out and out rejected  buying books and upgrading to an actually improved system.  To monetise  them at all requires miraculously changing their gaming habits.So regardless of how many 3.5 and 3.0 fans there still are, their  decision not even to switch to Pathfinder points out that they are  economically worth almost nothing.  They aren't book buyers except in  rare cases, and they certainly aren't subscribers.3.5 and 3.0 fans should therefore be almost entirely ignored from a  business decision perspective.  Or possibly given adventures and splats  occasionally.  But they are largely irrelevant - they aren't even customers and are happy with what they have.Which leaves 2e, 1e, and oD&D fans.  We've already had a huge bite  of the 2e lovers with a game that was meant to be just cleaning up 2e  and giving it a more modern ruleset (3.0).  It's an already heavily  tapped well - and the 2e, 1e, and oD&D fans are used to not giving  anyone money to play.  After all there hasn't been a major new book for  any of those games in a dozen years (unless you count e.g. OSRIC or  Swords and Wizardry).  Suddenly you need to change a decade's worth of  buying habits and convince them to now pay a charge for what they used  to have for free.This isn't quite the mountain there was for 3.X holdouts.  They  haven't, after all, rejected a cleaned up version of the exact same game  they used to play.  They've rejected a different game.  But even they  compared to 4e and PF fans are a hard to monetise and unlikely to move  to a subscription model.Money matters (to Hasbro it's all that matters) - and there are only two  groups in town showing willing to put their money where their mouths  are.  4e and Pathfinder.  Lose the 4e fans and you need to reverse brand  loyalty and produce something PF fans prefer to PF when they have all moved away from WotC once already. Groups like the OSR may be loud - but when did they last put something on the best sellers list?  Or indeed at all?  I believe the Evil Hat (Spirit of the Century and Dresden Files) and Cubicle 7 fans to matter more financially.  And both are small change.Then there are the externals.  People who currently aren't D&D fans.  Say what you like about 4e, it had a plan to bring a probably receptive group in (that was derailed by certain incidents with Gleemax).  An explicit goal of uniting the editions means they aren't even being targetted except as a side effect.So what's WotC's big strategy?</blockquote>

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