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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Jacobs" data-source="post: 4621179" data-attributes="member: 23937">With Dragon #323 and Dungeon #114, we did a relaunch for both magazines in an attempt to renew interest and excitement. For Dungeon, the relaunch went quite well—it continued on a mostly uptrend in subscriptions and popularity and positive feedback up to the final print issue after some pretty scary years where Dungeon was coming very close to being cancelled and/or rolled into Dragon.For Dragon, though, the relaunch actually hurt. Why's that? I suspect because we put out the notion that, with the relaunch, Dungeon was the DM's magazine and Dragon was the Player's magazine.I think what partially happened was that a lot of the DMs who bought Dragon but not Dungeon jumped ship, and there wasn't a corresponding number of players subscribing to Dungeon to jump ship over to Dragon. I suspect also that, while the idea is that there are a lot of players out there... what players spend on RPG stuff PALES in comparison to what DMs spend. Sure, there might be 4 or 5 times the number of players out there than DMs, but if DMs spend 4 or 5 times the amount of money on RPG products than a single player, does it matter? And if DMs spend MORE than that (which, judging from my own buying habits and the buying habits of other DMs I know, is pretty likely), then doesn't it make more sense to market primarily to DMs anyway?After Dragon's relaunch, and about the point where Erik Mona took over the editor-in-chief chair a few issues after the relaunch, a lot of efforts at Paizo went into trying to basically apologize to our customers for saying that Dragon was a player's magazine. We took efforts to get articles for DMs back into Dragon, and did our best to try to get folk to realize that while Dungeon was indeed primarily for DMs, so was Dragon. Effectively, Dungeon was for DMs and Dragon was for EVERYONE.Still, the damage done by proclaiming Dragon a "Player's Magazine" was done, and it took a LONG time to recover from the slump as a result. By the time of the last print issue, Dragon was making pretty good strides toward that recovery, IIRC, but I'm not sure we'd fully recovered. I was on the Dungeon side of the fence, after all, and had my mind wrapped around Adventure Paths and Wil Wheaton at the time!Anyway, in closing, I think that tradition's a good enough reason to retain the two titles as long as the two title system progresses. That said, they're not the same things I grew up with, by simple fact of the matter that they're not in print any more and don't have ads and so on. So maybe it IS time to merge them together and call them the D.I. (shrug)</blockquote>

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