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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6658911" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, they made a huge gamble. Hasbro decreed that product lines below some specific yearly revenue figure would henceforth either continue 'organically' (IE purely supported by their own revenue) or they would be rolled up entirely. D&D product management saw the handwriting on the wall, that they needed to have 200-300% more sales to warrant corporate funding, and that the alternative was a small press D&D that would simply eek out the tail end of the 3.x market and bump along with almost no staff or resources to do much about it. So they pitched one final huge wave of investment in the game, with the promise of meeting the required sales levels, which were effectively twice what even TSR ever did at its peak. The theory was that a 'digital revolution' could be inaugurated. This is where the super spiffy vaporware DDI concept came from, with the 3D VTT and etc. It was all concept that was pitched to corporate to get funding. They did a de-novo game design with elements that could be cataloged digitally, and tried to execute a digital platform to go with it.Its not at all that 4e failed as a game, particularly. It has been said it had very high initial core book sales, and plenty of people played it (Encounters was a great success for instance, hardly a sign of a hated game on the whole). It was just that they utterly failed to execute the DDI vision. The result was a much less ambitious DDI that was probably reasonably successful (they're still running it, albeit on auto-pilot, so it clearly made a reasonable amount of money at some level) but fell vastly short of putting the D&D group's revenue into the 'core strategic product' category. So D&D was told to go back and pay its own way, which is how you got the downsizing and presumably Essentials was sort of a "hey, we better take the money we can still spend and make sure we have some good selling SKUs that will be out there for the next 3-4 years" kind of thing.5e is just basically the alternative strategy. Small Press D&D. 5 full-time developers and whatever outside help they can budget from revenue, release what you can. Don't take any big risks, release a very conservative game that has the most chance to keep selling reasonably well for a LONG time because there isn't going to be another round of investment. Anything from here on out is going to be slow and small. I'd imagine they're kind of bunkered in on the RPG front, just keeping the lights on until they hope digital games, movies, etc (which are a completely different division of Hasbro) get themselves up to speed enough to perhaps encourage a bit of funding for some new game content. Of course none of that really impacts the game, as a game. In some sense it may be for the best. I don't get the impression that for all the money thrown at 4e there was a very clear vision in the team as to what exactly they were creating. 5e certainly doesn't suffer from that problem. Overall it is, IMHO, the most coherent of D&D offerings, certainly since Red Box Basic and the rest of early B/E/C.</blockquote>

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