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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6261139" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't follow the Hasbro stock levels, nor read the financial (or gaming) press on how they're doing. My only evidence is what I see coming out of WotC, plus posts I read on these boards.On the basis of that evidence, I would not be surprised to see a strong level of internal support for D&Dnext. A lot of money seems to have been spent creating it - besides all the salaries for the WotC staff they are paying consultants, paying for the playtest, wearing the cost of no new products for a couple of years and (presumably) of weaker numbers in DDI than they might have expected if they kept going with 4e. There's also the cost of litigating over the movie rights. It would seem irrational to spend that much money creating a product (and on associated brand costs like the litigation) then not to put in the effort to support it in the marketplace. A game designer who is a hobbyist might do that - put a lot of (unpaid) time into designing a system, then release it with little or no fanfare to see how it sinks or swims. But that would strike me as an odd way for a large commercial publisher to go about things.I also don't see the big deal some posters make about a "Hasbro suit" being in charge. There seems to be this curiously widespread belief that a "suit" can't oversee the design and successful marketing of an RPG. I don't see any particular reason to think that's true. "Suits" oversee the design and marketing of bucketloads of other "cultural production": movies, TV shows, non-literary fiction (and plenty of literary fiction too), games, toys, etc. RPGs just don't seem that special to me in this respect: presumably Greg Leeds can read a summary of focus group reports and marketing surveys and whatever other tools they use as well as the next person!It's true (I think) that we're never likely to see D&D move as close to the avant garde again as we did with 4e: once bitten, twice shy. But most other commercially successful "cultural products" aren't avant garde either. They're mainstream products satisfying mainstream tastes. D&D is in an even better position than that: having played such a big role in creating the tastes of so many present and past RPGers, it's in an ideal position to satisfy them. (This strike me as an important element in the overall playtest - WotC finding out exactly what sort of market it and TSR created.)And of course if D&Dnext flops, for whatever reason, D&D the RPG might be mothballed (though the brand presumably won't be). But that's not a prediction: it's just a statement of basic commercial logic. If D&D can't be made a commercial success, well then why would a commercial enterprise continue to publish it? Of course, even if the TTRPG flops it might not be mothballed, if the view is taken that the TTRPG is needed as a type of core to keep the other, profitable, parts of the brand alive. But that's just another truism. It certainly doesn't shed any light on whether or not D&Dnext is in trouble.</blockquote>

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