will 4.0 succeed?

[Darrin Drader]

The question isn't whether or not it will be a successful roleplaying game. It will be when the sales are compared with all other roleplaying games. The real question is whether or not it will be successful enough for Hasbro. My crystal ball is cloudy where that is concerned.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Exactly.

D&D is the 800lb gorilla of gaming. It will succeed like no other RPG in the market, with the possible exception of 3.X derived product. I'm sure there will be people playing 4Ed for at least a decade.

Whether it will do well enough to meet WotC's or Hasbro's financial success metrics is another question entirely. If it doesn't, then at some point sooner than we'd expect, 5Ed will be rolled out.

And people might be playing gimped 4Ed product when that 5Ed release comes out prematurely and sucks the majority of gamers into its particular gravity.

 

[joethelawyer]

i think whisperfoot has the right of it. its all about hasbro. they have one goal---increase shareholder wealth. everything they do must be viewed through that lens. therefore, what wotc was doing with 3.x didnt increase shareholder wealth enough for them. while we gamers viewed 3.x as a success, wotc/hasbro measures success by one thing--the bottom line, both short term and long term. hasbro must have crunched the numbers and decided that either the current strategy was not getting them enough profit, or wouldnt get them enough profit in the future, or both.

one thing we can be certain of is that hasbro did not come out with a new edition as a group of gamers trying to help out a group of gamers.

joe

 

[pawsplay]

I think it will Daredevil. That is, it will by any ordinary measure succeed, but it won't succeed quite as much as the creators wanted it to.

 

[dmccoy1693]

Agree with Whisperfoot. Will 4E be the best selling RPG this year, absolutely. No Doubt.
Will it sell well enough for there to not be layoff before June 6, 2009? Answer cloudy.
Will it draw in new players? Absolutely.
Will it draw in LOADS of new players? Doubtful.

 

[Lifesupport]

Yes - I think that 4E will finally push alot of the remaining 1E/2E player base into the present. I think it will have this effect as 4E will finaly push existing 1E/2E players to realise how complex and inconsistent the 1E/2E rule set is.

 

[Darrin Drader]

I don't think the success or failure will be a question of when 5th edition will be out, but more one of whether or not WotC will cancel or sell the D&D line if it proves to be unsuccessful by their standards. If they are forced to invest a million or two to reinvent the game and then they only barely make that back, or they don't even get out of it what they put into it, then Hasbro will say that RPGs are no longer viable and they'll end their relationship with it. They may decide to license it out, which would probably be the best situation if a failure occurs, or they might just decide to put it on ice until they can come up with a newer, better strategy for making it appeal to the masses. At that point, the next edition might be radically different than any version of the game we've seen so far, and it might just be developed by the folks in Rhode Island rather than the ones in Seattle.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Yes - I think that 4E will finally push alot of the remaining 1E/2E player base into the present. I think it will have this effect as 4E will finaly push existing 1E/2E players to realise how complex and inconsistent the 1E/2E rule set is.

I can't agree with that- they haven't been convinced to change in the past 15 years or so- I don't see how 4Ed will change that.

(Full Disclosure- I still play 1Ed/2Ed games in addition to 3.X, though the main campaign in those editions is being updated to 3.X).

 

[pawsplay]

I don't think the success or failure will be a question of when 5th edition will be out, but more one of whether or not WotC will cancel or sell the D&D line if it proves to be unsuccessful by their standards. If they are forced to invest a million or two to reinvent the game and then they only barely make that back, or they don't even get out of it what they put into it, then Hasbro will say that RPGs are no longer viable and they'll end their relationship with it. They may decide to license it out, which would probably be the best situation if a failure occurs, or they might just decide to put it on ice until they can come up with a newer, better strategy for making it appeal to the masses. At that point, the next edition might be radically different than any version of the game we've seen so far, and it might just be developed by the folks in Rhode Island rather than the ones in Seattle.

I'm betting they'll license it out. That way, if it succeeds to any extent, they still get all the royalties on D&D cartoons, lunchboxes, Official Dice Bags, etc. Oh, and a zillion trashy snipoff novels.

 

[pawsplay]

Yes - I think that 4E will finally push alot of the remaining 1E/2E player base into the present. I think it will have this effect as 4E will finaly push existing 1E/2E players to realise how complex and inconsistent the 1E/2E rule set is.

I really doubt that. 3e is what brought me back in to playing D&D at all, and 4e has gone off the edge of the map with some of its changes. To me, and probably many other people, 4e is barely D&D at all, whatever its relative merits.