Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 3469248" data-attributes="member: 22424">In the other thread, I posted that this felt like being punched in the gut. That wasn't hyperbole, it was a statement of my feelings at my time. Like a great many people here, I have been reading Dragon for the majority of my life, and now it is gone. So, yes, there is a sense of mourning.Your being dismissive of the feelings of those who are effected by this, no matter how silly you may think they are being, is really not appreciated.This was a decision taken by 'suits' for business reasons. That's not to say it was the wrong decision, however.Wizards of the Coast have recently moved back into publishing adventures. Rightly or wrongly, they seem to have seen Dungeon as a source of competition. In addition, they are moving to a digital subscription model, and here they rightly consider Dragon to be a source of competition to that. So, under those circumstances, it is a good idea for them to end the magazines. It would be folly to keep them in circulation and allow them to compete with their new venture.(I would also expect to see the d20 license revoked, except that d20 (not OGL) now seems to be essentially dead, and probably isn't even a blip on the radar of the people pulling the shots at WotC. Besides, revoking d20 gains them nothing since everyone affected would just go OGL.)This move does improve the chances of the Digital Initiative succeeding. They now have something that is a solid draw and that they know they can deliver. Unfortunately, as I see it, this only improves the chances for the DI from 'certain failure' to 'almost certain failure'. I have seen nothing in Wizards' track record to indicate they can pull off a tenth of the other things they have promised. And the e-zines alone aren't enough to sustain the DI; there's a reason ebooks haven't taken off - reading large blocks of text on a screen is uncomfortable, you lose all the benefits of the printed medium, and leverage none of the advantages of multimedia that the PC can provide.So, I'm 95% certain the DI will fail, with features delivered late, crippled, or not at all. A year down the line, the promised functionality will be pared back, and back, and eventually the whole thing will be canned.My horror scenario is that then Hasbro will look at D&D the role-playing game and determine that it is not profitable enough. The design work done on 4e will be shelved, the product will be canned. And, because D&D the brand remains a very valuable asset (for licensing to novels, video games, and movies) they will decline to sell, or even to license out the rights. And D&D as we know it will be dead.That's the scenario that most worries me. I am, actually, hopeful that that last paragraph won't come to pass, but I do expect the DI to fail. Now, I don't hate WotC for doing this, and I'm not going to boycott them or anything like that. I'm almost certainly not going to sign up for the DI, unless the Virtual Tabletop is a stellar tool, but I don't particularly wish it ill.Just my opinions.</blockquote>

Verification