NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Reinhart" data-source="post: 7688210" data-attributes="member: 13080">So the important thing to remember is that TSR was the firm that licensed out the TV rights to Marvel Productions, video game rights to Atari, and movie rights to Sweat Pea. For all my criticism of WotC, they had zip to do with that beyond their decision to acquire TSR in that state. The "problem" with most Hollywood style of licensing deals is they tend to come with renewal options. Options, as a legal and economic term, are legally binding promises. It means that if the licensee wants to continue the license at the time the contract has expired, and the licensee meets the renewal requirements, the lincensor cannot deny them. I use "problem" in quotes because many licensees aren't willing to work without them. Who wants to build a reputation and brand just to have it taken away from them? Of course, the licensor is still getting paid for all these extensions. They are, however, stuck with their original terms and that's why Hasbro has been so unhappy. TSR didn't have the advantages that Hasbro can leverage, so what looked good to TSR doesn't look so good to Hasbro. Also, TSR's licensing agreements were from a time when video games and fantasy movies weren't quite the huge commercial juggernauts they are now. TSR was the first to dilute the D&D brand with too many settings and product lines, but some of those licensing agreements also contributed to D&D's brand dilution. We all can see now that the licensing agreement with Sweetpea wasn't great for the brand. And while Bioware's use of the D&D license was pretty outstanding, the products Atari made with other studios haven't been so great. For the past couple of decades there was very little coordination and consistency between the various D&D product lines. Right now, if you ran into an advertisement for a game expansion with the D&D logo on it, you'd have to already be very familiar with the brand to know which of these it's for:1. A "generic" expansion for the current rules of the D&D tabletop RPG.2. A supplement for one of D&D's countless fantasy settings.3. One of D&D's several board games.4. One of D&D's two totally separate MMO's.5. One of D&D's other video games (currently Sword Coast Legends, Arena of War, and Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition.)And technically, all of the above categories have gotten some sort of expansion recently, even though Forgotten Realms is the only setting being explicitly used for all of them. So it's not just the D&D community that's fragmented by settings and editions, there's also fragmentation of the product which creates confusion about the identity of the D&D brand. Only a D&D enthusiast is likely to be up to speed with all of these and so only D&D enthusiasts can actually parse whether the new product is actually valuable to them or not.So what's WotC doing about it? Well, their options are limited for those products which are already out the gate. They seem to be trying to make good with what they've got. Instead of marketing products for each individual fragment of the brand they're trying to make product launches that involve as many as possible. Who is Rage of Demons for? Well it's for Neverwinter Online, Sword Coast Legends, the Forgotten Realms novel fans, and the table-top RPG. Now this tactic is still far from perfect. There's still a confusing mess even for people familiar with the products. For instance, there was a Rise of Tiamat article in Dragon+ written by the Neverwinter Online team that involved their new currency system and then inserted three different stat-blocks for dragons from three totally different games. And remember how some of us thought that Out of the Abyss would include Drizz't or a scenario with Orcus commanding an army of alhoons? Yeah, I'm sure that they factor into at least one of those Rage of Demons products, but I'm still unclear which. And let's not forget that despite WotC's "deep involvement" with Sword Coast Legends it was wildly different from what many of the fans expected it to be.Basically, there's definitely an intent to streamline and unify D&D to make it more marketable, but the reality is that D&D is still pretty darn messy.</blockquote>

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