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="redrick" data-source="post: 7669063" data-attributes="member: 6777696">These are different circumstances and not really comparable. Pathfinder was explicitly designed to be a logical extension of 3.5, with strong backward compatibility with that system. Any 3.5 material purchased could easily be converted to run in Pathfinder. 5e, by comparison, was expected to be very different from 4e, so folks are less likely to buy a product for a system that they don't plan to be using that much longer.Also, how large was the public playtest for Pathfinder? I don't know. Wizards not only started working on the next edition, but also started running their playtest at game stores as part of D&D organized play. They wanted everybody, fans of 4e included, to start engaging with the new rules system. They also published and sold several adventures for D&D Next while it was still in development.Now, as to profitability of 4e, well, we really just don't know. The presumed profitability of D&D 4e at the start of the public playtest for 5e isn't really an indicator on the profitability of 4e earlier on in its release cycle. Nor is it an indicator on the profitability of DDI, which didn't rely on new material to drive its revenues. (There is more than enough material coded into the DDI system to last any gaming group for quite some time, and the fact that it's still online is a testament to the fact that many gamers are still willing to pay a monthly subscription for it, long after any new content has been generated.)Wizards might very well have decided that new books for 4th edition would not be profitable, or at least not profitable enough. They might have decided that the potential payoff of a new, massively popular 5th edition would be far bigger than the diminishing profits of splat books for 4e, and focused their energy on 5e to maximize those returns. If you have limited resources, you will invest those resources in whatever will generate the most long-term profit, even if there are other places you could invest those resources that would generate modest short-term profit. All sorts of reasons could have gone into that decision. 4e being unprofitable is just one possible explanation.I can stay in my neighborhood and make $8 an hour at a local coffee shop. Or I can spend an hour on the train, making no money, in order to get to an office where I can make many times that. I could have stayed in Texas, making $12 an hour working small-time, but I chose to move to New York City, where I spent several months getting myself established, but ultimately make much more money.</blockquote>

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