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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dungeoneer" data-source="post: 6216765" data-attributes="member: 91777">This is why I think you need a company that takes the long view. Except for TSR at the very beginning, whoever owns D&D is unlikely to see soaring profits and runaway bestsellers. It takes a pretty minimal investment, just a couple of books and some dice, to pick up a TRPG. And people can play the game with just that investment for years.But over the long term, a company that had a lot of trust from the community could make money. Because churn happens.Imagine a gaming group that got started with Second Edition. They were very happy with it, so they skipped 3.x. But by the time 4e or maybe D&DN rolled around, they were ready to try something new. Plus they've got more money to burn this time around. The trick for whoever owns D&D is to make sure you own both the original game that got gamers started and the new game they want to try out.Maybe the above example is a bad one, because it requires the company to wait decades to make money off a gaming group. But in reality churn happens faster than that. Maybe between 2e and D&DN this gaming group tried out Warhammer40K or Vampire or a GURPS game. They don't want a dungeon crawler, they want something different. If Paizo owned D&D, the key to success would be to offer a lot of different varieties of games so that when customers 'churn' they're still giving you their money. I honestly think D&DN is kind of the wrong direction for WotC to go. You probably aren't ever going to 'unite' D&D gamers under one edition. So the market is fragmented? Embrace the fragmentation. A lot of traditional D&D players disliked 4e. I get that, it was pretty different. What if they hadn't called it Fourth Edition? What if they had called it D&D Tactics? Would that have changed gamers perceptions of it? I think it would. People get really bent out of shape when they think WotC is hijacking 'their' game. But if new versions of the game were presented as alternative rule sets, rather than as reinventions of the original game, I think gamers would be willing to give them more of a pass. If someone doesn't like D&D Tactics, well, it's not for them. No big deal. But if they don't like the new edition of the game they're mad because they think WotC is ignoring them.There's honestly no reason that WotC or Paizo or whoever couldn't support multiple versions of the same game. Because different gamers want different things out of D&D. If you made different versions of D&D for the main gamer demographics, you'd probably wind up with something like this:- D&D Classic, with cleaned-up versions of the original rules.- D&D Super-Simulation Edition for gamers who like rules and tables for everything.- D&D Tactics, as above.- D&D Storytellers, for the group that really likes to role play.And yes, the company that made those games would probably need to release some crunch-free books that would work with any of them. Settings books and gazetteers are perfect for that kind of thing. In addition, each version of the game would get a couple books a year that were specific to it to keep it alive. Of course when a new version of the game rolled out, it would get lots of books for a while.Another bonus to this approach would that the company would virtually always be rolling out a new 'edition' of one of the versions of the game. And we all know that new editions tend to make a lot of money at first. But since there would be several simultaneously-supported versions of the rules, they would sidestep the problem of alienating old gamers with new editions. That's my idea, anyway.The point is a company can absolutely make money off D&D (IMHO), but it's going to be a gradual process. A corporation that posts quarterly profits is a bad fit for the D&D 'brand'. A company run by people who love the game is a better one.</blockquote>

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