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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lonely Tylenol" data-source="post: 2467898" data-attributes="member: 18549">For reference, there were a handful of very slim supplements for 3.0 when 3.5 came out.  After 3.5 came out, there was a sudden ramping up of the supplement production to flood the stores with 3.5 supplements to replace the old supplements, starting with the Complete series, and later adding Races and a few other miscelleneous books (eg. psionics handbook) that kept updating rules.Now, there are more books in print for 3.5 than there were for 3.0.  There will continue to be an increasing number of 3.5 books until just before 4.0 comes out.  This causes a certain amount of inertia.  With 3.5 you could say "well, I don't really have that much that will become obsolete, and it's pretty much still compatible with my older books, so what the heck."  But with a 4.0, you might say "well, I have this gigantic stack of 3.5 books, and 4.0 is likely to be less compatible with 3.5 than 3.5 was with 3.0, rendering my books completely obsolete if I try to convert, so I'm not going to bother, considering that there's a huge online community extant to help continue to support this edition."I suspect WotC anticipates this effect, and will either have to make 4.0 fairly compatible with previously released supplements, or have some brilliant idea to get people to switch over without just losing interest in new products and playing 3.5 until judgement day.</blockquote>