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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Transformer" data-source="post: 5997409" data-attributes="member: 70008">I'm kind of shocked so many people seem to think this is a real possibility. Wizards might as well just light their money on fire or dump it into a giant pool and swim in it like Scrooge McDuck as try to simultaneously churn out quality new materials for six or more different systems at once.Only a small subset of the (already tiny) tabletop RPG market is interested in retro fantasy RPGs. Of those, only a very few scattered groups actually play editions from the TSR era, as opposed to retroclones or homebrew systems. Of those few scattered groups, many wouldn't even be interested in buying new materials from Wizards; they either like to homebrew everything or they've already got all they need from stuff they bought years ago/stuff they bought or pirated in PDF form. And of the remaining people--maybe, what, a dozen groups in the whole United States, at most?--only a small portion might have an interest in this or that particular new splatbook or adventure.Even if we're talking about Wizards releasing a different version of the same basic product (with the same fluff) for every edition, it would be comically frivolous of them to take the time to separately design and playtest all the crunch for OD&D, Basic, 1st ed. AD&D, and 2nd ed. AD&D. It's a self-evidently ridiculous business plan.It gets slightly more plausible if we're talking about simultaneously supporting only 3rd and 4th edition, but even there, most of the 3rd edition players who regularly buy new products have moved on to Pathfinder. It's almost certainly the case that Wizards would get a better return on investment from just continuing to support 4th edition, and evidently that path was already deemed not lucrative enough.No, it seems perfectly obvious to me that the best they can do in the way of supporting older editions is sell high-quality PDFs of lots of pre-existing older edition materials. Get together a nice, high quality site with an excellent search function, get really good quality PDFs of all the old stuff, and sell them cheap. Have sales sometimes to highlight certain parts of the catalog. Luckily, it looks from the GenCon presentation that Wizards is going to at least do something similar to this.I'd say there are a couple of massive problems with this plan:1. Will there ever be enough, say, 2nd edition support in DDI to actually convince a few of the people running 2nd edition campaigns to subscribe, when all of the actual tools only work for 4th edition, and those people have plenty of great products sitting on their shelves already? I doubt it. You could say "make the tools work for every edition," but then you're back to the original problem: it would cost several orders of magnitude more money than it would bring it to make every DDI tool work with every edition.2. Correct me if I'm not understanding you, but are you suggesting that Wizards publish submitted fan-created material, and then make money off of that material by charging for DDI, and not pay the actual author a dime? I could be wrong, but wouldn't that generate a ton of ill-will and negative feedback, along the lines of "Wizards doesn't even have professional designers make half their stuff anymore, it's just random people, and they don't even pay those people for their creative work, just like slimy companies who try to get artists or musicians to do valuable work for free just for the exposure."</blockquote>

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