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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Transformer" data-source="post: 5997668" data-attributes="member: 70008">No, he doesn't mean that. What you describe is the equivalent of re-tooling old campaign settings and adventures for 4th edition (as with 4e Dark Sun), not the equivalent of producing all new content for older editions. Producing all new, exclusive, first-party products for 2nd edition AD&D would rather be the equivalent of Sony producing all new, exclusive, first-party content for the PS1.Yes, and Wizards is already coming out with special editions of the 1st and 3rd edition core rulebooks, which is the closest possible equivalent of your Model T example.It is not possible to create an RPG system which is backwards-compatible with every edition that came before it. It cannot be done. It is a relatively simple matter to make your gaming console one generation backwards compatible, while any RPG that is even fully 3rd and 4th edition-compatible would be cripplingly unwieldy and bloated and confused.Wizards' position is nothing like that of a car company or video game company. In the automobile industry, you must support multiple models (a 2-door truck, a 4-door truck, an economy 4-door, a luxury 4-door, a minivan, etc.) in order to gain any significant market share, and you must have market share because you need massive economies of scale to survive. Every new model you produce, up to a point, gets you (or ensures that you keep) more market share, because people want all different kinds of cars.2nd edition AD&D represents virtually no market share. It represents a few scattered groups who are pretty happy with what they've got already. If Wizards produced all new content print content for 2nd edition, it would net them virtually no new players at all. A very few people would buy perhaps the first adventure or two, mostly out of curiosity. They would lose money on the product, period.The video game situation is even less parallel. A serious video gamer might play through 3 or 4 big titles in a month. A serious RPGer probably takes two years to experience one RPG system. We have got to admit to ourselves that Wizards cannot produce all new, playtested, print materials for TSR-era editions. No amount of un-parallel parallels is going to change the fact that any such product would unquestionably cost far more than it would bring in.I guarantee you Wizards took a good, hard, objective look at their options, involving lots of real financial analysis, before they settled on trying to unite the fanbase with a new edition. No business model besides "one system which is played by 70% of all RPG players" can sustain the size of their company and still give them the return on investment they were used to from the 3rd edition era.Yes, other companies succeed by selling and supporting multiple systems. They do that by having much smaller staffs producing far fewer books for each system, such that fans of a given system are likely to buy a good portion of the books that come out for it. You only produce the 4 or 5 most lucrative possible splatbooks for each system. And even if a given splatbook only sells a few thousand or even a few hundred copies, and most of the people who bought it are just RPG junkies who buy all kinds of books that they'll never actually use, well, you only had two designers, a handful of playtesters, and some freelance artists contributing to that splatbook, so you still made money on it.If 5th edition fails to win everyone back (which I agree seems likely), Wizards may very well have to begin doing something like that. But it is unquestionably a less lucrative, less stable, less desirable situation for them than one in which they control most of the market with one system. Wizards knows it, we know it. It's just silly to try and convince ourselves otherwise.</blockquote>

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