CPEvilref wrote:
I could well be wrong, but to the best of my knowledge, Hasbro is relatively hands off with WotC as regards D&D so I don't see 4E as coming from...
Mostly, from my understanding that might be the situation involved. Hasbro is hands off in regards to WotC. But, apparently it did come down to them telling WotC to "make Dungeons and Dragons profitable". When you compare the amount of money it makes to what Pokemon and Magic the Gathering make, it just doesn't add up, and of course it doesn't, it's not collectable (not in the same sense anyway).
Anyway, I imagine jobs were threatened and management was pushed to "make D&D profitable" from Hasbro. So this is what they came up with, it is probably not the best business decision by any means but maybe they got it in their heads that their competition with products such as True20 and others that were inspired by there IP were hurting their sales, and they resorted to this.
Thing is, the belief that games such as True20 and Pathfinder will (and have) hurt their sales is not entirely untrue. For example, my roommate is a huge True20 fan. She used to collect almost all of the WotC stuff, since she decided True20 was all she needed for any setting she wanted to run or play in she has barely purchased any further Dungeons and Dragons books.
WotC is coming off (justifiably) as the bad guys here, which it's obvious to see the reasons why. But having worked in or been around business environments most of my life I think that on some levels, they just got desperate and made the wrong decisions.
I like 4e, but I will probably only be financially supporting the companies that do not use the GSL as I think they need to rethink that, and realize that they need to deliver on their own products and provide more as a company, rather than just trying to stiff the competition.
My point is there are two sides to every story, and no one does bad things just to do bad things, despite what our d20 Modern and Shadowrun games might have taught us.
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