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alexandraerinSo, I haven't had a lot to say about the new edition of D&D that's under development. That's because there's not a lot of information about it yet, but really, I'm just not that interested. The grand concept behind it is to produce a game that "unites the editions"... in other words, they want to make everybody happy. That's the shortest route to making nobody happy.
Look at how much the 4E player base was fractured at just the idea that Essentials was going to be catering to fans of earlier editions... and nobody could even quite agree on whether it was aimed at bringing in the 3rd Edition fans or the old school grognards or what. Almost everybody who liked the current edition feared that the things they didn't like about previous editions would supplant or dilute what they liked.
The people who are still playing BECMA or either edition of AD&D or 3.X/Pathfinder are doing so because those are their favorite editions. Some of that might be partisanship or nostalgia but some of it is an honest matter of taste. You could maybe sell an AD&D 2nd Edition group some more refined material for their favorite editions but you're not going to sell them on a whole new edition unless it seems like a legitimate continuation of their game in a way that 3rd Edition wasn't, and the same is true about people who went over to Pathfinder... if they didn't buy 4th edition, you need to sell them 3.5.2, not 5.
Wizards of the Coast will keep putting out new editions because they keep needing new products to sell. That's the reality of what happens when a hobby becomes a corporate concern... lest we forget, one of the first big edition splits happened in large part because it allowed TSR to get out of paying royalties to one of the game's original creators. But every time they do that they're going to be leaving whole groups of players behind. It's just the nature of the beast.
This is a big part of why I'm interested in developing my own humble little indie game. I think at its core roleplaying is always going to work better as a hobby than an industry. I think that's why it seems so hard to make money at it. It's not like video games... everybody is the person who can keep playing the same game over and over again for years, because the game product is not the game that is played. Everybody's a modder, everybody's a designer. There are still people playing games that were rebooted and relaunched two or three time since, there are people producing material for editions of games where the intellectual property has changed hands multiple times or vanished completely.
I don't think it's impossible for a corporation to make a business model around roleplaying games that really works a lot better than the ones they've been using, but I think the corporate culture is going to get in the way. The focus on "brand identity" that keeps them from even passively supporting older material is a big sticking point, for instance, as is the fear of piracy that keeps them from utilizing the easier ways of capitalizing on out of print books.
Look at how much the 4E player base was fractured at just the idea that Essentials was going to be catering to fans of earlier editions... and nobody could even quite agree on whether it was aimed at bringing in the 3rd Edition fans or the old school grognards or what. Almost everybody who liked the current edition feared that the things they didn't like about previous editions would supplant or dilute what they liked.
The people who are still playing BECMA or either edition of AD&D or 3.X/Pathfinder are doing so because those are their favorite editions. Some of that might be partisanship or nostalgia but some of it is an honest matter of taste. You could maybe sell an AD&D 2nd Edition group some more refined material for their favorite editions but you're not going to sell them on a whole new edition unless it seems like a legitimate continuation of their game in a way that 3rd Edition wasn't, and the same is true about people who went over to Pathfinder... if they didn't buy 4th edition, you need to sell them 3.5.2, not 5.
Wizards of the Coast will keep putting out new editions because they keep needing new products to sell. That's the reality of what happens when a hobby becomes a corporate concern... lest we forget, one of the first big edition splits happened in large part because it allowed TSR to get out of paying royalties to one of the game's original creators. But every time they do that they're going to be leaving whole groups of players behind. It's just the nature of the beast.
This is a big part of why I'm interested in developing my own humble little indie game. I think at its core roleplaying is always going to work better as a hobby than an industry. I think that's why it seems so hard to make money at it. It's not like video games... everybody is the person who can keep playing the same game over and over again for years, because the game product is not the game that is played. Everybody's a modder, everybody's a designer. There are still people playing games that were rebooted and relaunched two or three time since, there are people producing material for editions of games where the intellectual property has changed hands multiple times or vanished completely.
I don't think it's impossible for a corporation to make a business model around roleplaying games that really works a lot better than the ones they've been using, but I think the corporate culture is going to get in the way. The focus on "brand identity" that keeps them from even passively supporting older material is a big sticking point, for instance, as is the fear of piracy that keeps them from utilizing the easier ways of capitalizing on out of print books.