Quote from: aramis;309574you missed a couple:

* I know the details of 4E sales because I'm a 3rd party publisher
* the PDF market is meaningless.

Yeah, I missed those. Not while reading, but while re-telling.

Waht I still don´t get about the meaningless pdf market: If it´s meaningless, why the activity on WotCs side?

The generational theory isn't something Mr. Goodman invented, it's a marketing concept he applied to the data. Malleus Arianorum concurred with his interpolation approvingly in the third person past tense.

Quote from: Settembrini;309578What I still don´t get about the meaningless pdf market: If it´s meaningless, why the activity on WotCs side?

We're talking about a company that obviously doesn't care to deliver quality in any (remote) sense unless it pays off for them, big time. Recall the 4E FR Campaign Guide saying at the back of the book "This index isn't meant to be an index - it's meant to be a source of inspiration"?

Read: "You believe paying a high school student $5 per hour to use some easy-to-use software to compile an index of this book is money well invested? Well, we don't."

Making PDFs of 4E books to cater to 2,500 people downloading them isn't worth the effort.

Thing is, Windjammer, they have to make the PDFs ANYWAY. A lot of the printing done in china is sent as PDFs with embedded fonts. BIG pdfs. 300DPI+ images, and vector fonts (.ttf or .ps), because those are easily separated with the drivers for their systems.

The PDFs released by uploaders prior to the official launch appear to have been the print-side PDF's sent to the printers.

All they need to do to make those into salable PDF's is open them in acrobat, and crop them, and then save optimized. Watermarking might require some minor tweaks; I don't know 'bout DTRPG's process.

It turns a byproduct of the printing process into a salable product in 20minutes or less.

Quote from: Malleus Arianorum;309583The generational theory isn't something Mr. Goodman invented, it's a marketing concept he applied to the data. Malleus Arianorum concurred with his interpolation approvingly in the third person past tense.

I was going to point out the same thing.

People tend to pick up the same hobbies/interests they had as teenagers again when they are adults.

Explains why I have a lot of classic David Bowie and Jethro Tull on my intunes library at the moment. And whey classic sitcoms are made into movies thirty years later.

Quote from: aramis;309593It turns a byproduct of the printing process into a salable product in 20minutes or less.

Ah, ok, thanks for the reality check.

I had been aware of the PHB 1 printer's PDFs, but forgot to bring these to bear on my ruminations. Thanks.

Quote from: Caesar Slaad;309516Translation

got modded before i could read it.

Quote from: Narf the Mouse;309546Most RPG sessions, I've noticed, aren't epic, dramatic campaigns with detailed, intricat storylines. They're 'Hey guys, let's kill some orcs!' action-comedy.

The most sensible thing i've read in ages.

the biggest truism in the hobby today; i tried running Changeling the Lost a while back having been impressed by reading the game. I tried to coax my two players, who aren't lazy or stupid (well not often) to come up with character backstories and explanations as befit the storytelling nature of the setting nd the whole WoD thing. I don't think those games work otherwise. I might as well not have bothered. Consequently I didn't run the game. And probably for the best. People don't want to spend their leisure time pretending they are d20 Shakespeare. They want to have fun and the roleplaying comes from the group interacting, not some rulebook telling you how. Fortunately because of my friends' stupidity and laziness I saved myself the hassle of having to dream up some turgid storyline for a pretentious horror game. Too much highbrow in gaming, yet WoW sells in the millions.

3E hit at an absolute low point in D&D's history, probably the lowest point other than before it existed.  TSR almost went bankrupt, it's product had been crap for some years, and people we just disillusioned with TSR and D&D altogether.
When 3ed hit, it was like the second coming of Christ.  If it had been a worse game, it still would have sold like gangbusters.

4ed is coming in at a time of strength, not weakness.  3ed/3.5 were still going strong, loads of people were still playing and still happy with D&D, so its really an apples/oranges thing.  Theres no WAY 4ed could equal or surpass the 3ed hype machine, because the situations were opposite.

Also, yeah the 90's were a low point for D&D, not role playing.  The 90s were great for role playing, just not if you wanted fantasy.  White Wolf kept the industry alive until D&D resurfaced, and lots of people who played WW games moved on to other stuff - like me.  I had been out of gaming for a while, but WW brought me back in, and I eventually made the jump back to AD&D (not happily) and then 3ed was just the perfect game for me at the time.

Quote from: Hackmastergeneral;3096013E hit at an absolute low point in D&D's history ... 4ed is coming in at a time of strength, not weakness.   ... Theres no WAY 4ed could equal or surpass the 3ed hype machine, because the situations were opposite.

Here's Monte Cook, interviewed in Kobold Quarterly issue 6, some time early in 2008 before 4E was out.

Quote from: The KoboldKQ: Does you have an opinion you want to share about 4E coming out?

MC: 4E is in an interesting but somewhat unenviable position. It faces challenges that 3E never had to, and I have no idea what exactly will happen. To be sure, it will be a success, but will it be enough of a success for WotC's bottom line-watchers to be happy? To justify having such a large department of people? I don't know.

When 3E was launched, 2E was virtually dead. (By that, I mean as a viable commercial product, not as a game.) The general audience was ready for change, eager for it actually. No one had to be convinced that 2E was a bad game (it wasn't) in order to get them to be excited for 3E. 2E had simply run its natural course.

Also, 3E came out when the economy was doing pretty well. People had plenty disposable incomes to dump on three big hardcovers. Perhaps even more importantly, it came out when geek nostalgia was at its peak. D&D was showing up on TV shows, movies, and even GE commercials. There was a powerful zeitgeist there. Lastly, it came at a time when the kids who played it as teens in the 80s were now at the age where they could sit down and introduce it to their kids. The timing for a big resurgence for D&D was just right.

Now, the designers and WotC had nothing to do with any of those circumstances, obviously. It was just sort of a perfect storm situation. 4E has none of those advantages. WotC announced the new edition while 3E was still going strong. It has had to spend as much or more of its marketing push on convincing the audience that 3E is flawed as it has previewing and hyping 4E. (3E also had Dragon and Dungeon magazines to help support it and its marketing effort, and 4E does not, but that was by WotC's choice.) The economy is lot shakier. D&D is portrayed (unfairly) in the media as the sad little precursor to online games.

So it will be very difficult for 4E to achieve 3E's success, and that has absolutely nothing to do with the game's design (which I actually know very little about). I do see that it is fracturing the D&D community in ways that 3E never did, but that's because there almost wasn't a community left back then—at least in comparison to now. That's sad to see, and I don't think it had to be that way, but what's done is done.

See also here for an earlier assessment by Monte re 2E vs 3E, shortly after 4E was announced.

Quote from: RPGPundit;309519Did anyone actually save the guy's parody before it got deleted by the mods? I would have liked reading it.

RPGPundit

Thankfully, it's been resurrected and reposted at the Wondrous Imaginings blog:

http://wondrousimaginings.blogspot.com/2009/06/really-funny-comment-on-joe-goodmans.html

QuoteFor despite my having said that the internet market is less than nothing, the DDI has changed all aspects of 4E in ways that you, with your limited senses, cannot understand. I shall not endeavor to explain it to you further.

haha oh shit, thank you someone for the sunday morning humor! (i don't attend church, you see..)

all i can imagine is mouth-breathing and the constant pushing of glasses back up on the bridge...then the look of smug satisfaction.  

thanks for the post, ZenWired!

My observations:

First, if Goodman is correct in saying 4e sales are comparable or better than 33 out of the 35 years of D&D sales based on all the data he's familiar with, that, to me, sounds like a pretty good definition of strong sales.  And if WotC or Hasbro was expecting 4e to top 3e's peak sales, they were the only ones - everyone else was predicting lower sales as far as I remember for most of the reasons already discussed.

WotC getting rid of pdf sales was retarded.  Whatever bullshit "unpiratable" system they eventually may or may not come up with in the future will likely be more retarded.  It's amazing how fast WotC went from a young and vibrant next-generation company in the 90s to a stodgy, plodding group of corporate assholes.

Finally, EnWorld's mods are jackasses.  The post they deleted was quite funny and hardly offensive (unless Mr. Goodman has very, very thin skin).  I'll never understand why some message boards feel they to be so totalitarian.  Must be their pathetic delusions of power as mods.

Quote from: ZenWired;309607Thankfully, it's been resurrected and reposted at the Wondrous Imaginings blog:

http://wondrousimaginings.blogspot.com/2009/06/really-funny-comment-on-joe-goodmans.html

that's some goooooooooooooood sarcasm.

mmmmmmmm-mm.

Quote from: Ghost Whistler;309611that's some goooooooooooooood sarcasm.

mmmmmmmm-mm.

Meh.  It adds very little to the debate, does nothing to rebut any of the points Goodman made, and just kind of handwaves everything away with snark.

His tone was off, for sure, but Goodman made some good points, backed up with what little hard data we have available.

Anyone looking at 4ed would be silly to call it a failure, and retarded not to call it successful - but it DOES have a harder situation sales wise than 3ed did, and it likely will never be as successful as 3ed was.

But "not being as successful as the most popular and best selling game in RPG history" =/= "failure".