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Why do you just pack it in and go home WotC? Well all know that your production costs are too inflated because of your size and that the expectations for Next profits set by Hasbro are too high to be met. D&D will only survive as a table top rpg if it is sold to a smaller company with lower costs, lower expectations and a clean track record with the freedom to abandon sacred cows you wont to stir new interest instead of keeping the game on the power creep and feat bloat treadmill which is obviously getting diminishing returns at this point.  

Oh yeah because anyone who admits this publicly will be replaced by a yes man who in typical corporate fashion will promise the impossible to cling to their position for as long as possible. Just like what lost me my last job and now that my 6 month non-disclosure agreement is finished I can tell you all about it.

I worked for an advertising firm in charge of running a campaign for a Bank I'm not mentioning out of fear for future employment. Everyone I worked with knew that the campaign would fail to deliver on the sales X Bank demanded and everyone at X Bank knew that it would fail. However we went though the motions for 5 months and fired all of our entry level people twice over in the span of time because we had to blame the people at the bottom because the economy sucks so bad that most people can't afford another $80 a month service. Yes, it was in fact their fault! Not X Bank's fault for not allowing us to deviate from their ass backwards bench marks that actively hurt their own sales. Not the X Bank vice president in charge of this campaign for starting it knowing it would fail just so it looked likehe was trying to do something to keep his job. After 5 months we lost it and another firm got the campaign because they promised the impossible. It didn't take them half as long to loss it either because they were still marketing at the same broke, alienated public. 

WotC I honestly think you should just have D&D follow a "controlled decent" instead of a "collapse". That way the IP is still worth more and you will only need to wait 10 instead of 15 years for the world to be ready for 6E.

Apr 30, 2012 -- 8:29PM, The_Jester wrote:

Here's the thing... WotC isn't huge. There's maybe 300 on staff, and most of that is divided among the four or so big brands and divisions. D&D is small.  

For a traditional pen and paper game company that's huge. Compared to a company with <20 employees who can sell 1/10 the product and make a much wider profit margin  their costs are inflated. It doesn't help D&D is being made stand up on it's own without M:TG padding out WotC overall profits being taken into effect.

On the other hand, if 4th Edition had been the product of a smaller company then its profit margins would still be considered quite exceptional and then the fans of the older editions might have lost their chance to shape the future of the game.

You people should be thanking Wizards for making 4th, if it had failed as a retro-style game like many of you wanted then we'd be seeing a 5th edition with a big focus on innovation over tradition.

You lucky fellas.