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With a highly profitable paper card business, Wizards has always been concerned with cannibalizing paper sales and pissing off the physical card distributors. M
by gamble 16y ago
With a highly profitable paper card business, Wizards has always been concerned with cannibalizing paper sales and pissing off the physical card distributors. MtGO players are largely also paper card players - in particular, the intensely competitive ones who are willing to pay $4 per virtual booster for an online venue to test out competition decks - so matching the paper rules was essential. At the same time, the way they avoided problems with the paper distributors was to cater to the hard-core players and ignore the casual market.
TL;DR: Wizards is too dependent on paper card sales to design a next-gen online TCG.
- jacques_chester 16y agoYou are absolutely correct about their position, which reminds me very much of Kodak throughout the 90s. Kodak was tied to film. Even though their own staff foresaw digital photography, they were bound by their own economics and basically wished for digital to go away -- hence their heartbreakingly ridiculous Advantix Preview (the hybrid film/digital camera I mentioned above).