@kyliafanfiction replied:
Even Hasbro has to know that nothing can appeal to everyone, right? They know not everyone likes every version of RISK™/Monopoly™ etc? I get the joke about business executives being detached but like... are they really not seeing how this can't work?
They're not dumb, they're just thinking like a toy manufacturer.
One of the basic pieces of orthodoxy in toy manufacturing is that you want to segment your target audience in a particular way: specifically, you want to be able to divide your audience up into fully distinct demographic buckets which have no interests in common. That way, you can be confident of exactly who any given piece of marketing is targeting. Without that total market segmentation, you run the risk of competing with yourself for the same audience, which is inefficient.
(As an aside, this is one of the major reasons why children's toys suddenly became so strongly gendered back in the 1980s. The toy manufacturers landed on gender as their primary audience segmentation strategy, and to achieve that, any given toy needs to e only For Girls or only For Boys. Anything with crossover appeal creates a risk that your For Boys marketing will accidentally appeal to girls as well, or vice versa, and now you've got two different arms of your marketing strategy competing with each other for the same audience's attention and dollars.)
With board games, this is basically fine. Most groups don't play a wide variety of games; one group might have Monopoly as their "game night" standard, and another might have RISK, with groups that are equally interested in both being the exception to the rule. Your audience is effectively self-segmenting. Critically, you don't need to own a copy of Monopoly to play RISK, or vice versa.
With Dungeons & Dragons, however, every group needs copies of the core rulebooks (or the equivalent digital/VTT subscription products) in order to play. You can't tidily segment that audience, because no matter what you're trying to sell them, it all flows back into that central pool of "people who buy Player's Handbooks". Half of your audience only being interested in campaign setting A and half of your audience only being interested in campaign setting B would be fine if they were completely separate games, but since it's ultimately all D&D, what you end up with in practice is campaign setting A and campaign setting B competing with each other for the same pool of potential purchasers.
If you're thinking like a toy manufacturer, that just won't do. From your standpoint, there are only two acceptable outcomes: either every D&D group can be treated as potential purchasers of every D&D product, or the outliers can be shaved off into some other audience segment with no crossover marketing appeal to muddy the waters
Presently, Hasbro has opted for the former approach, which is why we're seeing stuff like the Forgotten Realms being canonised as the Dungeons & Dragons setting, with all the other campaigns being watered down and repackaged as tourist destinations which characters from a Forgotten Realms campaign might occasionally visit, or the move away from focused, topical sourcebooks and toward big, messy guides-to-everything which package supplementary material like cable TV bundles in the hope that you'll be willing to buy five things you don't want in order to get one that you do.
(If Hasbro ever opts to try the other tactic, the result would probably be D&D fissioning into multiple completely separate games, each aggressively marketed toward a specific demographic. They'd... probably use something other than gender as their audience segmentation strategy for this purpose? Though I've gotta admit I'd be morbidly curious to see which D&D campaign settings Hasbro's marketing wonks decide are For Girls!)
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