Quote from: FrankTrollman;396018It is somewhat difficult to figure out WotC's plans for future development. In no small part because either bad sales or a marketing director with bipolar disorder has caused them to radically alter their direction. Several times a year. Most recently they said that they were going to put 4e D&D on the shelf for seven months while they make their Essentials line, but seven months is a long time in 4e's market direction. It was seven months between Scott Rouse saying that the PDFs would get updated to include errata (Sep 08) and WotC pulling the PDF sales altogether (Apr 09). It was seven months from them saying that they would not produce 4e D&D in 2008 (Jul 07) to them releasing the now infamous Tiefling & Gnome video (Feb 08). Going by past behavior, the chances of them actually completing the Essentials line and going back to regularly scheduled 4e books without a major direction change is slim to none.

With such regular annual firings of WotC employees in the D&D division, they can use this "churn" as "plausible deniability" in the "covering your ass" PR type crap.  (ie.  "The guys who said 'this' or 'that', are no longer employees of WotC").

Blame the previous "regime" for all the present problems.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;396018D&D Essentials is supposed to be "evergreen" but that's a fucking joke - once 5e comes out (and it will come out), printings of Essentials will cease

Wonder if the 4E Essentials books will ever see any revised printings with errata added.  If it turns out the 4E Essentials titles sell even worse than the original 4E core books, I doubt they will even do any reprints.

With the existence and popularity of the DDI character builder, I doubt we will ever see revised printings of the crunch heavy splatbooks (with errata added in), such as the "Players Essentials:  Heroes of ..."  and older "* Power" books.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;396018There will be 5e. The question is whether anyone will be left who doesn't suffer from such severe event fatigue that they just don't care anymore by the time it does.

Wonder if Mike Mearls et al, will still be around WotC when 5E is being designed.

For that matter, in principle they can even outsource the design and development of 5E D&D to a reputable freelancer.  (ie. Perhaps they'll choose somebody like a Steve Kenson).

I would buy a Steve Kenson 5th edition D&D. Gay wiccan magic tree sex and all.

-Frank

Wait...there's people that argue WotC isn't using a POM sales model?
I grokked when they released a 3rd Edition D&D; a new company bought the IP, and wanted to generate new sales along with put their own spin on the IP.

3.5 was the first sign of a POM model to me, especially since they basically re-printed the entire line for 3.5 (yes, there's compatibility, but that's not the point; they re-released a lot of 3.0 softcovers with updated content as hardcovers in 3.5)

4th Edition with DDI?
That's WotC looking to switch from a customer-product business model, to a subscriber's model.

Smart, if you can pull it off. But it's looking like WotC didn't take into account upkeep on DDI.

Quote from: Novastar;396140Wait...there's people that argue WotC isn't using a POM sales model?

Yes. On EnWorld, even discussing the idea that 4e is a product limited in time which will itself be discontinued, repudiated, and replaced is an offense. Like, literally the mods will lock your thread and give you a warning because those thoughts are unutterable. They've explicitly stated that as policy.

It's less official, but still nonetheless true on RPG.net. A thread speculating on when 4e might be discontinued, who might be tapped to write the next major edition, or what such an edition might contain will get filled with trolls, insults, snark, and bullshit by 4rries. And when the mods step in, they will go after the original post for "stirring up trouble" and not the 4e hardliners who throw insults around like they were Zimbabwe dollars.

Quote4th Edition with DDI?
That's WotC looking to switch from a customer-product business model, to a subscriber's model.

Smart, if you can pull it off. But it's looking like WotC didn't take into account upkeep on DDI.

The problem with the subscriber model is that they haven't shown people things they actually want to subscribe to. Mike Mearls has written more than a dozen Skill Challenge overhauls. I am not going to pay money for that. Especially since none of them actually address the core problems with the Skill Challenge dynamics.

They need a hard copy magazine again, so people who subscribe actually get something. Also, they need to come up with a sales pitch that is different from that of an abusive boyfriend. The "I know the last rules didn't work, but I got new rules, rules that will be better. This time for sure!" pitch is not very persuasive after you've done it a half dozen times in a single year.

-Frank

Quote from: FrankTrollman;396148They need a hard copy magazine again, so people who subscribe actually get something. Also, they need to come up with a sales pitch that is different from that of an abusive boyfriend. The "I know the last rules didn't work, but I got new rules, rules that will be better. This time for sure!" pitch is not very persuasive after you've done it a half dozen times in a single year.

-Frank

The problem with that, is increased overhead for a print product, and the very likely scenario that people like me will buy individual issues, but not a subscription (I only buy what interests me. Even Rifters get short shrift from me...).

I'm not sure I'd want to buy "this version of the rules!" in hardcopy, anymore than pay for a softcopy, though.

Presumably almost everyone who plays Pathfinder would be a customer of Wizards if they hadn't changed the rules so much (and the same for retro-clones, although they seem to be much less popular).

So they must believe that the gain from people buying the new version of things they already have is greater than the loss from people sticking with the old version.

I would have thought that the type of customer who automatically buys the new core rules would automatically buy the new class book or the new setting as well, meaning that there would be no need to come out with a new, incompatible ruleset. But obviously they don't agree.

Quote from: Age of Fable;396212I would have thought that the type of customer who automatically buys the new core rules would automatically buy the new class book or the new setting as well, meaning that there would be no need to come out with a new, incompatible ruleset. But obviously they don't agree.

I think you'll get a lot of people who will buy the PHB, maybe even the entirety of the "Core Books", but unless you hook them there, they aren't likely to buy anything further.

Quote from: Novastar;396225I think you'll get a lot of people who will buy the PHB, maybe even the entirety of the "Core Books", but unless you hook them there, they aren't likely to buy anything further.

I don't know whether it's even about hooking them. The old D&D boxes used to promise "a lifetime of adventure" or something similar, and the evidence seems to be that lots of people took that at face value and happily played for years without ever thinking to buy supplements.

This is what drives companies to the Periodical Model. Let's imagine an alternative world where D&D and AD&D had been kept in print as "Evergreen" products all the way from the 80s. We'll even imagine that this has been a wild success, and that there are now 10 million regular D&D/AD&D players.

So what do TSR/WotC get from this wild success? Well, in core book sales, all they get is new growth and replacement copies. And since RPGs only really need to be owned by one person per group, their market isn't even 10 million players but more like 2 million groups. So if we assume a churn and replacement rate of about 5%, then TSR/WotC are selling 100,000 core sets per year (a set being either a D&D box or three AD&D books, naturally). Sure, they can try to sell settings/adventures etc. (which, core setting sets aside, can be seen as a Periodical bolt-on to a core Evergreen model), but history has shown that they struggle to reach much of the market with those.

We're deep in to pulling-numbers-out-of-my-ass land to speculate on how setting books and adventures might sell in Evergreen reality, but my gut feeling is that the late TSR model probably was actually the best one (i.e. throw lots of shit at the wall). The market of people who will buy a setting book/adventure is a small subset of the whole game market, and no single setting book/adventure will appeal to all of them, so if you're publishing only one setting you're leaving on the table. If you publish 1,000 you're going to cannibalise your own sales, yes - so the trick is to find the middle ground which works for your market over time.

Anyway.

It's now 2010 in our Evergreen thought-experiment world, and someone at WotC has a brand new idea. They're going to bring out a brand new version of D&D that's incompatible with the old, and support it with yearly "core" rules updates that you have to buy in to to stay current. They're going full on Periodical.

The marketing flip chart says that even if only 25% of current groups move over to the new model, they'll still sell nearly three times as many books in 2011 as they did this year. Then if they manage to keep just 50% of those people on the periodical train, they've still upped yearly sales by 25% - and these are pessimistic estimates.

"But wait" says the bigwig "we need to do a lot more work to produce the new edition and the updates, and we're only getting 25% more. Why bother? All we do now is re-print old books and laugh our way to the bank"

Ah, says the marketroid, this is where the genius bit comes in. DDI rules subscriptions. There would be no point to these without the periodical model, but with it, you're now getting something from everyone who plays, not just one person per group. So even though we're predicting our user base will be just 12% of what it is now - but getting everyone to pay us every year to keep playing, we're going to increase the market we sell to more than ten-fold.


Or in other words - Periodicals mean sales year after year, and so will return the same profits as an Evergreen on a small fraction of the player base.

But the periodical model tends to inevitably suffer from a decay of its user base. Its a sucker's bet, you're mortgaging your own future.

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;396395But the periodical model tends to inevitably suffer from a decay of its user base. Its a sucker's bet, you're mortgaging your own future.

Yeah, but who stays in a job for long these days? That's the next guy's problem.

And even if WotC are worrying about that, it's easy to convince yourself at the start of the process that you can continue to attract new players in something like the old numbers after you move to the new model, and so the problem should take care of itself.

And then if that turns out not to work you can launch things like D&D Encounters

Quote from: Grymbok;396400Yeah, but who stays in a job for long these days? That's the next guy's problem.

Or the point where you release an "all new!" edition, yet again.

Strange that they cancelled Dragon magazine, when that's a way of continually selling to the same people.

Quote from: Age of Fable;396497Strange that they cancelled Dragon magazine, when that's a way of continually selling to the same people.

Yeah, that was a huge mistake. They wanted to cancel Dragon Magazine and sell that kind of product to be monthly in hard back form for $30 a piece. Of course, that particular golden goose turned out to not actually be full of gold when its belly got cut open. Cue surprised gasp.

-Frank

Quote from: FrankTrollman;396499Yeah, that was a huge mistake. They wanted to cancel Dragon Magazine and sell that kind of product to be monthly in hard back form for $30 a piece. Of course, that particular golden goose turned out to not actually be full of gold when its belly got cut open. Cue surprised gasp.

In 2006, paid circulation for Dragon was either 46,250 or 41,220. The discrepancy is maybe cause they took the count from different issues? But from the former link, we know the trend was downward.

The current DDI membership is something over 37,085. That's the current number of people in the WotC community group for DDI. You don't get added to that group unless you log into the community site; just being a DDI subscriber won't do it. So the number is higher than that, but we have no idea if it's 10% higher or 100% higher.

And, of course, seven bucks a month versus fifteen bucks a month. Y'all can do the math.