Quote from: StormBringer;358723I was rounding up, and that was the revenue, not the profit.  I would call the profit a million or a million and a quarter, tops.  Depending on month-over-month subscriptions.

We don't have nearly enough information to even begin discussing profit.

Quote from: Fifth Element;358725We don't have nearly enough information to even begin discussing profit.

Sure we do.  Server lease costs and average salary for web page administration isn't a mystery.  The size of the project is known, so a good guess as to the size of the team isn't unreasonable.

Like the man said, we can speculate.  I doubt they are shelling out more than a half-mil on upkeep and overhead, for example, but that is a pretty wild ball-park figure.  If I could be arsed to look up some numbers, and compare with someone else who could be arsed to look up some numbers, or report from personal experience, I would wager we could estimate their costs for that to within a few thousand dollars.  Someone else with project management experience could supply some other numbers we haven't though of.

Not having 100% accurate information directly from WotC's ledger doesn't mean we have no information whatsoever, nor does it mean that what information we can figure out is 0% accurate by definition.

Following in his footsteps, I will admit to being a bit snarky in my response to Ian, but I don't think this conversation is not worth having.

Quote from: Mistwell;358690Yes, we do not know their actual profit or loss, just revenue.  Same argument I made about the cancellation of the PDFs (where we didn't even know the revenue, much less the profit or loss).

Doesn't mean we cannot discuss what we do know.

As regards the PDF case, this posting is a useful breakdown:

Quote from: FTNow we get to the really exciting numbers. Remember [the] Shill interview? Greg Leeds says everything is fine at WotC land several times in very specifically vague ways. Selling through of "printings" rather than "units" - that sort of thing. But look at what else he says:

Quote from: Greg Leeds from WotCWe can conservatively estimate that for every one book downloaded legally, ten were downloaded illicitly.

And the court case:

Quote from: WotC in courtHowever, by the time Sribd removed the unauthorized copy of Player's Handbook 2 from Defendant Nolan's Scribd page, approximately 1,010 copies had been downloaded

Really? So conservatively, they sold 101 digital copies of the PHB 2?

Quote from: Greg Leeds again wroteWithout citing specific numbers, our content is distributed to hundreds of thousands of people, and our PDF business was small in comparison.

No kidding.

Quote from: StormBringer;358759Sure we do.  Server lease costs and average salary for web page administration isn't a mystery.  The size of the project is known, so a good guess as to the size of the team isn't unreasonable.

Like the man said, we can speculate.  I doubt they are shelling out more than a half-mil on upkeep and overhead, for example, but that is a pretty wild ball-park figure.  If I could be arsed to look up some numbers, and compare with someone else who could be arsed to look up some numbers, or report from personal experience, I would wager we could estimate their costs for that to within a few thousand dollars.  Someone else with project management experience could supply some other numbers we haven't though of.

Not having 100% accurate information directly from WotC's ledger doesn't mean we have no information whatsoever, nor does it mean that what information we can figure out is 0% accurate by definition.

I agree that we could come up with a rough estimate of ongoing maintenance costs for the project. But what we don't know is the initial cost of development. I'd suggest that is likely the most important cost in determining profitability here. I could be $1 million. I could be $2 million or $4 million or $10 million if they realy arsed it up.

That's what we don't know.

Quote from: Fifth Element;358792I agree that we could come up with a rough estimate of ongoing maintenance costs for the project. But what we don't know is the initial cost of development. I'd suggest that is likely the most important cost in determining profitability here. I could be $1 million. I could be $2 million or $4 million or $10 million if they realy arsed it up.

That's what we don't know.

Having worked for a different division of Hasbro at one point, go with your higher guesses unless proven otherwise.

Quote from: SowelBlack;358807Having worked for a different division of Hasbro at one point, go with your higher guesses unless proven otherwise.

As demonstrated by TSR's and WotC's earlier tries at electronic versions and online forays.  The Dragon Archive, for example, was an immense money hole as I understand it.

What´s the salary of an IT-guy that works on that stuff? Remember, the DDI crew was rather big, until they where fired. Literally in some cases! Remember the murder-suicide?

If you have to pay permanent positions with healtcare plans and social security, $2 million can get gobbled up fast.

Just from an economic standpoint, DDI is a better value than the printed books. Although I cannot say anything about the volatility of the data that is being sold through DDI, remember that WotC has proven that they can remove data (like PDFs of past games) from a website, but they cannot take away a purchased printed book.

Quote from: jeff37923;358864Just from an economic standpoint, DDI is a better value than the printed books. Although I cannot say anything about the volatility of the data that is being sold through DDI, remember that WotC has proven that they can remove data (like PDFs of past games) from a website, but they cannot take away a purchased printed book.

I think your first sentence is backwards.

Quote from: StormBringer;358869I think your first sentence is backwards.

How so?

If you take the releases of 4E books for a year and compare the costs of them to DDI for a year, from the numbers released you get more content for the dollar value with DDI.

Quote from: jeff37923;358872How so?

If you take the releases of 4E books for a year and compare the costs of them to DDI for a year, from the numbers released you get more content for the dollar value with DDI.

Ok, I see what you are saying.  Your follow up sentence provides a counter-point, in that physical books can't be taken away by WotC.  I misunderstood the point you were making.

From one perspective the R&D costs matter.

But from another, from the perspective of today, for profit and loss issues, it doesn't matter what the R&D was.  Those are considered one-off sunk service costs from a prior year.  It was written off.  Whatever hit Hasbro stock was going to take, it took long ago.  Whatever hit the employees of the company were going to take, they took long ago.  Whatever hit the bank account and loans and financing was going to take, it took a while ago.  The company looks at current cost to run DDI this year, or this quarter, not the cost it took to get to that point.

Again, that does not mean those costs do not matter in the grand scheme of things.  I'm just saying it's not necessarily as relevant to the issue of how much they are making on an ongoing basis.

Wonder how much of the DDI development work is "outsourced" to contractors/freelancers.

25,000 users on an online service is pretty light so if I were running DDI as a busienss I would leased the hardware in some datacentre somewhere, a linux farm or something with a dozen boxes is more than ample. That means you should get all yoru IT service support as part of that and you don't need to employ 24x7 support so you can focus on your core business. Also the software engine for running DDI I would outsource with a stream for product enhancements.
As for the Development support costs the tech is pretty simple so one or 2 guys at most. The cost of the content providers should be low because they are the same guys as develop your book based products so the cost for DDI content is just cost for content which gets reused in printed format later.
You probably need a guy to manage the DDI product set keep on top of the server providors and mange the work flow.
So dedicated staff to support DDI I would say 3. One manager and 2 development techies that take the content reformat and upload it and add vendor produced updates as they are released. As its a game company and you can exploit worker goodwill I would reckon the manager would be on c.$80K and the techies on $40-50K. Round up the salaries for ease and say $240K a year or $20K a month
Plenty of companies will give you a managed web farm solution for <$500 a server per month so say WotC went for some uber provider giving multiple layers of redundancy and huge storage say $2000 a server per month with 12 servers - $24,000 a month.
You can see why the DDI looks like a tasty prospect......

Oh and the key to the DDI benefit is down to the usage model. As was mentioned in the monetisation thread in a group of 5 players most books are only purchased once. If I am a keen player who aims to buy 3 books a year that comes in at $100-120 a year. For me DDI is a good deal as now its costing me $70 a year for the same content and more. however in my group of 5 players previously maybe 2 of us would have bought the books and we would share, say $200 a year. Now all 5 subscribe to DDI and WotC are making $350 a year and they have eliminated 80% of their costs through printing shipping marketing and storage. And of course the money is coming in a steady stream and accountants love that.