7. Random WTF thought: Given the positive attitudes & desire to “right the wrongs”, what really drove Monte Cook to exit WotC? ‘Cause this seems like a design environment he’d love.
He was pretty clear that his reasons for leaving were "corporate," not "design." Knowing big companies (and I do), it could have been as simple as an overly-constraining IP assignment clause in the contract, combined with inflexibility on the part of Hasbro HR and Legal. I've had to turn down good, interesting work for similar reasons myself.
(And before you say, "but he already signed a contract," it's quite possible they started with an interim contract for $X and ran into problems once they tried to do a long-term contract for $X*10. Stupid things happen in big companies. Or maybe Cook was the inflexible one. Or something else happened. Who knows. My point is that it's extremely plausible that Cook's beef was with the corporate bureaucracy, not the D&D people.)
Latest estimate I saw [for DDI] was just over 70k, giving $8.4Mish per year. Which, for a company the size of Hasbro may well not worth bothering with.
It's also important to note the costs associated with DDI. Developing the existing tools was expensive. Maintaining the servers, developing material for the magazines, and applying the errata are all expensive.
One to three million per year is a reasonable guess for DDI costs. A developer costs $150-250K per year (salary + benefits + facilities) and the DDI team is not large; server costs are negligible these days; applying errata is data entry (cheaply outsourced); new material is mostly being done by freelancers.
My guess is that DDI
net profit is on the order of $10M per year as a reliable, recurring revenue stream. (Yep, it's a total guess. I'm assuming the forum numbers are a very low floor, based on my purely anecdotal experience that I'm the only one of 3-4 DDI subscribers in my group that has a WotC account.) Given that $50M is the target for a Hasbro brand to be considered a "major brand" deserving targeted Hasbro investments, $10M per year would make DDI a golden goose indeed. Even $5M a year, the most conservative estimate I can come up with, is significant.
My guess is that DDI is what's making an extended playtest possible. Along with fiction, I'd bet it's the real D&D revenue stream.
There's absolutely no guarantee that DDI has been a profitable venture, taken over the whole of the 4e edition cycle. That being the case, Hasbro may well be hesitant about investing another tens of millions in developing another new set of tools for 5e.
Given the Gleemax debacle, you're probably right. I suspect those loans have been paid off (or written off) by now, but I agree. The D&D brand is unlikely to get more Hasbro investment.
That said, D&D is (presumably) profitable and can fund its own activities. Hasbro investment is required for big pushes, but not for continuing operations and minor expansions. Given that programmers are very expensive, and also hard to hire these days, I expect we'll see DDI focus on crowd-pleasers that take minimal programming. A good example would be converting previous edition material to electronic form and releasing them as DDI-only.
Similarly, I'll bet we get a Compendium-alike for D&D Next, but we may not see a Character Builder, or at least not one that's as sophisticated as 4e's.
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