D&D 5E D&D Team Productivity?

[Parmandur]

So by my calculations in the roughly six and half years since 5e's launch WotC have published 24 D&D books and 2 boxes. 3 of the books have been updates of old material (Saltmarsh etc), 5 of them have been partially outsourced to other companys like Sasquatch, Green Ronin etc and 2 have been almost entirely written outside the design studio (Acquisitions and Wildemount).

Now surely that is a pretty low productivity rate?? I mention this now because it seems like a very very long time that this Candlekeep book has been in production.

All of the above comes from a position of love. I own every 5e product in at least two formats and a lot of them in 3 (standard, special edition and Beyond).

They produce 3-4 big, flashy products a year, with a smaller staff than they had during 3E & 4E when they put out a ton of smaller, less flashy products.

In terms of ROI, which really is what matters, their productivity seems to be going fine.

 

[CydKnight]

They don't owe me anything.

 

[Stormonu]

They produce 3-4 big, flashy products a year, with a smaller staff than they had during 3E & 4E when they put out a ton of smaller, less flashy products.

In terms of ROI, which really is what matters, their productivity seems to be going fine.

And they aren't the only one producing content - there are plenty 3rd party publishers who fill in the gaps for those looking for content to purchase.

 

[Mallus]

How is WotC doing using the "how much product have we had to bury in a large hole" metric?

(I believe is technically known as the Atari 2600 ET-Cartridge Scale)

 

[CM]

How is WotC doing using the "how much product have we had to bury in a large hole" metric?

(I believe is technically known as the Atari 2600 ET-Cartridge Scale)

Not just Atari... Didn't TSR have to buy back and pulp a large amount of overproduced late-2e product?

 

[tetrasodium]

At some point a couple years ago I largely quit buying whatever wotc put out because I recognized that was spending more effort replacing too many levels of misplaced FR/planescape specific plot armor & worldbuilding before I could change things to not be in FR than I would just making adventures and campaigns from scratch. Even after doing all that I still had to homebrew al the mechanical stuff left out of those books. Tasha's got played up as something with a lot of variant rules & ACF type things similar to phb2 so I had hope that it would be an olive branch towards people who wanted more than the extreme simplicity at all costs with at least a few new things towards slightly more depth, instead it showed that I need to be just as if not more selective with books like xge & tcoe. Not only is the 5e release cycle slow it is written from the perspective that there is a very specific narrow range of acceptable for d&d beyond which is not to be tolerated rather than including titles for people with interest outside that narrow range.

 

[Mistwell]

That's not the middle ground I'm speaking about. 1e had a slow release rate, as did BECMI. 2e, 3e and 4e had high release rates. 5e is back to slow. The middle ground between the two has never been tried.

I think the release schedule for 5e is faster than 1e's release schedule and slower than 3e's and 4e's so how is that not middle ground between the two?

 

[schneeland]

I have to say the publication schedule is one of the things they do better than they did with 3e (which, for me, collapsed under the weight of its numerous publications). Now if we talk about content, then they are not publishing what I want them to - as @tetrasodium already notes, you get a rather small range of products, and if that's not for you, than you're out of luck.
Yet I have to acknowledge that their strategy seems to be financially successful, so at some point I had to acknowledge that I am apparently no longer their target audience (coincidentally, I was in the "small group of old people we don't really care about too much"-segment in their marketing material). Maybe I get lucky with 6e again (and until then I probably have to stick to my old 1e-3e material).

 

[Staffan]

I wouldn't mind a couple more books a year, but not at the rate of 2 per month like in 2E (and I think 3.5E!).

2 per month? At its height, I believe 2e was more like 20 products per month... definitely double-digits, at least. Of course, those were significantly smaller than 5e's hardback behemoths, but TSR pushed out tons of stuff back in the 90s.

Not just Atari... Didn't TSR have to buy back and pulp a large amount of overproduced late-2e product?

I believe those were just novels. Once game stuff is sold to distributors, it's no longer the publisher's problem to sell it. However, the mass-market book trade have the right to "return" books to the publisher — and I use the term "return" in quotes, because they only have to return the covers and then pulp the rest.

As I recall the tales being told back in the day, the cycle went something like this:
TSR publishes the first Dragonlance novels, which sell a boatload and saves them from bankruptcy. Management goes "Well, that seems to have worked well. Let's do more of that." This leads to TSR publishing lots of D&D-based fiction, which is sold both through game stores and the book trade. However, much of what they publish don't sell anywhere near as well, so the book trade "returns" unsold books in return for credit. They then use the credit to buy more books, many of which don't sell and get "returned". This cycle then goes on for a while, until the book trade (via, I believe, Random House) go "You know what, your shlock doesn't sell. We don't want credit anymore. Give us money."

Meanwhile, TSR had made a lot of other dubious choices, such as spreading out over about a dozen campaign settings, leading to poor sales of individual books and poor cash. Licensing Buck Rogers probably didn't help either. Anyway, TSR was not doing so well financially, and then Random House's demand for money back broke the bank to the point where they couldn't pay their printer to print new issues of Dragon and Dungeon, or other books. As I recall, this was explained to magazine subscribers as being "a problem at the printer".

 

[Urriak Uruk]

So by my calculations in the roughly six and half years since 5e's launch WotC have published 24 D&D books and 2 boxes. 3 of the books have been updates of old material (Saltmarsh etc), 5 of them have been partially outsourced to other companys like Sasquatch, Green Ronin etc and 2 have been almost entirely written outside the design studio (Acquisitions and Wildemount).

Now surely that is a pretty low productivity rate?? I mention this now because it seems like a very very long time that this Candlekeep book has been in production.

All of the above comes from a position of love. I own every 5e product in at least two formats and a lot of them in 3 (standard, special edition and Beyond).

To be fair, they actually have sped up the speed of book production since launch; initially, adventure writing was primarily the brain child of just Chris Perkins (he literally wrote Curse of Strahd when he was supposed to be on vacation). Since then, they've done a lot more of bringing in other writers and consultants, if you like at the list of people who helped write Rime of the Frostmaiden.

It is really hard nowadays for any company to have a big team of full-time writers, especially for things smaller than TV or films. Writers need to eat, so to have them on full-time means they need to get paid, and good writers need to get paid well (or they'll go write somewhere else).

WotC seems to have grown their team somewhat and fills any holes with consultants and part-time writers.

I'll add though, we are unlikely to EVER get more than 4 books a year. The model seems to have become to promote a book every quarter of the year, and not to try promoting multiple books at the same time.