D&D 5E Light release schedule: More harm than good?

[airwalkrr]

I am comfortably happy with the present release schedule. It does not strain my gaming budget, and is considerate of WotC considering the price of their product has gone up considerably in recent years.

 

[Parmandur]

What's preferred by some part of the customer base may not be food for business.

 

[Hussar]

So basically, what's good for the customer may not be for the business.

That goes largely without saying. Taken to an extreme, it would be great for customers if everything was free and plentiful, but, that's pretty poor business sense. Poor pricing controls contributed to the demise of TSR.

From a customer POV, having a new book out every month might be great because you have so many choices. From a business POV, though, it might not be great because it leads to edition churn that much faster as the supplements continuously eat away at the bottom line.

 

[Hussar]

Interesting article on the front page sheds some light on this topic I think:

http://www.enworld.org/forum/conten...liced-Very-Thinly&postid=6527459#.VN0wBUIVfFI

Shows just how tiny margins we're talking about.

 

[Parmandur]

That goes largely without saying. Taken to an extreme, it would be great for customers if everything was free and plentiful, but, that's pretty poor business sense. Poor pricing controls contributed to the demise of TSR.



From a customer POV, having a new book out every month might be great because you have so many choices. From a business POV, though, it might not be great because it leads to edition churn that much faster as the supplements continuously eat away at the bottom line.

From my customer point of view, if they released something every month I'd stop buying. Every once and a while, made an event, is far more attractive than a shovelware approach.

 

[Staffan]

From my customer point of view, if they released something every month I'd stop buying. Every once and a while, made an event, is far more attractive than a shovelware approach.

Me, I think one book per month is about right. Not a big honkin' hardback like Hoard of the Dragon Queen though - two or three of those per year is probably about right (one big adventure, one big setting book, and one big book of miscellaneous rule stuff - perhaps alternate between setting and rule expansion). But add in a few 64-, 96-, and 128-page books to the mix - a lot of them being adventures, some setting sourcebooks, and stuff like that.

Would I buy it all? Probably not. But not all customers want the same thing, and that means that variety is good.

 

[Cybit]

Some of the assumptions about the profitability of 4E and how many people actually play PF are not accurate, fyi.

I think their reasoning for slowing the schedule down is wise; what usually contributes to the death of a system is the demands of ever rising profits, which usually lead to more and more splat books, which then usually overloads the systems with too many options. Even Pathfinder, who is using the single hardbound book a year bit, has hit the saturation point with many of their customers (see PFS: Core). That's with a fanbase that is predisposed to liking lots of options as well. I think every edition has a saturation point for options and books, and the longer you can stave off that saturation point (to an extent), the longer the edition will survive.

I think WotC's strategy to make the game long lasting is to decouple the survival of the product from the sales of the books. If you know that you're going to always be making money regardless of how many books you sell in a year - what would you be able to do? What if your goal is to rebuild the brand of D&D, so that another whole generation of gamers has at least played it, or messed around with it? You could pick and choose what books to make - you can work on universes rather than splat books - you can even take risks. I'm OK with that. It is easy to look at an earlier edition of a game, when you have 5+ years of content, and then look at a new edition and feel like "there's not enough stuff here!". But fundamentally, you're comparing years and years of published materials for a system versus a system that has been out for, what, 6 months?

I'm OK with the slower pace. The reasoning is sound, and it makes the game far, far more accessible to brand new players.

 

[Hussar]

Me, I think one book per month is about right. Not a big honkin' hardback like Hoard of the Dragon Queen though - two or three of those per year is probably about right (one big adventure, one big setting book, and one big book of miscellaneous rule stuff - perhaps alternate between setting and rule expansion). But add in a few 64-, 96-, and 128-page books to the mix - a lot of them being adventures, some setting sourcebooks, and stuff like that.

Would I buy it all? Probably not. But not all customers want the same thing, and that means that variety is good.

See, the problem is, those 96 or 128 page books cost about the same to produce. So much of the cost is art budget, rather than word count that it doesn't make a whole lot of difference from the game maker's side of the equation.

 

[delericho]

Me, I think one book per month is about right. Not a big honkin' hardback like Hoard of the Dragon Queen though - two or three of those per year is probably about right (one big adventure, one big setting book, and one big book of miscellaneous rule stuff - perhaps alternate between setting and rule expansion). But add in a few 64-, 96-, and 128-page books to the mix - a lot of them being adventures, some setting sourcebooks, and stuff like that.

Would I buy it all? Probably not. But not all customers want the same thing, and that means that variety is good.

Indeed. I think the ideal (for me) would be a 'main line' consisting of the core rulebooks, splatbooks, new monster books, and similar, with about 4 books released a year; plus an 'adventure line' consisting of about 4 books a year; plus a 'setting line' again consisting of about 4 books a year. (Actually, even better might be two settings each with a couple of books per year.)

That gets us to 1 book a month, while not having the same expectation that people would buy everything - lots of people would skip the setting(s) for example, and I suspect most people would pick and choose which adventures to buy.

Of course, there are good commercial reasons why they're not doing that.

 

[Staffan]

See, the problem is, those 96 or 128 page books cost about the same to produce. So much of the cost is art budget, rather than word count that it doesn't make a whole lot of difference from the game maker's side of the equation.

I'm fairly certain that a 96-page book on average has less art in it than a 256-page book - the art cost ought to be roughly proportional to page count (plus some for the cover). Sure, there are some economies of scale, but not to the point where a 96-page book costs just as much as a 256-pager. Otherwise Paizo wouldn't be churning out smaller books like crazy. They charge $13 for a 32-page Player's Companion, $20 for a 64-page Campaign Setting, $23 for a 96-page Adventure Path, and $40 for their big hardbacks (usually 256 pages, occasionally more). Part of that is, of course, that they're expecting to sell a lot more of, say, Advanced Class Guide than of Belkzen, Hold of the Orc Hordes.