D&D 5E Mike Mearls interview - states that they may be getting off of the 2 AP/year train.

[Morrus]

An edition works if it makes enough money to sustain the company producing it (or, from 3E onward, to justify the division's continued existence to the parent company).

2E failed to sustain TSR. 3E did quite nicely for WotC. Therefore 3E worked and 2E did not. 3E's shorter edition cycle doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the business model.

You're conflating systems with managements. It wasn't 2E (the system) which condemned TSR, it was the management. If truth be told, any system which isn't terrible will sustain a company which owns a solid brand name and who uses it well. If you own "Dungeons & Dragons", industry domination is yours to lose.

 

[Staffan]

2e helped bring TSR to its knees. It didn't do it alone - the novels certainly helped (and were the thing that brought the fatal blow), and I'm sure the money TSR spent on the Buck Rogers license which happened to be partially owned by the company's owner could have been spent better.

It just took a while for it to show, because of book-keeping stuff. When a company makes a product, that's not a "cost" in the book-keeping sense - it's just a reshuffling of assets, from cash-on-hand to inventory. You might have spent $100,000 on printing and such, but now you have $100,000 worth of books. Once sold, you then record the cost (to you) of the book as "Cost of goods sold", and the price the customer (or rather, the distributor) paid as revenue.

Except those books weren't worth $100,000, because people weren't buying them. In the words of Ryan Dancey: I discovered that the cost of the products that company was making in many cases exceeded the price the company was receiving for selling those products. I toured a warehouse packed from floor to 50 foot ceiling with products valued as though they would soon be sold to a distributor with production stamps stretching back to the late 1980s. I was 10 pages in to a thick green bar report of inventory, calculating the true value of the material in that warehouse when I realized that my last 100 entries had all been "$0"'s.

In 1e, the typical adventure sold between 50,000 and 150,000 copies, with the occasional outlier (e.g. White Plume Mountain at 175k). For 2e, they sold about a tenth of that (Source). Certainly, 2e also had a whole bunch of non-adventure books sold (splatbooks, settings, regional sourcebooks, and so on), but it shows how each product in the 90s made a whole lot less profit than in the 80s.

And I'm saying that as someone who loved a lot of what was done with 2e. The original Dark Sun boxed set was a frickin' masterpiece, bringing an almost-dead world to life with strong descriptions and stark imagery. Al-Qadim was a thing of beauty. Jakandor was creative in its description of the same (small) setting from the points of view of two diametrically opposed forces. And Spelljammer had just the right amount of crazy. But 2e certainly wasn't financially successful.

 

[robus]

An edition works if it makes enough money to sustain the company producing it (or, from 3E onward, to justify the division's continued existence to the parent company).

2E failed to sustain TSR. 3E did quite nicely for WotC. Therefore 3E worked and 2E did not. 3E's shorter edition cycle doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the business model.

Hmm - I thought I was with you but I have to agree with Morrus. 2E (as a game system) is separate from 2E (the published material). 2E might have worked just as well as 3E if it had had a more conservative publication schedule. I thought you were using 2E and 3E as shorthand for D&D "eras" but I think I was mistaken.

 

[darjr]

I think someone is cherry picking quotes and facts. The thing of note later on in that passage from Ryan Dancy is that there were stacks and stacks of 1e books. As in stuff from the 1980s. I know 2e was begun by 1989, but most of the things in the 1980s wasn't 2e.

It wasn't 2e, but the management. Bill Slavicsek said "it's raining money out side and you want to catch as much of as you can. You can either make a really big bucket or waste your time and attention by creating a lot really small buckets - either way, you're never going to make more rain".

I.e. it was bad management.

 

[bmfrosty]

I like to think the new format works for them in that selling a million books each year split between 3 titles is better than selling a million books each year split between 12 titles.

Sent from my Pixel using EN World mobile app

 

[Staffan]

I think someone is cherry picking quotes and facts. The thing of note later on in that passage from Ryan Dancy is that there were stacks and stacks of 1e books. As in stuff from the 1980s. I know 2e was begun by 1989, but most of the things in the 1980s wasn't 2e."

"Stretching back to the late 1980s". I'm not a native English-speaker, but to me that indicates that the oldest books were late 80s, and they stretched up to the then-present day.

And I'll note that the focus on setting stuff over core rules/adventures started in the late 80s, when they were publishing both Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, and Oriental Adventures. It snowballed in the 90s with Spelljammer, Dark Sun, Al-Qadim, Birthright, Planescape, Mystara, Ravenloft, and probably some other stuff as well, but the snowball was already rolling downhill in the late 80s.

It wasn't 2e, but the management. Bill Slavicsek said "it's raining money out side and you want to catch as much of as you can. You can either make a really big bucket or waste your time and attention by creating a lot really small buckets - either way, you're never going to make more rain".

I.e. it was bad management.

Oh, I'm not blaming 2e as a system. When I say 2e (at least in this thread's context), I mean the 2e-era proliferation of zillions of books across a dozen settings, as opposed to the current focus on a small number of high-profile releases.

 

[Shasarak]

2e helped bring TSR to its knees. It didn't do it alone - the novels certainly helped (and were the thing that brought the fatal blow), and I'm sure the money TSR spent on the Buck Rogers license which happened to be partially owned by the company's owner could have been spent better.

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But 2e certainly wasn't financially successful.

I believe that your analysis is incorrect - a company does not survive for 10 years with a product that is not financially successful no matter how much fancy accounting it does.

As TSR discovered, printers require payment in cash.

 

[Mistwell]

I didn't play 2e when it was out, and I was under the impression initially that it was broken or not well done. However since then I've bought a bunch of 2e books for the story elements, and found them to be exceptionally well done. Not that my tastes are universal, but it's a lot more difficult now for me to believe 2e failed because of the content. I am sure there were some duds in there, but so far everything I've bought has been really quite good.

 

[GameOgre]

There is no magic role playing game system out there that can overcome mismanagement and poor business decisions.

 

[Dausuul]

You're conflating systems with managements. It wasn't 2E (the system) which condemned TSR, it was the management. If truth be told, any system which isn't terrible will sustain a company which owns a solid brand name and who uses it well. If you own "Dungeons & Dragons", industry domination is yours to lose.

I thought we were discussing release schedules. It wasn't 2E (the system) which condemned TSR; it was 2E (the release schedule), also known as 2E (the fire hose).

Hmm - I thought I was with you but I have to agree with Morrus. 2E (as a game system) is separate from 2E (the published material). 2E might have worked just as well as 3E if it had had a more conservative publication schedule. I thought you were using 2E and 3E as shorthand for D&D "eras" but I think I was mistaken.

No, you were correct. I was assessing business models, not game systems. That's why I made a point of noting that while 4E had its issues, the release schedule was probably not one of them.