you could include the sage advice, upcoming product info, the unearthed arcana stuff,
You mean like they're already doing in Dragon+?
repeat of the Forgotten Realms part above but using other campaign settings, etc....
You mean like the description of Barovia in the last issue of Dragon+?
Please don't get me started on Dungeon Master's Guild. You sit there and sift through all the mud and occasionally find something okay. You rarely find anything good for free and I don't know about you but I don't trust most of the stuff that is only listed at 1 euro because after a while all those little euros add up and you are stuck with material that is beyond awful.
There is some amazing stuff on the DMs Guild and it really doesn't take
that much work to find it. The preview box can give you a good idea of the content in a product, and you can compare a product with others from the same author. If several are selling well, you know they can reliably produce good stuff.
And lots of people (like the Unearthed Arcana plugs, the shout-outs on the D&D Round Table, these forums) do shout-outs to noteworthy products.
We price the work of D&D creators super low. Making decent content takes weeks. And people expecting it for pretty much free.
I charge super low for my DMsGuild products. $0.50. And I've been lucky enough to sell quite a few. But when you calculate my rate per word for a couple of my most profitable books (traps and diseases) it's $0.01. A quarter of the rate of En5ider and a tenth the rate for WotC. It's not even remotely worth my time from a professional sense, given the hours I put in.
But I do it because I love the game and want to share content with other DMs.
If 5th edition truly is as popular as they claim then I would say this would sell easily.
Would it?
If people were that hungry for content, wouldn't En5ider be a *huge* hit? It has just over a thousand people, one-percent of
Dragon magazine at its peak.
People like D&D and they like playing D&D, but monthly purchases and subscription fees just make most people shrug. They like the occasional big purchase that feels like a treat, if they buy at all.
The magazines numbers were never huge:
http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...-Circulation&p=4136286&viewfull=1#post4136286
Assuming they could get Paizo numbers (30,000) paying $5 a month, the magazine is making $150,000 each month (minus the fees for the people handing the webstore interface). It also needs a full time editor, art director, and layout artist. Possibly more. A half-dozen people worked on the 4e magazines. Before considering the people at the back end handing the digital side, such as bandwidth and website updates.
At industry wages, half your money is gone before you even have to start paying writers for content.
That's assuming 30k people don't balk at the cost of a digital magazine with content they could get cheaper elsewhere. And, more than likely, the conversation would immediately shift and people would resume complaining that the magazine is no longer printed again.
And, realistically, if they wanted to release a digital booklet of Realmslore or some feats or a small adventure, they could do that right now on the DMs Guild. With no special set-up requires, no monthly deadlines, and no subscriptions.