When is WotC going to crank up it's D&D pdf releases?

I recognize they are getting through a lot of material for a lot of editions, but I am curious as to when they'll get round to releasing the core books for all editions beyond the Basic Rules Cyclopedia and Red Box. I'd also like to see some of the core settings released too.

Is there a particular reason for not releasing these or is it just a matter of time and patience?

TrippyHippy said:

I recognize they are getting through a lot of material for a lot of editions, but I am curious as to when they'll get round to releasing the core books for all editions beyond the Basic Rules Cyclopedia and Red Box. I'd also like to see some of the core settings released too.

Is there a particular reason for not releasing these or is it just a matter of time and patience?

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Honestly, who would really know? This is WotC. At best we see premeditated ad hoc-ery from them; while there may be a strategy behind the scenes, it has certainly never been communicated to the customer base.

Patience, Grasshopper.

TrippyHippy said:

Is there a particular reason for not releasing these or is it just a matter of time and patience?

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My top speculation runs thus: if they made a concerted effort to get it all out there, they could easily succeed and get the attention of fans for a short period of time. While there is a market for the material, it is small, and quickly saturated. There'd be a burst of buying and interest, and then nothing, pretty much forever. If they make it a low-level effort, with bits of older content coming out now and then, it costs them less in resources, and they have you coming back to look what they have to offer (and thus, relevant to you) for years.

Last 2 weeks were 9 products each.

For those who are actually filling in collections that is a very aggressive pace.

One of the side effects of reprinting the 1e and 2e core books is that they now have Original Electronic versions of those books instead of just OCR scans.

I think they want to give the physical products a little more time in the limelight.

What started as 2-3 per week has accelerated to 9 per week in less than a year.

It is slow going. It will be many years before everything is available.
But I imagine some of the delay is getting new scans. They probably don't have a lot of people doing it.

I can understand the delay in getting Core books out, because you don't want to compete with your own game. Settings and adventures can be adapted but Core rules can't. If 5e does well I can see them risking it though.

I have to imagine part of it too is the concern that a whole mess of people are going to complain if errata is not included within the new scans. Not that they should expect the pdfs of the core books to be fully edited and errata'd... but when have the gaming audience ever reacted rationally like that? So we have much larger books with many more things that could be edited and errata'd, and an audience at the gate just waiting to bitch about it if they don't go through the effort to accomplish it.

Then of course to reiterate what Jester Canuck rightly put out there... all these modules and things that they're releasing can be used (with a small bit of modification) with the 5E rules. So why would they want people to buy 1E or 2E core book scans right now and start playing those older games, and thus be less likely to pick up 5E when it's released in the summer? There's enough non-core book product out there that they can drop 6 to 10 products every week or two, while holding back core book scans until many months (if not a year or two) past the release of 5E (when hopefully most of those people will have bought the 5E books themselves.)