In the PDF age all adventures should be compatible with all editions

[GregoryOatmeal]

It's "everyone who still plays a version of 3E, and is willing to do the minor conversion work to change the adventure to their preferred version of 3E (3E and 3.5E and Pathfinder are all subtly different)

I can't recall meeting anyone that has played 3.0 since 3.5 came out (as in barring 3.5 resources and mandating only 3.0 books) and I see 3.0 content used in 3.5 all the time so I don't think this is really an issue for people. No one produces 3.0 content now and there's never been a 3.0 retroclone. So the 3.0/3.5 thing is just hard to swallow. It does happen with 3.5/PF but I can not imagine most DMs would shy away from running a PF adventure in 3.5 or vice versa. Especially PF DMs that have strong roots in 3.5 and know the system - for them their is no leap back to 3.5.

and is in the market for adventures beyond those already provided by Paizo or the various 3E-compatible companies, and can afford to branch out to a new company even if they want to

WotC has unique IP and strong brand identity (the D&D 3.5 brand. I've seen PF advertisements that declare "3.5 thrives") so Paizo is playing in their home court. Some gamers don't buy 3pp and still consider Paizo to be 3rd party "off-brand". Lots of this demographic stopped buying gaming products entirely when 4E came out. It's just weird how strong the D&D 3.5 brand when it doesn't actually see any first party support.

is willing to pay more for a WotC adventure than for a Paizo adventure, even though it'll include whole swathes of mechanics they can't use

Again, optional supplements produced at minimal price in digital format to expand the audience.

and doesn't already have an emotional/personal interest in not patronizing WotC."

Small gestures like providing 3.5 content would go a long way towards healing those wounds. Most of those gamers are on a WOTC boycott simply because they stopped producing 3.5 content in favor of 4E.

it's certainly not going to make up for the increased production costs and lost sales.

Increased sales and recovering lost brand identity would offset production costs. And how would recovering a demographic lose sales???

 

[gamerprinter]

Again, optional supplements produced at minimal price in digital format to expand the audience.

Under those circumstances - it would be a loss, and a product that is a loss is a product that nobody wants to create (at least no business wants to create - there are exceptions...) As fan created content where money loss or gain is not in question, then it might happen. But WotC? No, they won't do this.

Small gestures like providing 3.5 content would go a long way towards healing those wounds. Most of those gamers are on a WOTC boycott simply because they stopped producing 3.5 content in favor of 4E.

While some might be compelled to purchase WotC products again, such a gesture as providing 3.5 content is no guarantee that the majority would come back as customers. I know I wouldn't, nor most PF fans I know.

Increased sales and recovering lost brand identity would offset production costs. And how would recovering a demographic lose sales???

As stated, would they recover the demographic of lost sales? I doubt it. The increase in sales would be minimal at best.

 

[GregoryOatmeal]

Morrus and co. don't have to turn nearly the sort of profit on any given book that a large company does. If they do much more than break even, well, I'm sure they'd like to do better, but that's still technically a success.

That's and the overhead costs are a fair point

lots of people aren't willing to pay extra for a book where half the mechanics aren't useful for them.

We've discussed this

Plus, there's the fact that adventures are used, in part, to drive sales of the core line. WotC isn't selling 3E core books. Therefore, adventures that encourage people to play more 3E do them less good than adventures that encourage people to play more 4E--even if they sell just as well. (The same would be true in reverse, for Paizo.)

So they should use this to drive sales towards two distinct core lines. A used 3.5 PHB holds value better than almost any other book or media product despite competing with a popular clone game. So they could do a two-pronged strategy and sell two editions. 3.5 and 4E are so different that many fans of one game won't touch the other, so it's high-time they accepted that and marketed to both demographics.

Pride is pretty much zero of an issue in this instance. Do you really believe that either company would hesitate to do this if they thought it was worthwhile? Especially with the economy the way it is?

You don't want to point your customers to the competitor. I think gaming customers are more sophisticated than this.

Don't let the flame wars fool you. The WotC folks and the Paizo folks aren't enemies.

I'm sure they're quite collegial but they're definitely competitors. It would be interesting to see how them producing products for each others systems would impact the partisan bickering.

 

[Marius Delphus]

They're even printing both editions.

EN Publishing products are print-on-demand. No print runs. One customer orders, one physical copy is printed, bound, and mailed (by a third-party vendor). Three orders, three copies. Twenty customers, twenty copies. No orders, no copies (Heaven forfend). No "printings" or print runs at all; no boxes of War of the Burning Sky or Zeitgeist... not even Russ gets a printed copy unless he actually orders one.

EN Publishing is... how shall I put this... not a professional publishing house. Apart from the professional artists we use (and adore), when it comes to D&D and Pathfinder we are a group of ambitious hobby fans who, for the most part, do this in our spare time (of which there just isn't enough). We're just so completely unlike WOTC or Paizo that it's really pointless to try and compare.

 

[Mouseferatu]

WotC has unique IP and strong brand identity (the D&D 3.5 brand. I've seen PF advertisements that declare "3.5 thrives") so Paizo is playing in their home court. Some gamers don't buy 3pp and still consider Paizo to be 3rd party "off-brand". Lots of this demographic stopped buying gaming products entirely when 4E came out. It's just weird how strong the D&D 3.5 brand when it doesn't actually see any first party support.

That demographic exists, but it's not nearly as big as you think it is. Really, it's not. Pathfinder now has a huge portion of that market, and the name "Dungeons & Dragons" printed on the cover is not going to sway most of them.

Seriously, the companies have done the market research on this. They've run the numbers.

Again, optional supplements produced at minimal price in digital format to expand the audience.

I honestly don't know how many more ways I can say this.

A) Such products will still cost more than any equivalent offered for a single system alone, even done "minimally." (Assuming you still have WotC's overall production standard in mind for "minimal." Of course, if you go below that, lots of people won't buy them because they're ugly or look cheap.)

B) Such products will not expand the audience to a sufficient extent to pay for their extra costs.

Increased sales and recovering lost brand identity would offset production costs. And how would recovering a demographic lose sales???

And that's what I'm telling you--it wouldn't. The portion of the 3.5 market that WotC could potentially regain this way is tiny. It wouldn't offset production costs.

And you can lose sales recovering a demographic if you do it by creating a product that lots of your existing demographic won't buy. And lots of 4E players won't pay extra for a module that costs more due to 3E material, or vice-versa. (And rightly so.)

As far as supporting two lines, the arguments for not doing that have been around since the days of Basic and Advanced. I'm not going to rehash them here; suffice it to say, it's not sustainable.

Look, I get that you want WotC to do this. But really and truly, it's just not feasible.

 

[Hussar]

Increased sales and recovering lost brand identity would offset production costs. And how would recovering a demographic lose sales???

It may not lose sales, but it certainly could lose money. Remember, you're not talking about a one time cost here. This would have to be done for EVERY module. The margins on modules are very, very slim. There's a reason WOTC doesn't do modules that much and 99% of RPG publishers out there barely do them at all. Paizo is the outlier here, not the typical.

Step outside of D&D for a second and name four GURPS modules. Or Vampire modules. After all, Vampire was the number two game for a long time. At least a couple of modules should have made the rounds. I'm not sure, but, did White Wolf actually make any straight up modules for Vampire?

A module costs nearly the same as a book to produce. It's not that far off. But there is a very solid ceiling as to how much you can charge for a module. Anything that adds to the price of producing a module is just eating profit. If you can make that up in volume, great.

But again, when the best selling pdf's sell, maybe, 2-3000 copies, volume just isn't there.

 

[prosfilaes]

Step outside of D&D for a second and name four GURPS modules.

The Old Stone Fort, Flight 13, Wild Cards: Aces Abroad, <s>Space: Unnight</s>. That's not counting the 128 page books that consisted of 3 adventures: Cyberpunk Adventures, Space Adventures, Fantasy Adventures, Supers Adventures, Time Travel Adventures.

Now I look at the GURPS page; Space: Unnight was apparently not an adventure, so we'll call on Space: Stardemon to replace it. I forgot about Martial Arts Adventures, and there's a number more, though a lot of them are the old solo adventures.

 

[Barastrondo]

Step outside of D&D for a second and name four GURPS modules. Or Vampire modules. After all, Vampire was the number two game for a long time. At least a couple of modules should have made the rounds. I'm not sure, but, did White Wolf actually make any straight up modules for Vampire?

A few. But they did not sell well enough to make it a viable long-term business model.

The problem with adventures is that they sell to a subset of a subset. First you have the subset of "people willing to run a game"; Storyteller handbooks never sold as well for us as players' guides (and I doubt they do for other people, either). Within that you have the subset of "GMs who find pre-published adventures useful." Many don't -- while adventures sell convenience, sometimes that's just not enough to make up for the fact that a pre-published adventure is not conveniently designed for your group's quirks. The more you have to tweak it to suit your group, the less convenience you're purchasing.

What we're talking about here is a subset within that subset of a subset: people who want pre-published adventures, who are willing to settle for conversion jobs instead of original adventures, and who will spend money on these things in addition to buying all the stuff you normally sell to them (instead of cutting their purchases of your stuff elsewhere).

Catering to this market is not a license to print money.

 

[Barastrondo]

double post when does that happen? How embarrassing!

 

[Hussar]

The Old Stone Fort, Flight 13, Wild Cards: Aces Abroad, <s>Space: Unnight</s>. That's not counting the 128 page books that consisted of 3 adventures: Cyberpunk Adventures, Space Adventures, Fantasy Adventures, Supers Adventures, Time Travel Adventures.

Now I look at the GURPS page; Space: Unnight was apparently not an adventure, so we'll call on Space: Stardemon to replace it. I forgot about Martial Arts Adventures, and there's a number more, though a lot of them are the old solo adventures.

*Points to Barastrondo's post*

I believe that was the point I was going for. I suppose in a system as old as GURPS, there would be modules. My point was, they aren't exactly burning up the airwaves as people talk about them.

But I do stand corrected.