How many people subscribe to D&D stuff?

MerricB said:
The one question I have is if you let your subscription lapse and you DON'T visit the community site, whether the group membership properly expires or not. Has this been checked? (It doesn't add you until you have a community membership, but does it unsubscribe you the same way?)
Click to expand...

I'd be surprised if this was the case. I'm not aware of any forum community where updates to your account don't propagate until you log in. The only reason you're not added to the group until you create an account is that there's nothing to add before that point.
 

log in or register to remove this ad


I watched the numbers a bit yesterday and at one point the number did go down (81265 to 81264) but then it was up again by the end of the day (81270).

They could have a 1000 enlightened or disaffected users leaving per month but have 2200 people ready to jump in or back on to the crunch wagon. This week seems to be averaging ~+40 per day.

Every gamer you've ever known could cancel this month and they will still end up with positive growth for the month.

BTW 81,300 this morning.

DDI_over_Time.jpg
 
Last edited:

MerricB said:
The one question I have is if you let your subscription lapse and you DON'T visit the community site, whether the group membership properly expires or not. Has this been checked? (It doesn't add you until you have a community membership, but does it unsubscribe you the same way?)
Click to expand...

Yeah, that's one of a couple corner-cases that COULD skew things a lot.
 

Someone over on RPG.net noticed that this means, at a minimum, 4e is making about half a million dollars a month with only token labor.

The decision not to print more books is making a lot more sense now!

-O
 

Dannager said:
I'd be surprised if this was the case. I'm not aware of any forum community where updates to your account don't propagate until you log in. The only reason you're not added to the group until you create an account is that there's nothing to add before that point.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I'd be surprised as well. I just like to be thorough. :)

Cheers!
 

Obryn said:
Someone over on RPG.net noticed that this means, at a minimum, 4e is making about half a million dollars a month with only token labor.

The decision not to print more books is making a lot more sense now!

-O
Click to expand...

Not entirely token, but $6 million/yr is easily enough to employ 30 full-time high-end IT people, at a high burdened rate. A fraction of that should suffice for hardware, and bandwidth, so even if you assume DDI employs 10 full-time people with a lot of overhead and high salaries it must be generating some pretty decent cashflow. If not then I'd be wondering about the management a bunch more than the product. I mean, maybe it has potential to do more, but few and far between are the online subscriber-based services that charge $7-10 a month and have 5 digit sized user bases.
 

AbdulAlhazred said:
Not entirely token, but $6 million/yr is easily enough to employ 30 full-time high-end IT people, at a high burdened rate. A fraction of that should suffice for hardware, and bandwidth, so even if you assume DDI employs 10 full-time people with a lot of overhead and high salaries it must be generating some pretty decent cashflow.
Click to expand...

Again, 10 full-time employees dedicated to DDI would surprise me, especially given that there are no apps in active development at the moment. I can see 10 if they were supporting an in-house software development team (and I've worked with teams smaller than that on application suite products), but right now they're sort of coasting on what's already been developed, and merely integrating content from the magazines. That's probably manageable with a couple full-time people, or some part-time work from an interdepartmental software team (WotC has their own software development people working on other IPs like M:tG).

If not then I'd be wondering about the management a bunch more than the product. I mean, maybe it has potential to do more, but few and far between are the online subscriber-based services that charge $7-10 a month and have 5 digit sized user bases.
Click to expand...

We're looking at potentially a 6-digit sized user base by the time 5e rolls around. Heck, given that people aren't added to the group until they create a community account, it wouldn't surprise me if it were already 6-digits.
 

Obryn said:
Someone over on RPG.net noticed that this means, at a minimum, 4e is making about half a million dollars a month with only token labor.

The decision not to print more books is making a lot more sense now!

-O
Click to expand...

I look at it this way. At what time in D&D's history has anyone ever had the cashflow that they could coast for two years without producing new (as in not reprint) books? That's pretty difficult for any publishing company. I've always thought that it was the DDI that is letting WOTC take so long to bring out 5e.
 

I think somewhere I confirmed that you are not added to the group until you setup a community account. I can't find it or really be sure that I nailed it as a fact. And besides it might have changed since then, I doubt it, but it might have.

Though being able to see the folks with a community account listed in the pages of the users makes me think that it still works that way.
 

Remove ads

Top