How many people subscribe to D&D stuff?

Dannager said:
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).
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Yeah, 10 was sort of my "it can't be more than this! number", though headcount can tend to pile up. Still, I doubt they have super high overhead nor all $100k salaries either, so you could have 20 people realistically and still probably have PLENTY of cash flow. I'd be surprised if they had less than 5 people, but some of them may have other duties of course. They DID have a number of software guys for a while. DDI may not have ALWAYS been a cash cow, early on.

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.
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Hussar said:
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.
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Yeah, if you imagine it could be 6 digits users, and they seem to be able to run on no book sales you'd HAVE to assume that's at least partly a matter of having some nice cash flow. I'd certainly be QUITE happy to run DDI as a business, I'm sure it would be no problem at all to make a very nice return on that as it stands now. Even counting what they sunk into it, and that a bunch of money was wasted back in 2006-7 it would be hard to imagine bad overall numbers.
 

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And, let's be honest, the losses back in 06 and 07 would be long written off by now.

I think it's particularly telling that there were zero layoffs this Christmas. That's like the first time in how many years?
 

Hussar said:
And, let's be honest, the losses back in 06 and 07 would be long written off by now.

I think it's particularly telling that there were zero layoffs this Christmas. That's like the first time in how many years?
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Only a couple. IIRC, there was another year pretty recently where we didn't hear of layoffs in the D&D team.
 

They didn't have Xmas layoffs the one recent year that they had a large mid-year purge in May or thereabouts.

I'm not surprised for no layoffs this year. They're already running really thin in terms of staff compared to prior years, and that's even before you consider the needs in the buildup to a new edition.

Plus several people have left on their own terms (Monte and Stan! for instance).
 

I find the DDI subscriber numbers to be an interesting puzzle, and I like the "detective work" done so far. But I'm curious: is there anyone on the community list that is no longer a DDI subscriber? I don't have access to the list - has anyone copied it in an accessible place?
 


Ferghis said:
There might be smarter ways to get this list, but since they're listed at 10 per page, and there are over 80,000 members, it would be a pain in the neck to copy the list.
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You'd probably want to do a bunch of curl's stuck inside a script, yes - manually it would be a bit tough ;)
 

Gilbetron said:
I find the DDI subscriber numbers to be an interesting puzzle, and I like the "detective work" done so far. But I'm curious: is there anyone on the community list that is no longer a DDI subscriber? I don't have access to the list - has anyone copied it in an accessible place?
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It's been tested with a few examples in this thread.

-O
 



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