If that's true, then why bother with supplements at all? Just bang out a new core set every 3-5 years and save your cash.
I assume there's some sort of feedback in play which means that the optimum profit point involves enough supplements to keep your core customers engaged and ready to pick up the next edition of core books.
Too few supplements and the core shrinks to the point where the money saved on no supplements is less than the loss incurred by lost sales of new corebooks. Too many supplements and you spent more money than you needed to, relative to the amount of extra new corebook sales you engendered.
Was it a successful launch? What metric do we have that says this?
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The fact that we do not know if more books are coming out after PotA might mean they are waiting see how it does before announcing other books. If it was a success, would they need to wait? We could just have one book out this year.
I think it was a successful launch. Besides the "cultural" factos [MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION] (and some others) point to - like the lack of edition-war-style reception, the good reviews, the anniversary feel-good factor, etc - there is also the sales information. Amazon rankings were the strongest ever, and strongly sustained. The IcV2 numbers are running D&D's way. The only information I've seen from store owners suggests they are selling lots of D&D books.
All this adds up to a strong launch. It's very hard for me to believe that it's not also a successful launch, because it is hard to see how, on any realistic projection, it could have been significantly better.
I don't see how the absence of additional announced books is relevant one way or the other. If WotC's experience tells it that supplements don't sell well enough to justify their cost of production, and (perhaps) in addition have an effect of dampening rather than boosting core sales in the medium to longer term (because creating a play environment that is hard for new customers to get into), then they won't make those supplements.
If the company was going to fold because it had nothing to do following its big initial product launch, then I agree it would make sense to question the strategy. But WotC seems to have plenty going on. Most of that is in the non-D&D divisions. But the D&D people also seem to have stuff they're doing, like overseeing boardgames, these semi-annual APs, the free stuff they're posting, handling Twitter traffic, etc.
you have not answered the question being asked which is: How does this current short term success continue without more support?
I agree that the reception was very positive... Up to January. The story shifted from how great 5e is to WotC's communications (or lack there of), their release schedule and lack of PDF/OGL/Digital stuff. From the looks of it, it will only get worse. Ultimately people will just move on at least communication aren't improved, as OGL is released or a release schedule, even anemic, is made public.
I'm not sure what "people will just move on" means. Most D&D players don't play other RPGs. People who have started playing with 5e, or who have picked up 5e as a sequel to AD&D, are not going to "move on".
They may or may not keep playing D&D - perhaps many will play on-and-off - but they will (or at least WotC hopes they will) retain fond memories of D&D, perhaps buy the occasional starter set as a birthday present for a kid in the family, and buy the socks, lunchboxes, movie tickets etc that become available.
From the point of view of a hardcore RPGer, "support" means product being produced for the game. But I think "support" in that sense is pretty orthogonal to supporting the brand.
And the absence of "support" in that sense doesn't mean that the company is floundering, or that the brand is in trouble. It mostly seems to mean that such stuff isn't commercially viable from WotC's point of view. Which is not really a shock, because they've been saying stuff along that line for a while.
