D&D 5E Am I no longer WoTC's target audience?

Oofta

Legend
I feel like you're getting a bit silly here on two points.

First off, I don't think a two or four-year-old looking at a D&D book "generates future players" in any meaningful way. Otherwise I'd have been a zoologist, paleontologist, or pilot or something. And indeed pretty much everyone looks at tons of cool-looking books which have zero impact on their future life choices at that age. Definitely the most influential period for artwork on my hobbies and interests in later life was significantly later than that, at eight plus. I'm sure that varies, but I very much doubt it's normal to get into a hobby because you were exposed to it aged two. Otherwise model railways would still be big.

Second off, I think the idea of two or four-year-olds "getting a kick out of" D&D books is er, questionable. D&D often features some pretty terrifying and/or violent imagery. I know that, as a kid, even a fair bit older than that, the imagery from some stuff that seems utterly innocuous as an an adult, genuinely gave me nightmares, and I was not a "sensitive" kid - quite the opposite. The Monster Manual in particular I would question giving to a kid under about seven or eight. Some kids will be immune, but some kids watch Alien aged eight and don't blink an eyelid, so that doesn't mean much. I don't think WotC are, nor should be targeting "two to four-year-olds" in their main book line.



Sorry, no.

This is not a reasonable approach. It's a facile one that doesn't hold up to scrutiny. WotC certainly attempt to find out about the market, but how successful they are, what their methods are, and how much they actually know is massively open to question. It's easy to be snooty and dismissive towards people who are suggesting WotC are perhaps making a mistake, to take a high-handed and contemptuous position of "Oh look, an internet-man thinks he knows what might work! How tremendously funny!", which is basically what you're doing, even if you don't mean to.

But this is WotC. They are deeply fallible. This is the company that came out with 4E, and more importantly, 4E's market strategy and product approach. You think they did less market research then? You think they were less competent then? You think companies continually get better at this? (hint: they do not) You think the same company that had flops with so much 3E and 4E material is always making good choices? You can't run with "Companies always know better!" whilst there's clear evidence of said companies making serious mistakes. 5E exists because WotC messed up with 4E.

5E's success seems to me to be very simple - they're essentially starving the market rather than flooding it, thus absolutely anything they release at all is almost certain to sell well. It's a good strategy for high profit with low financial investment, there's no denying that. But that doesn't mean it's actually what would be most profitable or most successful for D&D overall, and there's little to no evidence WotC is even considering other strategies. All the evidence we have, I would suggest, is that WotC, very early in 5E, before release even, decided on an extremely conservative sales strategy for 5E, sticking to a small number of products which were sure things, and the odd opportunistic media tie-in (nothing wrong with that!), rather than going for a more maximal strategy. I mean, do you not see how cautious they were even with Eberron? I don't think they really want to sell new versions of extant settings. I'm less sure, though, that that's because they won't sell - I suspect it's more out of a wild abundance of caution and an utter, stark terror of flooding the market.
Do you sit in on the committee meetings that make these decisions? Have an insider view of their spreadsheets and decision making process? Because otherwise everything you just is about as valid an assertion as saying they use a magic 8-ball to make decisions.

I think that it's simple logic. Flooding the market simply saturates it to the point that they can't make a significant profit. It's hasn't worked long term for any edition. The TTRPG industry has really thin margins, selling products that spike and then drop like a rock has been a losing strategy in the past. Why would it be any different now?
 

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generic

On that metempsychosis tweak
Do you sit in on the committee meetings that make these decisions? Have an insider view of their spreadsheets and decision making process? Because otherwise everything you just is about as valid an assertion as saying they use a magic 8-ball to make decisions.

I think that it's simple logic. Flooding the market simply saturates it to the point that they can't make a significant profit. It's hasn't worked long term for any edition. The TTRPG industry has really thin margins, selling products that spike and then drop like a rock has been a losing strategy in the past. Why would it be any different now?
It isn't, but that's not a great curve to continue, and to continually reinforce by starving consumers. WotC controls the TTRPG market. If WotC falls, the market is devastated. They have the power to attempt to make small market changes over time.
 

Let's say 5th Ed is like Ninendo for children and casual players and Pathfinder is XBox or Playstation for hardcore games.

Designing a game with lot of crunch needs a lot of work to avoid potential abuses by munchkings finding some legal loophole.

And you have to remember the strategy is linked with translations to other languanges, and most of titles aren't translated. This may be a second reason for a lower candence of titles.

I want the metaplot of my favorite lines to be continued but if you really want a good plot, then you will have to hire the best writters and scripters from the media industry. And most of fantasy writters would rather to create their own worlds from zero.
 

This has certainly been the case for me, as I purchased Xanathar's, Volo's, Mordenkainen's, TFtYP, and GoS not because they were products which I examined deeply before purchase, but because, aside from adventures, they might be the only source of 5E crunch I am able to acquire for quite a while.

Yes exactly. With 5E, I've bought a number of books I extracted relatively little value from, didn't really enjoy, and didn't really want to buy, simply because that was it, crunch-wise, for that year.

Now, I'm not saying that's a bad strategy! Look, it worked! WotC made me buy books I didn't really want and don't really like owning (SCAG being a perfect example, there is literally nothing about that book I wanted but the crunch - not a word!). I mean, here's the thing for me - WotC can either sell me one book a year I barely want, or they could potentially sell me three or four out of five books a year I DO want.

I think the big problem is physical books. WotC is still tied to them and clearly they sell. If they were full-digital, there'd be very little downside to increasing output significantly, because the cost of creating a book (even with extensive playtesting etc.) is absolutely peanuts compared to printing and shipping and so on.
 

It's about return on investment. I have no doubts WotC could profitably publish far more books than they have in the 5E era. Paizo hasn't lost money publishing far more titles to a far smaller audience in the last few years.

But the strategists at Hasbro clearly want to maximize return with the lowest investment possible. The 5E core books are selling at rates than their wildest projections. But unexpectedly high revenue has not spurred more investment in WotC or more content. Hasbro will keep WotC on a bare sustenance diet and reap high profits rather then invest more with a lower rate of return.

So the answer to why no Greyhawk or Dark Sun isn't because there's no audience for those books, or that WotC wouldn't make money from them, or even that WotC cares only about fostering new players. The answer is Hasbro has no interest in dedicating X dollars to a book that will generate 1.3 X in profits when they know each of their two books a year will generate 1.8 X in profits.
 

So the answer to why no Greyhawk or Dark Sun isn't because there's no audience for those books, or that WotC wouldn't make money from them, or even that WotC cares only about fostering new players. The answer is Hasbro no interest in dedicating X dollars to a book that will generate 1.3 X in profits when they know each of their two books a year will generate 1.8 X in profits.

Yes, this, spot-on. I definitely could not have put it that well or that succinctly.
 

Flooding the market simply saturates it to the point that they can't make a significant profit. It's hasn't worked long term for any edition. The TTRPG industry has really thin margins, selling products that spike and then drop like a rock has been a losing strategy in the past. Why would it be any different now?

I'd suggest there's a middle ground between 'flooding the market' and the release tempo WotC has employed for 5E.
 




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