D&D General Is DnD being mothballed?
- Thread starter FallenRX
- Start date
Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
Based on Wild Beyond the Witchlight, I'd allow a warlock to have her as an Archfey patron.
Hussar
Legend
PHew. That took a while to wade through.
Just a question.
How is 3-5 pretty meaty books - as in 2-300 pages each, hard cover, full art, plus all the extras like web articles and whatnot count as a "slow" release? I mean, sure, it's slower than other editions but, we all pretty much agree that those were too fast.
How much faster do they need to be? If they bang out 6 books a year, say, then that's a book every two months. There's zero chance that any group will use that much material that fast. So, every year, there's just more glut of back catalogue. Paizo gets away with it because Paizo is a subscription based model - their bread and butter is from that subscriber who is getting a metric ton of material every year.
WotC is not using that model. They are basing it on the idea that every group will use almost every book. No book left behind.
And it works. That's the kicker. It's worked unbelievably well. I dunno about you, but, I've played five or six of the 5e Adventure paths. And my players have played those and more. There are modules that are years old that are STILL selling. That's unheard of in the past. A five year old (or almost ten year old in some cases) that are still selling? And selling well? I think people are ignoring the fact that WotC isn't interested in selling one book. They want to sell you all the books. Which they can't do if they start banging out large numbers of books.
People have said there's a big difference between the 5e release schedule and previous editions. Thing is, no there actually isn't. Even 4e's ludicrous schedule was still only 12 books a year. That's it. The difference between "really slow" and "too fast" is like 2 books a year. New book every other month? That's too fast. Sales of one book cannibalize the sales of another. So, realistically, 5/year is about as fast as it's likely going to be for the foreseeable future.
Which WotC has been pretty darn clear that that's what they're going to do. And they've stuck to it, to their credit. Instead of milking the fandom as hard and fast as possible, they actually seem to be interested in a long term sales strategy. And good for them.
Just a question.
How is 3-5 pretty meaty books - as in 2-300 pages each, hard cover, full art, plus all the extras like web articles and whatnot count as a "slow" release? I mean, sure, it's slower than other editions but, we all pretty much agree that those were too fast.
How much faster do they need to be? If they bang out 6 books a year, say, then that's a book every two months. There's zero chance that any group will use that much material that fast. So, every year, there's just more glut of back catalogue. Paizo gets away with it because Paizo is a subscription based model - their bread and butter is from that subscriber who is getting a metric ton of material every year.
WotC is not using that model. They are basing it on the idea that every group will use almost every book. No book left behind.
And it works. That's the kicker. It's worked unbelievably well. I dunno about you, but, I've played five or six of the 5e Adventure paths. And my players have played those and more. There are modules that are years old that are STILL selling. That's unheard of in the past. A five year old (or almost ten year old in some cases) that are still selling? And selling well? I think people are ignoring the fact that WotC isn't interested in selling one book. They want to sell you all the books. Which they can't do if they start banging out large numbers of books.
People have said there's a big difference between the 5e release schedule and previous editions. Thing is, no there actually isn't. Even 4e's ludicrous schedule was still only 12 books a year. That's it. The difference between "really slow" and "too fast" is like 2 books a year. New book every other month? That's too fast. Sales of one book cannibalize the sales of another. So, realistically, 5/year is about as fast as it's likely going to be for the foreseeable future.
Which WotC has been pretty darn clear that that's what they're going to do. And they've stuck to it, to their credit. Instead of milking the fandom as hard and fast as possible, they actually seem to be interested in a long term sales strategy. And good for them.
Echohawk
Shirokinukatsukami fan
That's not right.
Peak 2e: 1995: 3 hardcovers, 53 softcovers, 15 boxed sets, 7 other products. Total 78 = 6.5/month
Peak 3e: 2006: 19 hardcovers, 5 softcovers, 2 boxed sets, 6 other products. Total 32 = 2.7/month
Peak 4e: 2010: 12 hardcovers, 10 softcovers, 5 boxed sets, 7 other products. Total 34 = 2.8/month
Peak 5e: 2018: 4 hardcovers, 7 other products. Total 11 = 0.9/month.
darjr
I crit!
Mercurius
Legend
I didn't read all 20 pages, so forgive me if my upcoming point has already been made. But consider two possibilities...
You can sell 200K copies each of 5 books for $50 each = $50 million
or...
You can sell 50K copies each of 40 books for $25 each = $50 million
You make the same revenue, but in the first approach you make five big books, while in the latter you make forty smaller ones. Which one do you think is more cost-effective to produce?
(The above numbers aren't mean to be anything more than illustrative)
In the latter approach, you need a larger staff and more creators, while in the former you can get by on a smaller staff and out-source anything more that you need.
Now from a fan perspective, many might prefer the latter or, at least, somewhere in-between. But in terms of business profits and such, well, the choice is obvious.
Mercurius
Legend
I agree with your overall point -- it is obvious -- but am curious why you put 2018 as "peak 5E." First of all, I'm not sure what these "7 other products" are (dice sets?) or why they figure into your calculation. If anything, the make 5E's output seem larger than it actually is (i.e. removing the "other products" from each edition is more impactful to 5E...where 2E is reduced to 71, 5E is reduced to 4).
Secondly, 2019 and beyond all had at least five big products - hardcovers and box sets. 2019 might be peak, because you have four hardcovers, Essentials, Tyranny, plus two starter sets. Or it could be 2022, with five hardcoves plus a box set, plus the DL battle game. This year is just a bit less. 2018, on the other hand, just had four hardcovers plus the "other products" which were rather forgettable. Production ramped up a bit in 2019; 2020 saw a slight dip due to covid, but then it bounced back to "Five Plus" from 2021 on. So I'd say "peak 5E" really started in 2019.
Just a quibble, though.
EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
Now, what happens if we open up this fictitious binary to a spectrum of results? E.g., the curve between 50k copies each of 40 books for $25 each and 200k copies is, say, a square-root curve rather than a linear curve. So, perhaps you sell 100k copies of 20 books for $25 apiece, but your costs only go up by sqrt(2) rather than 2 via working at scale--essentially, you could have (say) three teams working continuously and separately, so each team is putting out 5 books a year, with an additional 5 "all hands on deck" books, as opposed to just one team putting out 5 books a year. Asking slightly more of the individual teams, but not that much more, and exploiting the between-team cooperation/cross-pollination to get more content out.
You could even specialize the teams. One team does exclusively adventures, and builds up a lot of skills for adventure-writing. One team focuses exclusively on monster design. Etc. Each team becomes more efficient than the single team that must do a bit of everything. Then, when you do the cross-pollination, it's to create books for everyone, major highlights/releases.
Essentially, this argument is a very elegant way of begging the question: it assumes that economies of scale cannot apply, that cost-per-book is never sub-linear, and that cost-per-worker cannot be reduced below linear growth through specialization or focus.
There is a certain term that gets bandied about for such things, but I find it rather distasteful, so I'm not going to use it myself. I'll just say that I find that this ignores real-world factors that are highly relevant, creating a trivial binary, rather than the much more realistic incredibly complex problem this actually is.
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EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
No, it's not. The difference between 3e/4e (which had essentially the same pace!) and 5e is about a factor of three. And that's if we're being generous to 5e. It's arguably closer to a factor of four or even five.
Putting out 25% as many books as the previous two editions? Yeah, that's a pretty stark change. And it's why the "minor slowdown" of the past year or two has stuck out so much. When you've cut things down that far, cutting out even one book becomes a very noticeable difference. Especially if the books that are coming out are so thin on player-facing content. A single subclass, a couple feats, some spells. A handful of mostly (entirely?) reprinted races. Etc.
My guess would be that even allowing the big hardcovers, it was beaten out because of the "other products" category, so they went with the one that had the biggest number, even if it wasn't necessarily the most impactful year.
Mercurius
Legend
I hear what you are saying, but the thing is that from the perspective of the suits at Hasbro, there isn't a problem: What they're doing is working in the way that the want it to work - maximizing profits, and doing so in a way without a huge amount of overhead (i.e. a huge staff of designers and/or a huge product catalog). As long as the fan-base is happy (and proves so by spending their money), they'll continue with the same approach.
My sense is that WotC is being run in a very corporate, business-first fashion. This isn't the TSR of Gary's days, when it was a bunch of nerds trying to make their hobby into a business, or even that of 2E and 3E, when it was still clearly lead by gamers, even if under corporate oversight. 5E just feels different to me, and in that regard I think Colville's basic idea is right: D&D is more of a legacy product that will adjust only to maximize profits, rather than as gamers trying to experiment with the game they love. Maybe another false binary, but it just feels like the emphasis has changed. In other words, it doesn't quite feel like a living, growing and evolving game, but more of an artifact that they'll tweak, but not truly evolve (for better or worse).
So from their perspective, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. 5E has been wildly successful, especially since 2017 or so. I don't see them diverging too much from the formula that continues to see the game grow (at least through early last year...haven't read any updates on this front).
