WotC WotC can, and probably should support multiple editions of D&D.

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

aren't they stopping the sales of 2024 when 2025 is released?

Yes.

Better would have been to say "there's no market for Madden '25, when we just sold them Madden '24," which is clearly not true.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

This was a factor but it wasn't the only problem TSR had. As far as I understand it, they pretty much always made money off their RPG sales so I don't even think this was a major contributing factor to their bankruptcy.

There was some scholarship published in the past year that suggested whole lines of TSR settings never made any money. If that's accurate, it's hard to imagine that not contributing to their financial collapse.

I imagine WotC just doesn't see it in their interest to sell multiple versions of D&D.

This is the bottom line. They have their own way of making these decisions, some of which seem counterintuitive to outsiders, to put it mildly.

 

[Alzrius]

But other than some reliable staples like Vanilla and Cherry, the new flavors tend to get dropped after a short while.

I for one would be perfectly happy to pay for a limited series of Grape D&D products.

 

[Zardnaar]

Sodas fairly cheap to produce is a big difference and vastly bigger market.

 

[Clint_L]

This was a factor but it wasn't the only problem TSR had. As far as I understand it, they pretty much always made money off their RPG sales so I don't even think this was a major contributing factor to their bankruptcy.

They definitely did not always make money off their RPG sales. As documented in Slaying the Dragon and elsewhere, after purchasing TSR, WotC did an extensive analysis of, essentially, what went wrong. One the the main contributing factors was the publication of too many mutually exclusive D&D product lines (settings mostly, but also two distinct versions of the game) that, per the numbers, not only were not profitable but could never have been profitable.

The reason they did that had to do with a really unusual publishing deal that had been worked out in the Gygax era, where they were getting paid up front based on projected book sales. That became, in essence, a scam where TSR was publishing more books than they could sell in order to get the advances, and using that cash to stay afloat but building up vast debt to their publisher in the process. Meanwhile, their customer base was becoming increasingly divided between distinct versions of D&D.

TLDR: TSR was losing money on RPG sales for years and was surviving on borrowed time while paying to warehouse vast numbers of books that they could never sell.

 

[Morrus]

You seem to be taking this personally, which I certainly am not intending.

No, I just disagree with you and am quite sarcastic.

WotC makes enough bone-headed decisions that I don't think we can say "if it was a good idea, WotC would automatically be doing it."

They have 95% of the TTRPG market. Maybe they make bad decisions which we like to talk about, but they clearly make good ones too. See: 95% of the TTRPG market. I don’t have 95% of the TTRP market. Do you?

Don’t mistake online outrage for worldwide sales figures .People buy things from the worst companies. Companies which do far worse than anything WotC has ever done.

And "it couldn't possibly work!" is worth at least examining with examples of companies that do something similar.

You’re comparing mass-market retailers to IP creators. They’re not even the same industry. WotC isn’t a pet store chain. Also, pet stores probably aren’t set up to develop worldwide tabletop roleplaying games.

If this topic is going to upset folks, it should probably be dropped. But that's not something I would have anticipated.

No, nobody is upset. But when they think you’re wrong, people are allowed to say so. That’s how conversation works.

 

[teitan]

Because when you divide your customer base like that, you are multiplying your print costs by 3 and dividing the audience for each by 3. Your profits vanish into a black hole. It’s about economies of scale and print run costs which reduce by volume.

tl;dr—You don’t compete with yourself.

My own TL;DR is that the RPG industry does not generate enough money for one publisher, even the 1800 lbs gorilla that is WOTC and D&D, to justify the cost at all and the sales would be so miniscule in comparison to the new thing that it would read as a loss.

They're doing what even CHaosium has been so good at, converting old content to the new system. 5e is so quick and easy to convert older materials, aside from 4e, that it's really moot and that was by design.

 

[bmfrosty]

TTRPGs aren't some special unique product category. Heck, TTRPG fans can reliably be counted on to purchase stuff they don't need (if you've actually run and completed every adventure WotC has published for 5E, WotC should buy you and your group VIP tickets to GenCon) that already duplicates the stuff that they've got (no one really needs dozens of dice, as much as it pains me to say it).

Dozens of dice? Amateur.

Maybe Unreal Engine is a better analogy. I don't know that there's a great video game analogy.

 

[MerricB]

The fact of the matter is that video game companies have no fear of flooding the market with content or about competing with themselves.

Have you see the state of the video game industry at the moment? Mass layoffs and studio closures.

HUGE amounts of money being spent on stuff that doesn't get even close to making the money back.

Recent analysis of the marketplace shows that 60% of play time went to 6+ year old games. The video game industry is in an incredibly unhealthy space.

The older, traditional version relied on people moving from game to game, always purchasing new ones. When games last 10-50 hours, then you can treat them as consumables. A player plays a game, finishes it, then buys a new one. So, more individual games get sold.

Most companies don't put out two games at the same time. They have a break between them.

But even when a company like Capcom or Sony put out two games at the same time, they aren't the same type of game, and the markets for both are big enough to support them. But with TTRPGs? The market is tiny in comparison. And for most games apart from D&D, the margins are terrible. And for the big TTRPGs, they aren't consumables. They're the lifetime games.

In theory, Wizards of the Coast could produce a second RPG, but unless the production costs were incredibly low, the return for investment wouldn't be worth it. Spending $100 to get back $101 means you would have been better than investing your money in a bank or the stock market. Spending $100 to get back $120 is worthwhile.

(Sony's margins for video games are at a decade low - just 6% for Q4 2023. That means for every $100 investment, they got back $106. It had been at 12% for the previous four years. Nintendo's are at 29.25%).

D&D is a lifetime game with microtransactions (supplements!)

Cheers!

 

[Staffan]

Alternity would suggest would suggest "no".

Right. They did have a Star Wars license for a few years though – but that used a version of d20 rather than a whole new system (closer to d20 Modern than D&D though).