7 Years of D&D Stories? And a "Big Reveal" Coming?

When asked what he was working on, WotC's Chris Perkins revealed a couple of juicy tidbits. They're not much, but they're certainly tantalizing. Initially, he said that "Our marketing team has a big reveal in the works", and followed that up separately with "Right now I'm working on the next seven years of D&D stories". What all that might mean is anybody's guess, but it sounds like there are plans for D&D stretching into the foreseeable future! Thanks to Barantor for the scoop!

 

[DEFCON 1]

But, if you *really* want new content every month, it's easy to buy the big book and only read 50-odd pages every month, saving the rest for later. You have the same experience, only it's cheaper.

Exactly! Just read one Episode of the Adventure Path at a time! Read the chapter... then run however many sessions it takes to finish it. Then read the next chapter and run that. Both books will take most tables well past the release date of Princes of the Apocalypse, so by the time you're finished you'll have a whole new book waiting for you!

 

[chriton227]

You want as many people as possible to buy all your products. Maximum sales. If that means fewer products then that's sound buisness. If more product reduces sales of individual products that means less profit and is problematic.

Exactly. The term I've heard used is cannibalization. If you release product Y and it cannibalizes sales from your product X, then you may end up in a situation where once you factor in the development costs of the products neither X nor Y are profitable, while X may have been profitable on it's own if Y was never released. Every product you buy not only has a per-unit cost (printing, distribution, labor to produce, etc.), but a fixed cost (R&D, SG&A, etc.) that is effectively spread across every unit of that product sold. You want to sell as many units of each product as possible, since the smaller each unit's share of the fixed cost it, the higher the profit per unit. Cannibalizing sales from your own product serves to effectively increase the cost of each book you produce, and has to be factored in when planning product releases. This is one of the major problems TSR had in their later days, all the different campaign settings were cannibalizing sales from each other, so instead of having one or two settings making money, they had several settings all losing money. This is also the reason why two of the same fast food restaraunt opening too close together might result in both locations losing money, even though the total volume of sales may be higher than if only one of them were there.

In publishing you also discover that the unit cost to print a book decreases as the size of the order increases. A printer may charge $5 each to print a book when you order 5,000, but only $4 each when you order 10,000. You can even see that on Lulu.com, ordering 1-14 copies of a POD book is full cost, but 60-119 copies is 10% off per copy, and 1200+ copies is 20% off. One short run printing company I found that has an online quote system (Tigerpress Online), I priced a 32 page letter size black and white book (like the old modules), at 50 copies it was $4.66 each, at 100 copies was $3.51 each, and at 500 copies was $1.84 each. If you are releasing a larger variety of books at a lower volume of each book, the higher per-unit printing cost might eat the entire profit margin of the book.

 

[Doc_Klueless]

But that isn't what he said.

My comment was entirely aimed at his assertion that he spoke about what gamers in general wanted from WotC. I'll concede that it was poorly worded to carry that intention. My point is that HIS statement that gamers want X and MY statement that gamers (as in me and my circle of gaming friends and acquaintances) want Y pretty much are at odds with each other. I don't think he has any proof one way or the other and that he's just projecting his needs, wants and desires on the greater population because it's what he wants, needs and desires.

I've no doubt that some gamers want what he wants. We just have no way of knowing the percentage of gamers that feel that way and if that percentage is enough to have a meaningful impact on business practices.

Which will bring someone traipsing in spouting about the polls in some of the other threads to which I say that anyone who has even remotely studied statistics, samples, sample sizes, sample selection, etc., will see that all those polls are so much hot air and have actually no real statistical significance.

We don't know what gamers in general want. We know what we want and what a very small sample of a self-selecting population who answered a pole want. It's in no way a proven indication of the wants of the larger population of gamers and would be pure folly to use to guide business decisions.

Which brings in someone saying that "Paizo does it this way and they're successful!" Great. I like Paizo. They have a business model that matches their goals. Now show me that the goals of Paizo and the goals of WotC are the same and you'll have an argument. Simply saying that both of them wish to be successful and earn a profit is not enough. How much of a profit? From what? The game or the brand or what? Successful at what? There's a lot of information that's missing from the arguments either way.

In short, don't think to speak for me and other gamers when you're spouting off about how WotC is ignoring the wants of gamers in general because you. just. don't. know. and neither do I. Which might be why I'm not attempting to speak for other gamers unlike some people.

 

[Sailor Moon]

The secret to business is to get more people buying your stuff than not and I don't think this go around will be any different.

I think they are putting out way too little product and they are going to suffer for it.

 

[Morrus]

The secret to business is to get more people buying your stuff than not

That's not the secret to business.

 

[Doc_Klueless]

The secret to business is to get more people buying your stuff than not...

The secret to business in more in line with Maximize your Return on Investment. But then again I haven't used my MBA in 10 years... and it wasn't a very good MBA even then!

 

[Sailor Moon]

That's not the secret to business.

Works for us.

 

[Morrus]

Works for us.

Good for you. It's still not the secret to business.

 

[Sailor Moon]

Good for you. It's still not the secret to business.

So because you say it doesn't it's not?

There are several secrets to business but the main secret is to try and put yourself in the minds of your customers and try and predict what they want. If they don't want what I'm selling then they won't buy it and I won't make money.

Businesses have to guess at what the overall population wants and give it to them.

 

[Morrus]

So because you say it doesn't it's not?

No, it's not so because I said so. I said so because it's so.

You have causality reversed.