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!
7 Years of D&D Stories? And a "Big Reveal" Coming?
- Thread starter Morrus
- Start date
*chuckles* Sure.
Jester David
Hero
Of course. There is a lot more to it than that, but if you want to sum it up in a few words you want more people to buy your product than not.
You can increase sales numbers by reducing price. It's easy. Sell cars for a penny, everybody on the planet will buy one. This does not make it the secret to business.
Selling premium products is an utterly viable business model. Look at Ferrari, Rolex, London flats which cost tens of millions, iPhones. None of these companies adopt strategies which solely maximise volume of sales. Indeed, many restrict sales numbers deliberately.
WotC isn't in that league, but in terms of RPGs it opts for higher end products.
And who on earth has more people buying their products than not? There's not a single company on the planet which sells to 50% of the population. That's an absurd thing to say. It doesn't even make sense, let alone constitute the "secret to business" (like that means anything, either).
Selling premium products is an utterly viable business model. Look at Ferrari, Rolex, London flats which cost tens of millions, iPhones. None of these companies adopt strategies which solely maximise volume of sales. Indeed, many restrict sales numbers deliberately.
WotC isn't in that league, but in terms of RPGs it opts for higher end products.
And who on earth has more people buying their products than not? There's not a single company on the planet which sells to 50% of the population. That's an absurd thing to say. It doesn't even make sense, let alone constitute the "secret to business" (like that means anything, either).
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It makes perfect sense.
If you have less of the D&D buying into your new edition than not then you aren't doing something right. D&D isn't a new product, it's a continuation that has a large audience that has followed it through the years. That's where a lot of the data comes into play. You try and gather a rough estimate of how many people are playing D&D and you try and come up with a plan that will have most of your numbers buying into it and picking up new people along the way. If most of the community don't buy it then you aren't doing something right and you change strategies.
BryonD
Hero
Fair enough
When did I ever claim to speak for you?
I did make some predictions about the overall market. Low production will result in lower participation over time.
This does not in ANY way suggest that there won't be people thrilled with what they have.
Jester David
Hero
You want people to buy your product, but you need to sell it at a high enough price to make a profit, and you need sell enough copies to offset production costs.
Books have two production costs. In addition to the costs of printing, which applies to each book, there is the cost of production: art, writing, editing, layout, etc. So you start out in a financial hole from writing the book, which gets deeper as you print the book, and gradually makes money as you sell copies.
The larger the print run (more copies printed at one time) the cheaper the printing cost of each book is, but the larger the initial investment. And the printing costs never reach zero. However, after a certain point, you pay off production costs and the more copies you sell, the more money you make.
Similarly, the cost of increasing the product's size goes down the larger it gets. (To a point.) The initial cost of making a book is high but adding new pages gets cheaper and cheaper. This is why it's cheaper to release one 320-page book rather than two 160-page books (plus you only pay for the cover once).
I used the earlier example of one product versus two. If you release one book to sales of 25,000 copies versus two books with sales of 15,000 copies each, the latter seems more profitable. You sold 30,000 copies. However, the print run was smaller, so less money was made on each copy. And you still need to pay off production costs. If you needed to sell 10,000 copies to turn a profit you sold 15,000 books for a profit in the former but only 10,000 at a profit: despite selling 5,000 more books you made 5,000 books' less money.
Because of this, less is more.
It is significantly better to release fewer products that appeal to more people. So it makes much, much more financial sense for WotC to, say, release one 320-page accessory that appeals to players of multiple classes than it would to release four 80-page books each focused on a single class group. The content will be cheaper for the players, the single book will sell better, the book will be more profitable for WotC, etc.
This is just the straight financials. And it does not consider the effect of diminishing the wall of books intimidating players away, or less frequent books being more anticipated, or having more time between releases allowing for more time to playtest and this increase quality.
BryonD
Hero
Your math works. But the overall evaluation has problems with assumptions.
You are presuming the tradeoff is roughly linear. If 100 people will buy 1 book and 70 people will buy three, then you are better off selling three.
There is no reason to presume it is three 100-pg books vs one 300-pg book.
Also, you presume that the overall market is constant for all calculations.
If 100 people buy 1-book this year and 30% of your market is playing other games that attracted their attention in the past year, then you are losing ground.
And that kind of decline can quickly spiral even people loving the situation move on for lack of supporting community.
You didn't. Sorry if it came across that way. That was a General You and not a Specific You. You've always been reasonable and I have no beef with you.
On the other hand, I think you may be sorta right in that "Low production will result in lower participation over time." However, I'd substitute the will for may. It's just too early to tell at this point, I guess.
Lately, I've just seen too many people say "We want this!" and "We want that!" when all they're really saying is "I want this!" and "I want that!" Goldomark is a prime example of this. I firmly believe that what he says he wants he does indeed want and that he is severely disappointed in WotC for not supplying what he wants. That is a very, very valid complaint/opinion/what-have-you. However, he always couches it in terms of "We" and seldom in terms of "I." That's my entire point.
Anyway, thanks for the interesting conversations everyone! I'm off to watch Return of the Kings extended edition with my daughter and, as most of us know, that'll take a while. An awesome while, but a while nonetheless!
[edit] somehow the order of my paragraphs got all screwy. Hmph. Internet mystery!
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