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!

 

[Tony Vargas]

That's a bit of a non-sequitur. The only numbers we have are the Icv2 numbers right?

Right. Everything else is anecdotes and vague claims by folks promoting one or the other.

How do you explain D&D going dormant for two years?

The line failed to meet an unrealistic revenue goal, it's production resources were slashed, and it took that long to cobble together 5e. You do remember the long Next playtest, right? One could also speculate that they figured a two year hiatus would allow some demand to build back up, or give Pathfinder time to bloat itself to death, but I don't think anything so Machiavellian is required. Lack of resources is reason enough. Also explains the slow pace of releases and the farming out of everything but the core rules.


Not that it matters: D&D still remained the mainstream vision of the hobby, even when out of print.

5e is more than enough to anchor the franchise, even if Pathfinder edges it out of the top spot eventually - or, if, improbably, some other, better game finally does so.

 

[Kramodlog]

That's a bit of a non-sequitur.

It is sequitur. If it had sold well it wouldn't have gone dormant while the small fries up star kept producing material and hiring people. Now the up star as more employees than the other. It becomes difficult to say that WotC sold more books.

The only numbers we have are the Icv2 numbers right?

ICv2 doesn't give numbers, only ranks.

 

[bmfrosty]

It is sequitur. If it had sold well it wouldn't have gone dormant while the small fries up star kept producing material and hiring people. Now the up star as more employees than the other. It becomes difficult to say that WotC sold more books.

That's a flawed interpretation. The correct interpretation is this: If it made enough profit it wouldn't have gone dormant.

Selling books is only part of that equation. You can sell plenty of books, but if you have too many returns or your cost of production is cumulatively too high, then you're dead in the water.

 

[Kramodlog]

The line failed to meet an unrealistic revenue goal, it's production resources were slashed, and it took that long to cobble together 5e. You do remember the long Next playtest, right? One could also speculate that they figured a two year hiatus would allow some demand to build back up, or give Pathfinder time to bloat itself to death, but I don't think anything so Machiavellian is required. Lack of resources is reason enough. Also explains the slow pace of releases and the farming out of everything but the core rules.

If demands needs to grow, it is because it is to low.

But if you really are saying that D&D always out sold Pathfinder even during 4e darkest days, this conversation is fruitless. Reality needs to be looked directly so that errors can become teachable moments. 4e tanked. And it tanked for various reasons, the main one is its content.

Not that it matters: D&D still remained the mainstream vision of the hobby, even when out of print.

I have to disagree vigoriously. Paizo's vision became the mainstream vision of the hobby. They became the leader. D&D is trying to emulate them to some degree now because Paizo is the leader.

D&D has the potential to come once again the leader of the RPG industry, but it needs to take the crown from Paizo first. That hasn't happened yet and all the debates around the products they want to release and the OGL are signs of doubt in their method of reclaiming it.

 

[Wicht]

Right. Everything else is anecdotes and vague claims by folks promoting one or the other.

Another negative for 2010 was the ongoing "edition war." The online arguing between fans of D&D 4th Edition and the Pathfinder RPG goes all the way back to our announcement of the Pathfinder RPG, but it took on new fervor in 2010 as 4E floundered a bit and Pathfinder challenged it in the marketplace. I need to make one thing clear—Paizo never wanted anything to do with the edition war. We weren't trying to take down D&D ; we were just trying to make a game that we enjoyed and that allowed us to tell the stories that we wanted to tell. I would be lying if I said we didn't enjoy the passion and loyalty of our customers defending their game—it was very flattering... but we really hoped that the edition war would just go away so everyone could enjoy their favorite game without attacking the other.

This will be news to most readers: By the end of 2010, the Pathfinder RPG had already overtaken D&D as the bestselling RPG. It would take almost half a year before industry magazine ICv2 first reported it, and several quarters more before some people were willing to accept it as fact, but internally, we already knew it was true. We'd heard it from nearly all of our hobby trade distributors; we'd heard it from buyers at book chains like Barnes & Noble and Borders; we could see it using industry sales trackers such as BookScan; we were even regularly coming out on top on Amazon's bestseller charts. Each individual market we sold in had us either tied with or outselling D&D, and none of those sources counted our considerable direct sales on paizo.com. Put all of those things together, and it was clear: Pathfinder had become the first RPG ever to oust D&D from top spot. It wasn't our goal, but here we were. And as we started planning for 2011, we knew that if we were going to be the industry leader, we were going to have to step up our game and act like a leader. 2011 would be our first chance to show what we could do with that position....

I don't think that's completely vague...

 

[Kramodlog]

That's a flawed interpretation. The correct interpretation is this: If it made enough profit it wouldn't have gone dormant.

Selling books is only part of that equation. You can sell plenty of books, but if you have too many returns or your cost of production is cumulatively too high, then you're dead in the water.

They've been a producer of books for a long time. I think they know how to manage cost of production by now. If they did indeed sell enough books, that wouldn't of been a issue.

But, again, if you really want to debate the popularity of 4e, that conversation has happened and it is settled. Time to move on and learn from past errors instead of staying in denial.

 

[bmfrosty]

They've been a producer of books for a long time. I think they know how to manage cost of production by now. If they did indeed sell enough books, that wouldn't of been a issue.

But, again, if you really want to debate the popularity of 4e, that conversation has happened and it is settled. Time to move on and learn from past errors instead of staying in denial.

TSR was a producer of books for a long time. You'd have thought that they'd know how to manage the costs of production by 1997. However, they produced more books than they could sell to a degree that they went up and WotC bought the corpse.

That's just the most relevant example. This happens over and over again.

EDIT: Didn't expect that a mention of mammaries would hit the language censor.

 

[Umbran]

If it had sold well it wouldn't have gone dormant ....

I don't think that necessarily follows. It is one plausible explanation, but there are a great many things that go into business choices that are *not*, "how good are current or recent sales", so that I don't think we can say this with any certainty, especially with the vague definition of "well".

One major such question is this: How much more content could they have designed for sale? With high volume release schedules, editions saturate. It can sell really, really well up until that point, but then you have to ask yourself if it will continue to sell going forward, and whether the edition in hand will continue to fit the business in the long-term.

And that's just one example - we can contrive enough plausible others that I don't think there's certainty that it didn't sell well.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Sell 'well' is relative. If your sales last year were $1 million, and you launch a product you hope will sell $3 million, but it sells $3.5 million, that's selling fantastically well.

If your sales last year were $7 million, and you pour a huge investment into a new product you hope will sell 50-100 million, then selling $9 million is a disaster.

 

[Kramodlog]

It also goes against what WotC emloyees/ex-employees have said about 4e's success. Here Mearls says:

"Look, no one at Wizards ever woke up one day and said 'Let's get rid of all of our fans and replace them.' That was never the intent,"

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/issues/issue_271/8109-Red-Box-Renaissance

It is implied that they lost a lot of fans. And that means lost sells.


Here he says that people are playing other games:

The result of this philosophy is that, perhaps more than ever before, gamers are playing different games than the official D&D coming out of the Wizards of the Coast.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/features/9294-The-State-of-Dungeons-Dragons-Future

At what point can we move away from denial and just accept what has happened?