A New DRAGON+?

You got a message from Dragon+? Via email?

 

[delericho]

Seriously, imagine if they had taken the storm sorcerer from UA, polished it up, took some borrowed 4e artwork and put that in Dragon+? BOOM! Instant usable content!

Actually, on balance I think I'd prefer that not be in Dragon+. That way, if I know D+ doesn't have anything for my game, I can happily ignore it, and I can equally get the material for the game (that I do want) from UA. I'm not sure I see any downside to that - after all, the very same device that I can use to get D+ also has the ability to get me UA.

 

[S_Dalsgaard]

I would actually hate having game crunch in Dragon+. I prefer it on the web (as in the UA articles) where it is easy to print and/or read on a screen with a reasonable size. Of course, I would have no problem with D+ having easy-to-use links for those web articles, so those who use digital devices at the table had easy access to them.

 

[Zaukrie]

UA is well hidden on the site. I would prefer the content be consolidated someplace.

 

[Parmandur]

As someone without either Android or iOS, I am glad that the free crunch is available to me outside the fluffy ad magazine (honestly wouldn't be any different if it was a print magazine; look at the current news rack sometime).





And of course the TTRPG is taking second fiddle; orders of magnitude more people play Neverwinter than buy the books. Their strategy of linking them helps the game by drawing the Neverwinter folks towards the tabletop, and not relying on endless splat books also helps the game. Not sure why people expect a tertiary revenue stream to be put ahead of the bread basket? It's like Marvel and comics: they still make them, and dominate, bit the comics are less important than toys.

 

[Kramodlog]

Not sure why people expect a tertiary revenue stream to be put ahead of the bread basket?

I didn't know you were privy to D&D's revenues.

 

[Parmandur]

I didn't know you were privy to D&D's revenues.

I'm not; but I seriously doubt they have sold a million PHB, whereas they have way north of a million Neverwinter players on Xbox alone: free to play, but I doubt they keep spending money on it because nobody is paying microtransactions. I doubt that SCL will be behind the books in revenue, either. That's just the difference in broad market realities. Even if it under performs, it will probably still be more money than the tabletop; they've been pretty open about this, and how they aren't concerned with capturing Pathfinders pen and paper market, because they have bigger fish in mind.

 

[Trickster Spirit]

I didn't know you were privy to D&D's revenues.

No one outside of WotC is privy to that, but are you really disputing the point? If the tabletop game wasn't a tertiary revenue stream, that's where they'd be focusing their efforts. As it is, Sword Coast Legends and Neverwinter appear to be taking the #1 and #2 spots in terms of promotion.

Frankly, I can't see a way for a tabletop game to even approach video game revenue no matter what its release schedule is. Best that can be hoped for is synergistic growth, where fans of the former two games check out the brand's roots by playing a game or two of D&D and maybe actually decide to stick with the hobby. But realistically it's the dollars they spend on SCL that really occupy WotC's attention.

 

[Parmandur]

So, some quick and dirty underestimates based on a quick Google search:

A little more than 2% of F2P users ever pay for content

The average amount for the core gamers who do spend can be $60 a month

Neverwinter has way over a million users.

Let's say that 20,000 users pay for Neverwinter content, averaging $60 a month: that's $1.2 million, a month.

Obviously not the real figure; but ot gives an idea of how much money there is in that field.

 

[Mercurius]

I agree with [MENTION=184]Agamon[/MENTION] - the problem isn't Dragon+, it is calling it Dragon+ and therefore essentially claiming it to be the successor to Dragon magazine.

On a side note, Dragon, and its later iterations as online/PDF and now app, is a good example of how advancements in technology do not always equate with improvements in content. We've seen three basic versions of "Dragon" now, and they've gotten worse in each iteration. Kind of a bummer.

 

[Kramodlog]

I'm not; but I seriously doubt they have sold a million PHB, whereas they have way north of a million Neverwinter players on Xbox alone: free to play, but I doubt they keep spending money on it because nobody is paying microtransactions. I doubt that SCL will be behind the books in revenue, either. That's just the difference in broad market realities. Even if it under performs, it will probably still be more money than the tabletop; they've been pretty open about this, and how they aren't concerned with capturing Pathfinders pen and paper market, because they have bigger fish in mind.

I just do not know how the RPG performed financially and what sort of royalties WotC gets from the compagnies who make the video games, so I won't pretend to know that one will make them more money than the others. Especially considering how they still produced lots of RPG books during 4e reign, when video games and DDI were added to the revenue mix.