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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 4915331" data-attributes="member: 5143">You can't put out less books and survive.  It simply doesn't work.  Higher quality would not have sold more copies.  Or at least, not enough more copies to even show up as a statistic.It just doesn't work mathematically.  Say you have 20 employees in R&D, plus managers, artists, IT people, HR, office space, power, internet, and all the other things that come with running a decent size business.  You need X dollars a month in order to keep paying all of those people.  And they aren't cheap.Before I begin this, I want to say all these numbers are made up.  I don't have any inside knowledge and no real numbers have been released.  I'm going off of estimates I've seen tossed around on the internet(In some of which there were WOTC people throwing around some estimated numbers).I'm going to guess that it is on the magnitude of requiring a good 25,000 books a month to be sold to keep going.  D&D is a rather niche market.  If estimates are to be believed, near the end of 3e, the number of people playing D&D was down to 200,000 worldwide.  If you do the math on that one, it requires an eighth of the entire D&D population to buy a book from you every month in order to survive.  From some other estimates I've heard thrown around, 50,000 books sold in the opening month of a product is fairly good sales for a book.  Lesser books sell only 20k-30k copies.  Core books sell closer to 100k-150k.Now, a large number of people aren't going to have enough money or desire to buy a book every month.  Certainly a eighth of the entire population of players aren't going to buy old books every month.  Which means you need at least one NEW product that a significant amount of people want to buy every month in order to keep going.Of course, once again my numbers are pure guesses.  But If they are anywhere close to correct, this is why adventures were not the primary focus of WOTC.  Keep in mind that the average group has 5 players and a DM.  If there are 200,000 people worldwide playing D&D, 33,333 of them are DMs.  If we assume the same ratio of total population to sales, then good selling adventure sells 8333 copies.  We can even round up to 10k.  Significantly below what even a poor selling supplement book sells.  And well below what the company needs to sell each month to survive.The only real way to continue to run the company by focusing on adventures would be to fire almost everyone in R&D until there is maybe 1 or 2 people working there.  Then to accept that D&D as a product line will be reduced to 1 adventure every 2 months or something, that it'll make 1/15 of the sales and profit that it makes when they release a core book and leave it at that.  But, any publicly traded company who says "We plan on making 1/15th of the profits we did last year" will be bankrupt in no time.It's just not feasible.Realistically, they could have kept 3e going maybe 2 or 3 more years.  They'd have to dig deep to find books on topics that people would still buy.  Since, you are exactly right.  Everyone owned 20+ player supplements.  No one wanted any more.  I'm guessing the sales were slipping on each and every 3e book to come out.  By the end of the 3rd year, the combination of the weight of all the released books and the small number of people the books even appealed to would have driven sales below the point that they could sustain the company.</blockquote>

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