A thought about the drop in the book schedule.

[Tortoise]

It just hit me that maybe the real reason for backing off the publishing schedule of books is to avoid having a lot of material hanging out in the wind with the uncertainty about the possible Borders bankruptcy. The entire book and magazine publishing industry stands to take a hard hit if Borders fails and that is money companies don't want to risk.

Since smaller hobby stores can't pick up the slack and WoTC wouldn't benefit from choking them with the excess to try to keep the volume up, it would be best to slow the flow dramatically for a while until things shake out.

Meanwhile they can keep things going on the digital front. This might be the time for them to try to coax people into subscribing to the DDi to get these materials thus helping it grow and making up some of the lost revenue that way.

Add to that the rising price of oil affecting the cost of plastic and you can see why the minis line got halted.

 

[the Jester]

Interesting thought. The Borders thing might, indeed, have some kind of impact on WotC's publishing schedule; although it's far from their only outlet, if it goes down, that's a lot of shelves that they won't have access to anymore. I wonder how big of a chunk of the market Borders represents?

 

[kitsune9]

Tortoise, this is a good thought. This is a hedging strategy. If commodity sellers believe that the cost of their product will drop, they will hedge against it to lock the fluctuation of their contracts at a specific price. WotC is probably doing the same thing here but through change of focus in product lines in the likely anticipation that Borders is going into Chapter 11 for reorganization.

 

[Umbran]

I don't know if it is true, but it does make some sense. I'd call it plausible.