D&D 5E A viable game and the vicious edition cycle

[Jer]

I mean, am I wrong? Would only releasing 1E numbers of books make WotC more money, in 2014? I'm skeptical of that, I must say.

I think this discussion is missing a good dose of "Mike Mearls current vision for the D&D product line" data. And so let's put that in here.

As far as worrying about sales goes, we’re definitely approaching the business in a different way. In the past, the way to make the business work was to release more and more RPG books. In reviewing sales records, it’s pretty clear that after a few expansions people simply stop buying and many even stop playing. Could you imagine trying to keep up with a boardgame if a new expansion or three came out for it every month?

Instead of flooding the market with an endless tide of RPG books, we’re moving to diversify the business. We have two active MMOs, board games, miniatures, t-shirts, novels, and even more stuff we’re working on.

In hindsight, it’s actually a fairly obvious move. Let’s say you buy the three core rulebooks and then the two volumes of the Tyranny of Dragons campaign. That gives you everything you need for the next 6 to 12 months of gaming. Do I really have much of a chance to sell you more RPG stuff during that time? Why fight that battle?

Our philosophy now is to make everything count. If we release a new super adventure, like Tyranny of Dragons, or a new rules expansion, we want it to be an event. When you add stuff to an RPG, you’re asking all the DMs out there to evaluate their campaigns, learn new options, and then try to implement them. You have to be very careful in how you add things to the game, and very deliberate in making those additions exciting and compelling.

So - my read on this is that the current direction for D&D is fewer books overall, more "non RPG" D&D items (including more licensing via third parties and more mobile and other video games), and when a new book or books are released a desire to make it an event rather than a regular expected occurrence. The reference to "all you need for 6 to 12 months" strikes me as a way to plant the seed for an annual event for releases. I could easily see an annual Gen Con release of 1-3 new "rules books" per year spanning from Unearthed Arcana/Epic Handbook/Monster Manual type books to campaign setting books and a tie-in 1-3 book "adventure path" storyline like Tyranny of Dragons - supported across not just the RPG, but also through the novels and the video game side of things.

I could be completely off on this, but reading the tea leaves it really sounds to me like Wizards has decided that the flood the market with new books constantly model isn't working and they want to try to make less RPG product but tie in a lot more non-RPG D&D product via storylines. And do a lot more outside licensing of the D&D brand for supplemental things rather than producing things in house.

 

[Dungeoneer]

They still make classic monopoly though and the monopoly variants usually use similar rules to classic monopoly. The monopoly variants are like D&D splat books or campaign settings.

Just to put this argument to bed, the rules of Monopoly DO change, and have been doing so every decade or so since it's release in 1936*. Hasbro recently accepted submissions for popular house rules which it will add to the official rules of the 2015 version of the 'classic' game.

* you don't notice because neither your nor anyone else bothers to read the rules!

 

[Werebat]

I think WotC is going to be surprised at how difficult it is to make significant inroads with marketing this particular brand across multiple genres and products. It's not a bad idea to do so with fictional world brands in general, but past efforts have shown that D&D as a brand (rather than as a specific game) isn't that strong when it comes to sales to non-gamers. Toys, movies, cartoons, books, comics, etc. have all been done in the past, but have never caught on to the degree that they (or TSR before them) expected.

But video games sold.

Come to think of it -- what happened to D&D video games? Did Temple of Elemental Evil REALLY kill them? That would be a shame -- half of that game was actually really good (that OTHER half, though...)

 

[Nebulous]

I don't understand why there hasn't been a major motion picture D&D movie from a top studio with merchandise tie-ins at Burger King. That would keep the franchise going for years and we wouldn't need a 6th edition any time soon, nor want it.

 

[Jer]

I don't understand why there hasn't been a major motion picture D&D movie from a top studio with merchandise tie-ins at Burger King. That would keep the franchise going for years and we wouldn't need a 6th edition any time soon, nor want it.

D&D Movie rights are tied up with the people who made the last 3 movies (one theatrical, two direct to SyFy channel IIRC). TSR signed a bad contract back in the 90s and the studio that made the first D&D movie (SweetPea) has the movie rights.

There's currently a lawsuit underway about the rights. Hasbro is insisting that the rights have expired (IIRC because SweetPea didn't release movies the way they were supposed to based on the contract), while SweetPea contends that they can't expire because TSR was full of idiots and sold them a permanent license to make movies and Hasbro is misrepresenting the contract.

As to why we can't get a good D&D movie even if a not-Hasbro company owns the movie rights - it's because they're owned by the company that made the first D&D movie. And they thought they were making a good D&D movie when they made it. So ... yeah. It would be nice if they sold the rights to someone else if the court decides that TSR was full of morons back in the day and did actually sign away those rights permanently, but I'm not getting my hopes up.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Could you imagine trying to keep up with a boardgame if a new expansion or three came out for it every month?

I don't have to imagine it. Battletech did exactly that and was wildly successful doing so for a number of years in the late 80s and early 90s.

The book-a-month model worked incredibly well for RPGs in the 90s, too. WWGS cleaned up putting out about a book (a really thin, soft-bound one, for the most part) a month, /for each of it's WoD lines/. AD&D 2e prettymuch matched that pace of publication, too (and, remember, it was novels and collectible games that killed TSR in the 2e era). If you take the supplements put out by both WotC and 3pps for d20 in the last 14 years, it's gotta be well over a book a month, too.

Gamers like new toys.

 

[Bugleyman]

I want to believe the AP model is the way to go, but I'm not sure if Pathfinder is yet proof of the possibility of a perennial edition. Pathfinder is still only about five years old, and I believe it is drowning under its own bloat. On the other hand, even a Paizo "failure" in this regard isn't proof of impossibility either.

Completely agree that Pathfinder is suffering a severe case of bloat. Personally, I'd love a revision, but the concept of a 2nd edition seems to be an anathema on the Paizo boards.

 

[doctorhook]

Completely agree that Pathfinder is suffering a severe case of bloat. Personally, I'd love a revision, but the concept of a 2nd edition seems to be an anathema on the Paizo boards.

I completely agree with your assessment too. One of Paizo's major weaknesses (in the business sense of the word) is that the original customer base for Pathfinder is extremely revision-averse; they didn't want to switch to 4E in 2008, and many of them won't want to switch to PF2 now. The tricky part for Paizo is whether or not in the past five years Pathfinder has gained enough new fans who are interested in another edition of PF.

 

[Werebat]

Completely agree that Pathfinder is suffering a severe case of bloat. Personally, I'd love a revision, but the concept of a 2nd edition seems to be an anathema on the Paizo boards.

The concept of Pathfinder suffering from bloat in the first place seems to be an anathema on the Paizo boards.

 

[Jer]

The book-a-month model worked incredibly well for RPGs in the 90s, too. WWGS cleaned up putting out about a book (a really thin, soft-bound one, for the most part) a month, /for each of it's WoD lines/. AD&D 2e prettymuch matched that pace of publication, too (and, remember, it was novels and collectible games that killed TSR in the 2e era). If you take the supplements put out by both WotC and 3pps for d20 in the last 14 years, it's gotta be well over a book a month, too.

Gamers like new toys.

Except that Mearls is saying that the sales figures for the past few years for D&D do not bear that out anymore - even back to the 3.5 era which is why they pushed out the 4.x revision when they did. It may have been true in the 90s, but it isn't anymore. And note that White Wolf is now gone, and Onyx Path (the studio putting out World of Darkness stuff now) is not putting things out nearly at the level that White Wolf used to in the 90s and (unless things have changed) they're a PDF and print-on-demand only business.

It isn't the 1990s anymore. Business has changed. I suspect that the Internet and the sheer volume of content freely available upon it is part of the reason.