Are Game Lines Smaller Today?

[Deset Gled]

TTRPG lines have made a decided shift toward fewer releases. I think Paizo is the only company still doing monthly, physical releases for a game line. There are a bunch of reasons for this:

• [Lots of good stuff]...
• When planning for the 5e product line, we found that people wanted about 1 new product per year. The monthly release schedule was choking the game line to death. People who bought everything were playing a game that looked completely alien to people who bought just the core rulebook. 3.5 had entire action categories that were standard in books released after a certain point, but the rules for them weren't in the PHB.

I have long thought that this was partially related to changes in Hasbro management from the top down. At the corporate level, they had a notable shift from manufacturing being a core business to brand management being their primary goal. I want to say the biggest announcements about this were 2015ish - sometime around the start of 5e, although the seeds were probably in place far ahead of that. I was always under the impression that a longer product life cycle was part of that focus on brand management.

Can you speak to any of the corporate changes towards brand management being a factor in the switch to fewer releases and/or a longer product life cycle for D&D? It certainly seems like a very different take on product management from the earlier WotC announcements about 3.5e being planned relatively quickly after 3.0's release.

 

[MGibster]

I feel they discourage any significant changes to the actual system, and contribute to the insane power-bloat and 'spell for everything'. Tacking on inexplicable talents and racial abilities instead of changing the combat system from its endless 'death by a thousand cuts'.

I think that's a fair criticism. Power creep has been the bane of many a game over the years. I think my most favorite splatbooks have been setting material, specifically the ones that cover a single city. Ryoko Owari: City of Lies for Legend of the Five Rings, Night City for Cyberpunk 2020, Arkham for Call of Cthulhu, and City of Greyhawk for AD&D are all gaming products I was able to put to good use.

 

[Theory of Games]

There's actually more ttrpg books than ever IF you count PDFs (which you aren't). Digital is the way of the modern world: easier to produce, distribute and store. Books are unnecessary and archaic products that drain the planet's ecosystem. I'm glad to see most organizations/companies making the switch to digital since, we only have one Earth