Can Wizards turn around their D&D support?

[delericho]

I'm more interested in this perception that Wizards seems to be taking regarding piracy and their support that they have to do everything they can to not lose a sale. Why are they so against piracy? Copyright protection and a 10 to 1 loss in sales.

Honestly, I think cancelling the PDFs was a knee-jerk reaction ordered by some suit in legal that nobody at D&D-WotC had the clout to oppose.

It seems to me that the problems seems to be that the choices that Hasbro is making for Wizards are ones where they want to make the most money with the fewest risks possible, and at least to me, this seems to be backfiring. And I bet they are most disappointed not that they are getting a lot of money from what is working, but that Wizards had projected a larger revenue from these projects and it seems like it's not generating the amount Hasbro is expecting.

That would be my guess, too. I would expect that, in order to get DDI greenlit, the powers-that-be projected that it would cost a few million to develop, would attract 200,000 subscribers (or another significantly large number), and so would recoup within a year or two.

Naturally, it hasn't worked like that - everything has been much more expensive (note: this is known), and the subscriber numbers have been a fraction of those promised (note: this is a guess).

What this could mean is that DDI has long since exhausted the initial budget, has spent all the money taken in in subscriptions, and is now bouncing along either barely breaking even, or still making a loss (due to ongoing development costs). Plus, D&D-WotC may not now want to ask for more budget, since with the economy being as it is, Hasbro at large are rather risk-averse, and prone to just cancel a project that hasn't done as promised.

If this is correct (a very big 'if'!) then that may well mean that the VTT is a "last throw of the dice" - this is the one thing they have in reserve. If it works, it might just turn DDI around and get it going again. If it doesn't, the future looks grim for DDI and, by extension, D&D as a whole.

That would certainly explain the Monster Builder - it appears to be near-useless as it is, but if it does add significant value to the VTT than they may have calculated that it was worth taking the flak in order to give the VTT the very best shot possible.

2011 may be the most important year for the game since 1997.

 

[Balesir]

I suspect Hasbro has found that the brand works for marketing tangent products and not for the actual products themselves. So you're going to see more D&D video games, board games, and novels. Those work, those get Hasbro the profits they are looking for. 4th Edition and Essentials? Not so much.

If that is true (I have no knowledge either way, but colour me sceptical), then it suggests that what WotC should be doing is giving D&D away as free PDFs. If the tangential products are succeeding (at least in part) because of a tie-in to "the world's most famous tabletop roleplaying game", but you can't make a profit from the game itself, the logical thing to do would be to maximise exposure to the original TTRPG in order to sell the spin-offs (and the books, for those keen enough to want nice shiny tomes in their hands). Make the offline CB and such freely available, too, and you have a good set of hooks to spread "the word" as widely as possible to grow your "merchandising" market.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

That would be my guess, too. I would expect that, in order to get DDI greenlit, the powers-that-be projected that it would cost a few million to develop, would attract 200,000 subscribers (or another significantly large number), and so would recoup within a year or two.

Naturally, it hasn't worked like that - everything has been much more expensive (note: this is known), and the subscriber numbers have been a fraction of those promised (note: this is a guess).

Which brings us back to senior management incompetence as responsible, because anyone that has ever worked on a new software project of this nature could have told them that the above plan was doomed to failure before it started. Maybe not for an experienced shop that knew exactly what it wanted to do and how, but the way DDI was set up from the get go? No way!

There were basically two good ways to do DDI, given the circumstances, and either one could work very well:

1. Go very slow and incremental. Be very open--even open source pieces. Have a handful of really sharp developers/designers that know what they are doing to incorporate the open source stuff worth taking. Make an open alpha and open beta--continuously as new stuff is introduced. As a version gets good enough, start charging minimally for the latest stable version. The plan here is to keep year to year operating costs as low as reasonable for what it is, but make gradual progress that people can see. PR is low key, but persistent.

2. Big Bang. Put a ton of money into it. Make the best piece of online support for table top play ever envisioned, and then some. It is closed for awhile, with little or no hints of what is going on. Once the feature set starts to firm up, PR starts being a little more open. Then a closed alpha is followed rapidly by a closed but wider Beta. NDA's abound. What is released is so good that some people who don't even play 4E buy the subscription just to play around with the characters on the VT, solo. People subscribe almost by reflex. PR, once let loose, is huge.

Either do it or don't do it. If you decide to do it, those are the two ways most likely to succeed. Pick the one that fits your business model the best. If you want to hedge with slow, inexpensive development and entice paying customers into a Beta, with the idea that you'll keep them there with incremental features--then you didn't really plan to "do it."

 

[Balesir]

Either do it or don't do it. If you decide to do it, those are the two ways most likely to succeed. Pick the one that fits your business model the best. If you want to hedge with slow, inexpensive development and entice paying customers into a Beta, with the idea that you'll keep them there with incremental features--then you didn't really plan to "do it."

Dead right - especially when those "incremental features" turn into backward steps, quality reducing direction changes and what appears to be dithering hesitation and "pauses".