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Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alcamtar" data-source="post: 262009" data-attributes="member: 3842">Well, speaking as someone who works for a giant corporation, they do a lot of things that don't seem to make sense. Like killing  profitable lines because the margins aren't high enough. My company recently announced that while we could compete in a particular market and even dominate, we don't care because there isn't enough money in it to show up on our corporate radar. And we have a long history of cancelling successful products that made MILLIONS of dollars just because profit margins were below 50% or whatever.We also have a tradition of reorganizing just about everything at least once per quarter. Every time a new VP gets promoted or even just makes a horizontal move he has to make his mark by reorganizing everything below him for little apparent reason than vanity. This is in addition to reorgs dictated by changing markets, reorgs based on changing policies, and reorgs dictated by changing products. Sometimes we have multiple managers trying to reorg the same division at the same time, and we lowly peons get traded around like a ping pong ball for a few weeks while they try out different structures and names until they find one they like.As for the setting search, it makes perfect sense in light of the "elves and bean-counters" story. The bean counters want to only do just ONE setting book for each setting, one that will make millions of dollars, then they can cancel it and do another. In order to do one setting book, you need a new setting, and 120,000 is a small investment if you expect to make 1,200,000 on sales. After that one book is out, create a new setting using the second-choice winner, collect your profits, repeat... They'll keep this up until sales go down (because people stop buying the new-and-unsupported-setting-of-the-month) or until they decide that there isn't enough profit in this and turn to something else. Of course these setting books will probably mostly be crunchy bits -- feats and prestige classes and spells -- if the bean counters have their way, so as to maximize sales.I don't see any of the above as a conspiracy or even cynical, any more than Microsoft's new "software rental" licensing is a conspiracy. Corporations maximize profits; that's their whole point of existence. It's not how much money they make, it's return on investment. Gotta entice those stockholders to buy!D&D is safe in the sense that it is now owned by a giant corporation which knows how to survive. It is unsafe in the sense that they'll drop it like a hot potato if it fails to perform.</blockquote>

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