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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kigmatzomat" data-source="post: 1948166" data-attributes="member: 9254">One thing to realize about WotC and the OGL is that it has done a *lot* for the bottom line.  WotC ran into an economy of scale problem with certain supplements, notably modules.  Modules had to be inexpensive, so low margins compared to books.  They still had to have a fairly good sized print run and they had to be creative.  Creative means they can be a flop and warehousing a WotC-class print run on an already low-revenue product results in sizable losses.  OGL was a number of things from WotC; a break from the lawyer-happy TSR days, a poison pill to prevent future owners from destroying the game (*cough*Hasbro*cough*), and a way to focus only on the truly financially lucrative products.  They even divorced themselves of Dragon & Dungeon so they have it down to as profitable a business model any RPG company could dream of.  Folks like PhilReed and SKR have much smaller print runs, release PDFs, etc to lower inventory concerns and are small enough that the "too low for WotC" margins are acceptable.  Why can't they make WotC-money?  Economies of scale work to WotC's advantage; the discount on printing costs is immense when you start adding zeros to the size of the print run.  Second, until they have the same wide-market recognition a lot of their buyers will be "taking a chance" on them so they can't cost morethan if WotC had sold the product even though it costs more to produce.  The only thing about the WotC that hurts WotC is that now they are competing against themselves because they cannot kill the 3.x game system simply by refusing to print more copies.  4th ed will be a significant improvement to AD&D or it will compete against 3rd ed sold by other people.  If it sucks too much people can simply ignore it.  They won't, of course.  But they could, secure in the knowledge the SRD and d20 supplements will be available from other sources.</blockquote>

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