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Message: <blockquote data-quote="stonehill_troll" data-source="post: 3693694" data-attributes="member: 27688">Quite often, but does it provide a valid guessimate that said popularity translates into sufficient sales that WOTC should invest in the cost of developing, designing and printing said books.  I believe it is very difficult to judge if a specific theme/topic has the potential sales for development based on internet feedback.  Take a look at Magic of Incarnum over on WOTC's board, from a poster's poll it would appear to be very popular. Yet Chris Perkins and other WOTC employees have stated at last year's GENCON and in recent threads a month or so ago, that Magic of Incarnum was the worst seller, something along the lines of "...this book was too niche and we do not want to repeat this again..."  Compared this to MMIV which got many complaints (here and on WOTC's own boards) and yet was described as one of the best sellers and despite the many complaints the same general theme/outline was repeated in MMV. They did do some tweaking that probably will make it another best seller for them.The same can describe Epic, Savage Species, and Psionics, niche theme topics, popular with a vocal group of posters, but did not translate into large number of sales.  People that "really" want (or dislike) something are usually very vocal about it, but IME the great majority of potential customers are not quite so interested in themes/topics that vary too far from the baseline game (at least in my view).  Also you would think since Epic and Psionics are in the SRD and not getting support from WOTC, 3rd party publishers would be flooding the market with adventures, monsters, feats, etc., yes early on there was 3rd party support for psionics, but it seemed to have died out and epic has seen little support 3rd party publishers.  I believe there is less than a dozen PDF products for epic. Internet feedback is very difficult to data mine for what actual sales might be.  I look at my 2 groups of 15 players (30-40s, married people with good incomes, most have been playing for 20+ years) I can see that;0 players are likely to purchase a Zakhara/Kara-Tur/Maztica (practically all games are homebrew, with homebrew adventures)1 player will buy a Fey book1 player is likely to buy a Psionic follow-on book1 player is likely to buy FC3: Yugloths3 players will buy the giant monster theme book (the 3 DMs, includes myself)6 players will orc/hobgoblin monster theme book (the 3 DMs, and a few players to get the feats)~8 players will buy Tome of Battle 2 (the more we play it the more we are finding it is a power boost...., we like the idea overall, but the game does not need any more power ups)~10 players will buy Complete Warrior 2 (A year ago I could have said all 15, but the recent complete books have proven to be less than stellar, the feats that work from a baseline of encounter limitations versus a daily limit is one reason "I" chose not to purchase these books and don't allow in my campaign)15 players will buy Feat Compendium12 players will buy Class Compendium10 players will buy Spell Compendium 2....It's pretty obvious in my view that the internet provides very conflicting feedback as to what people want, don't want, and what the masses will actually purchase and therefore  profitable to design, develop, and publish.This is not to say that WOTC should not "experiment" with new ideas.  They mentioned at last year's GENCON that Magic of Incarnum, Tome of Magic, and Tome of Battle were experiments.  Magic of Incarnum stank, Tome of Magic was a best seller for the year, and Tome of Battle was a sell out, had to go back for a second or more reprints I believe.  I guess sometimes the consumer does't know they want something until they see it/play it.</blockquote>

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