D&D Insider - how many subscriptions? (and speculation on profitability)

[Wayside]

I think the number is more to 75-90% of total customers. Whoever is invested enough in D&D to find the WotC website and subscribe to DDI would surely log into his WotC account (which needs to be created to subscribe to DDI in the first place) at least once. And after that he's automatically part of the DDI group.

I seriously doubt they're even close to have a 5-digit number of subscribers

I know many DDI subscribers. None of them has ever used the WotC forums (or the ENWorld forums, or the RPGnet forums, etc. Most gamers don't go in for the cesspool of online forums). I have a very hard time believing that the 45,000 figure represents more than half of actual users.

My guess would be that there are between two and five times as many total subscribers, which, going by the average subscription price, would put their yearly gross somewhere between $8.59 and $21.47 million. Even at the low end, that's a lot of cheese.

 

[Dice4Hire]

I wonder if the 45,000 is current subscribers. ARe people removed form there when they let their subscription lapse. Can someone who was on the forum, but cancelled DDI check?

 

[Mithreinmaethor]

I wonder if the 45,000 is current subscribers. ARe people removed form there when they let their subscription lapse. Can someone who was on the forum, but cancelled DDI check?

Usually within 2 weeks of your subscription being canceled or expiring you are removed from that list.

This has been discussed on the WOTC boards a few times as well.

I can tell you that not even half of the people that I know who play 4th edition and have DDi ever go to the forums.

 

[korjik]

If 45k is way on the low side, then the computer department at WOTC is pretty much guilty of fraud. If DDI is all you can put out with a yearly income up around $10 million, you have a massively huge problem.

Even if it is 45K payers paying the minimum, that is still $3.24 mil. 10 staff at $100,000 and assuming overhead is same as salary gives expenses as $1 mil, then assume half goes to Hasbro, then that is still more than half a mil to the rest of WOTC. That could pay for two overpaid executive parasites.

To give an idea of the scale of the cash DDI brings in: at a wholesale price of 40% retail and a retail of $50, DDI is the equvalent of selling 162000!! Hardcover books per year, which gets you into the bestselling books lists. This is using our minimum estimates!

So, not getting a decent subscription service is pretty much nuking the goose that lays the golden eggs.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Well, my subscription ran out a couple weeks back and I haven't gotten around to renewing it yet. My forum profile doesn't show membership in the DDI group, but I wouldn't be 100% sure how much that means.

 

[Hussar]

Would it be useful to compare the numbers to MMO's? 50k users of an MMO isn't bad at all. Granted, it's not in the big boy's league, but, it's still pretty respectable for a small scale MMO.

Just putting that out there.

 

[Ourph]

Unless we assume that everyone at WotC is really bad at math, then I thin it's safe to think that if WotC is switching content from print to digital, then the digital end is more profitable at present.

 

[Mengu]

I know nothing about IT or websites but 20 full time people to run DDI seems very high. What would twenty people do?

Like all my numbers, I made that one up too. I took a look at credits for CB. There are 5 developers, 6 QA, there is a dev manager and QA manager. These are probably the same team that do updates to compendium and CB, work on other products like MB, and the VTT. Web design and content management would be a different team since it encompasses a lot more than DDI, but that crew will unavoidably dedicate some of their time to DDI. And then there are a bunch of people who produce content for DDI part time. And a bunch more directors, managers, and admins that devote part of their time to DDI or DDI crew. If you add the full time and the part time, I think 20 is a reasonable number. Contract work is a service expense rather than a salary so we won't count those. Total salaries could be 15, could be 25, hard to say. I think 8-12 would be too few, 40-50 would be too many. Anything in between won't surprise me.

 

[Jack99]

I think the number is more to 75-90% of total customers. Whoever is invested enough in D&D to find the WotC website and subscribe to DDI would surely log into his WotC account (which needs to be created to subscribe to DDI in the first place) at least once. And after that he's automatically part of the DDI group.

I seriously doubt they're even close to have a 5-digit number of subscribers

Anecdotal: of the two groups of 6 or 7 people I know, all have DDI, but only Two have visited the WotC forums.

I wonder if the 45,000 is current subscribers. ARe people removed form there when they let their subscription lapse. Can someone who was on the forum, but cancelled DDI check?

You are removed. Darjr of ENworld tested it for us.

 

[darjr]

Yea, if I find the thread I'll post a link, but when my DDI expired last year, I didn't renew until I could confirm that I was no longer in the DDI group. So I think it's safe to say that people in that group have an active DDI account.

I do need to add that I've cancelled my account and asked for and received a refund but my account remains active, probably until my last subscription runs out, and I remain in that group.

I have seen others drop out of the group as their accounts expire, and pop back in after renewal.

So I think that number is a pretty good lower limit for number of DDI subscribers.