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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5431575" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, having run IT/development shops, your overhead + G&A generally runs somewhere in the vicinity of 100% of salary. hard to say what they pay, probably somewhat below industry average on the whole, but that could be wrong. Call it $50k and I think you're not too drastically far off. What is the size of the staff though, that's a pretty hard question to answer. 20 seems like it could be on the high side. There are other costs though, hosting, capital equipment, software licensing, stuff like that. Those costs are probably not a huge chunk, but significant. Possibly bigger is the cost of content generation for Dragon and Dungeon magazines and costs for media (licensing art).I agree, there's no way DDI has north of 200k customers, that doesn't seem realistic. The 45k in the DDI group or some significant fraction of that sounds more likely. The thing is with these numbers and uncertainty we really can't say if the thing is actually profitable or not. Even if we were to just pike 40k at $72 each for a year, that would be $2.8m/yr. At a rough guess with 20 staff you'd be marginally profitable. For a rough check on this kind of thing Wikipedia with a staff of around 150 has a budget of around $15m/yr. In other words as a rule of thumb multiply the size of your staff by $100k and you're in a ballpark realm. This means if they have say 30k active subscribers or a staff of 25 or 10% higher costs than we've guessed then they're losing money on it. OTOH it could be quite profitable. The only issue there is the SCALE is small. A company the size of Hasborg may just not be interested in such a small revenue stream, especially if it basically doesn't go too far beyond breaking even. They'll be looking at things like return on net income, internal rates of return on investment, etc. Bean counter stuff, but not raw numbers.</blockquote>

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