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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mistwell" data-source="post: 6292097" data-attributes="member: 2525">I had a longer post earlier but I lost it.  Anyway, here are some ramifications, as I see them:1) WOTC does not plan to focus on competing on the RPG book market.  It's too small a slice of the overall D&D Brand pie they are looking at, and they don't care if they are #1, 2, 3, whatever on the RPG book sales chart as long as the overall brand revenue is good;2) Supplements are, in WOTC's view, the reason companies now rank well or poorly on the RPG Book charts for any given period ("who's releasing the most supplements this actually maps almost perfectly to that measure").  This, along with some other changes, has caused the sales charts to fluctuate in ways they didn't in prior decades ("The frothiness, the rate at which these games change and appear on these lists and go away is new.").  So if you publish monthly supplements you rank well, and if you don't then you might blip high one month and then disappear the next month, but this doesn't necessarily track to overall yearly performance for a company or a brand or even a game anymore like it used to;3) In addition, they no longer think the RPG Book charts really accurately measure RPG Book sales well anyway ("this is really myopic, it's really only going to talk about retail sales, it's not capturing book trade, it's not capturing online, it's not capturing Kickstarter, it's a really myopic slice of the data").  Some highly selling books could not appear on charts, because their primary sales channels are not measured by the charts; 4) The combination of these factors (above) tells me WOTC no longer places as high a value on supplements as they have for prior editions.  Supplements were useful for ranking on monthly or quarterly book charts, but they are not a good measure for overall RPG sales for that year, they are not a good measure for overall brand sales, they might not even be a good measure of RPG book sales for that snapshot of time, and it might not even be healthy for the industry in general ("there's a lot of questions and is that a good thing for the industry, is it a bad thing for the industry, and what does it actually mean for the ongoing tabletop hobby");5) Since WOTC now views the competition and focus to be the entertainment brand itself, and the overall revenue for the brand is a much higher priority than RPG book sales, this also tells me they may well view D&D Next as an evergreen RPG product.  They might now be fine with publishing mostly the core books, for a decade or two or even more, rather than an every-5-year edition treadmill.  As long as they get slow, steady, sales from the RPG books line, with the core books being the key product and likely adventures and settings added to that mix as slow but steady line, I suspect they will be fine carrying the line for a long time.  That is, provided the overall D&D brand remains healthy in terms of revenue.  This is similar to the Marvel model for their comic books - slow steady sales are fine for that company for their books, provided the overall Marvel brand remains healthy, even despite the fact that those comic books used to sell much much higher numbers a decade ago.6) The converse is also present - WOTC could sell massive amounts of RPG books, but if they view the overall D&D brand as seriously lacking in total sales, they could consider D&D a failure even if the RPG book sales were (relative to other RPG book sales) a big success as far as that smaller market is concerned.</blockquote>

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