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Dan Rawson Named New Head Of D&D
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<blockquote data-quote="EpicureanDM" data-source="post: 8797285" data-attributes="member: 6996003"><p>If your sales have been consistently good, or have declined by an acceptable amount, you don't put additional stress on the design team to make more books. They're hitting their revenue targets, they know what they're doing, don't mess with success. But if your sales haven't been good and you're looking at a revenue shortfall, you've only really got one lever to pull: you've got to publish more books and make it up in volume. But you aren't going to start investing more money in your design and production teams. They're already underperforming. So you'll compromise on quality a bit in order to put a larger volume of products in front of your customers and hope they bite. </p><p></p><p>You might, for example, repackage some previously published material under the guise of updating it and put it in a slipcase to boost the retail price a little. If you're on a design team tasked with raising more revenue with the same resources, that's a smart play. You might publish adventure anthologies filled with stand-alone freelance content, so that your editorial and production resources aren't stretched trying to harmonize all that disparate, unconnected content. You might produce a new starter set with less content compared to the previous starter set in order to churn up a little revenue from your completionist whales.</p><p></p><p>The only definition of "weak book sales" that really matters is WotC's internal definition, meaning the sales and revenue figures that senior management expect to see. They don't and won't care if the decline is due to quality. They just want the numbers to go up. If D&D's numbers were stable or rising at the old publishing pace, we might not see an increase in pace or volume. It's possible, but making new, good-quality D&D books isn't like adding another production line to your factory. So it's possible that the increased volume of products is because D&D's going to the moon.</p><p></p><p>But look at what's making up the additional volume: retreads of previously published material - both 5e material and legacy material - and consumer products like a new Starter Set. Publishing a new Starter Set is a warning sign, especially this one since it has less content (conserve resources!) and is not compared favorably to the Starter Set you produced eight years ago. If the design team can't produce a better Starter Set after eight years of experience and feedback, then it feels like they're rushing something out the door to make a buck.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="EpicureanDM, post: 8797285, member: 6996003"] If your sales have been consistently good, or have declined by an acceptable amount, you don't put additional stress on the design team to make more books. They're hitting their revenue targets, they know what they're doing, don't mess with success. But if your sales haven't been good and you're looking at a revenue shortfall, you've only really got one lever to pull: you've got to publish more books and make it up in volume. But you aren't going to start investing more money in your design and production teams. They're already underperforming. So you'll compromise on quality a bit in order to put a larger volume of products in front of your customers and hope they bite. You might, for example, repackage some previously published material under the guise of updating it and put it in a slipcase to boost the retail price a little. If you're on a design team tasked with raising more revenue with the same resources, that's a smart play. You might publish adventure anthologies filled with stand-alone freelance content, so that your editorial and production resources aren't stretched trying to harmonize all that disparate, unconnected content. You might produce a new starter set with less content compared to the previous starter set in order to churn up a little revenue from your completionist whales. The only definition of "weak book sales" that really matters is WotC's internal definition, meaning the sales and revenue figures that senior management expect to see. They don't and won't care if the decline is due to quality. They just want the numbers to go up. If D&D's numbers were stable or rising at the old publishing pace, we might not see an increase in pace or volume. It's possible, but making new, good-quality D&D books isn't like adding another production line to your factory. So it's possible that the increased volume of products is because D&D's going to the moon. But look at what's making up the additional volume: retreads of previously published material - both 5e material and legacy material - and consumer products like a new Starter Set. Publishing a new Starter Set is a warning sign, especially this one since it has less content (conserve resources!) and is not compared favorably to the Starter Set you produced eight years ago. If the design team can't produce a better Starter Set after eight years of experience and feedback, then it feels like they're rushing something out the door to make a buck. [/QUOTE]
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