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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dragonblade" data-source="post: 5930482" data-attributes="member: 2804">I'm sorry, but you are wrong on multiple levels. Dancey's rationale on the failure of TSR only applies to creating new print products that compete with each other for limited consumer dollars on the retail shelf.Here is a very basic example. Let's say TSR made three different campaign setting boxed sets. Each one costs $1000 to produce. Each one that sells makes $10. So they need to sell at least 100 of each one to break even. However, they only have 100 customers. And instead of each customer buying one box set from each line, each customer only buys one or maybe two box sets each, with a few diehards buying all three.Spread out across all three lines, all three lines lose money unless one line is so popular that every one of those 100 customers buys the box set for that line. But that usually didn't happen. THIS is why TSR failed and what Dancey was talking about.Making a back catalog of products available digitally or POD is completely different. The cost in producing those products is virtually ZERO assuming you have a digital archive of that prior edition content already.I have a 50 GB Dropbox account for $99 a year. Doing the math, it would cost WotC a few cents on the dollar to host say the 100 Mb for these three hypothetical boxed sets. I'd be surprised if the digital footprint for their entire back catalog going back to 1974 was more than a TB.Let's say broadband costs are $1 per download (which seems high to me). If WotC charged $5 for a digital copy of each boxed set, they really only need to sell ONE to make money! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Furthermore, your PDF products don't compete with each other in the sense that Dancey was talking about. There are no returns, no retail, printing, or distribution costs you have to recoup. Even if you do POD, the entire cost of that POD product is covered by the consumer.Now, granted I'm ignoring some initial costs in setting up the whole digital marketplace and so on. But once you set up the initial architecture, it wouldn't take long at all before they turning a profit. WotC doesn't even have to do the heavy lifting themselves. Companies like DriveThruRPG already used to sell digitial WotC products and could easily do so again. Though if I were WotC I'd keep it all in house and try to tie my back catalog into some form of DDI subscription revenue.Like I have posted before, if I could get unlimited digital access to every product WotC has ever produced for every edition for my $75 a year DDI subscription, hell I'd give WotC my bank account number and they can bill me for life. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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