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Message: <blockquote data-quote="trollwad" data-source="post: 1588603" data-attributes="member: 19187">I disagree.  (I guess you should have gone further than econ 101).  Toyota's Lexus simultaneously has the lowest cost, highest quality (car and customer service) and the highest efficiency in terms of man hours to produce among luxury cars.  Toyota also has some of the highest profit margins per lexus (recent bizweek and fortune).  Even in the people-intensive publishing world, high quality often goes with low cost/high efficiency (look at the relative capital and labor efficiency differentials between the various newspapers).  As I pointed out in other posts -- the 'efficiency' (profits per unit of capital/time required) of return to tomb of horrors or probably tsr's licensing deal to the guys who made the ToEE videogame appears to be huge (good volume plus reasonable outlay because you are building off a prior body of work rather than recreating the wheel).  Actually, we have a lot of anecdotal evidence that WOTC has at least some bloat relative to the revenue generation capability of current inhouse creative staff.  The mere fact that module production for them isnt profitable is some evidence of such.  In addition, many people on Enworld have identified Sean Reynolds, Monte Cook and Gygax as some of the best module creators.  All no longer work for WOTC.  Together, the three of those, with apparently skeleton crew help, have/are producing damn near as much product as WOTC over the past couple of years (take a look at Monte's website for the sheer volume of what he is involved in, its pretty crazy and in my opinion pretty creative; meanwhile gygax has at least four major projects in the hopper right now before his stroke).  Now go to the WOTC website and your 3.5 books and simply add up the names of all of the people who are listed and appear to be creative or managerial employees of the company.  Now, pick your favorite prolific OGL producer (Troll Lords?, Necromancer?, Green Ronin?) and look at their website and forums.  I've done this for Troll Lords and they seem to produce a good bit of hi quality product IMHO with about three or four major guys and a few minions.  Look at Steve Jackson games for another apparent small, lean high efficiency (capital/effort) outfit.  A fairly small and fairly mature industry with volatile cash flows (like RPGs) should be run as leanly as possible because growth is unlikely to bail you out. My tentative contentions (they are tentative because Im not a WOTC insider) are (1) the OGL contributes to an exodus of talented creative types from WOTC because a guy like Monte can simply take his WOTC-honed skills and go and use them for his own benefit on a royalty-free basis -- thus pick your best three creative types (maybe Monte Cook?, Sean Reynolds?, Gygax?) and count out how many do not work for WOTC; (2) WOTC's biz model seems to be to avoid low margin but steady cash flow products like modules which are not profitable for the company due to WOTC's overhead whereas they are modestly profitable for apparently leaner Troll Lords, Malhavoc etc; as a consequence, wont WOTC be pressured to juice revenues by coming up with version 4.0 of the core rule books (prematurely) unless Eberron is a big hit?  Actually, even Eberron is interesting because WOTC evidently didnt have enough internal creativity to come up with a new setting, so they picked up steve baker from the outside.  Wouldnt it be better for WOTC to try a lower cost means of releasing modules (pdfs, to get around printing costs? with verisign certification and approval to prevent illegal copying) to have a steady source of cash flow rather than abandon the fray alltogether?  Thus the analogy to Toyota, which tried to figure out more efficient ways to produce low end product rather than abandon the market altogether like detroit did as competition intensified.</blockquote>

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