How many people subscribe to D&D stuff?

[D'karr]

I suppose so. I haven't found much about 4th Edition to be especially difficult.

I agree, maybe I should have said more convenient.

 

[dd.stevenson]

I'm not a subscriber. So far as I can tell, if you are interested in the crunch only then the products directly compete. The only reason to buy both is because thay are not completely overlapping offers.

Books
Access lasts as long as the physical product survives
Errata must be applied by owner
Contains art
Contains more descriptive text
Can be held
single purchase price

DDI
Access lasts only as long as WotC operates the toolset and a subscription is active
Has errata applied as part of the service
Limited art and descriptive text
Complements and extends convenience apps (character builder, encounter builders, etc.)
Has other offerings like columns and the online magazines

What DDI does not provide is the flavor content of the books. For example, all the information about the planes that appears in the books Plane Above, Plane Below, Heroes of the Fey Wild, and Heroes of the Elemental Chaos is not included in DDI. All of the mechanical content, such as backgrounds, themes, classes, powers and feats are included.

For me, it was important to have the flavor content - so I purchased a books. Until just recently, I also had a subscription to DDI for all the flavor content that is not in the books (Dungeon and Dragon), and for the electronic tools.

Thanks for the answers guys. Just going off what you've told me, I'm inclined to believe that not many people bought both the books and the subscription. (And... wow, that is really different than what I thought they were doing with DDI. What was wotc's business plan here? Were these products marketed to different segments, I wonder?)

Anyway this sort of gives me some ideas as to why wizards is doing what they're doing: ending the "long tail" of 4e splat two years early, and making wishy-washy statements about DDI's future. Not really my lookout, but it's given me some food for thought.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

What DDI does not provide is the flavor content of the books. For example, all the information about the planes that appears in the books Plane Above, Plane Below, Heroes of the Fey Wild, and Heroes of the Elemental Chaos is not included in DDI. All of the mechanical content, such as backgrounds, themes, classes, powers and feats are included.

For me, it was important to have the flavor content - so I purchased a books. Until just recently, I also had a subscription to DDI for all the flavor content that is not in the books (Dungeon and Dragon), and for the electronic tools.

It's more than that though. You REALLY cannot play 4e without owning at least SOME books. You would practically speaking need a PHB, RC, or DM's Kit + HotF* just to get the 'core rules'. While SOME of the core rules exist in some form in glossary entries and such within the Compendium it is in no way shape or form intended as a rules text. There's no way to just browse it from end to end really, and vast swaths of procedural rules simply don't exist in it at all. There's tons of stuff that is 'context' too, discussions of how magic items work, what they are, how to integrate them into the game, etc etc etc. While a really experienced DM can probably cobble together some sort of game play you STILL lack for instance all the actual combat rules, which there's no way you will reproduce from just reading Compendium entries.

So the Compendium and the books overlap, but they're not interchangeable by any means.

As for the primary reason WotC might terminate 4e DDI support, that should be obvious, because they would think it might cannibalize DDN sales.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Thanks for the answers guys. Just going off what you've told me, I'm inclined to believe that not many people bought both the books and the subscription. (And... wow, that is really different than what I thought they were doing with DDI. What was wotc's business plan here? Were these products marketed to different segments, I wonder?)

Anyway this sort of gives me some ideas as to why wizards is doing what they're doing: ending the "long tail" of 4e splat two years early, and making wishy-washy statements about DDI's future. Not really my lookout, but it's given me some food for thought.

Yeah, surely they must be considering what was what. Did DDI make money? Even if it did was it at the expense of book sales so that it really wasn't worth it? Can they afford to retreat back to a pre-digital business model?

OTOH we don't know diddly, maybe DDI was a brilliant success overall. Maybe they're eager to continue that success with DDN as well in a similar way. Even if this is true it doesn't mean 4e DDI will continue to exist of course.

 

[Ajar]

I'm really glad that they started putting the Dungeon and Dragon magazines as compilations again over the last couple of months. When they went to individual articles, without compilation, they lost my interest entirely. So when my subscription expired in February, I did not renew. I've just kept using the offline ones and not looked back.

I find this really interesting -- I'm the exact opposite. I have a lot less interest in reading Dungeon and Dragon articles now that I have to hunt for them in a single compilation. Previously I used to just download the 1-2 articles that interested me each month or two.

*

I hope D&DI was at least a modest success, and in particular I hope they have usage stats for the online Compendium. I'd hate to run a homebrew 4E game without access to it.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I find this really interesting -- I'm the exact opposite. I have a lot less interest in reading Dungeon and Dragon articles now that I have to hunt for them in a single compilation. Previously I used to just download the 1-2 articles that interested me each month or two.

*

I hope D&DI was at least a modest success, and in particular I hope they have usage stats for the online Compendium. I'd hate to run a homebrew 4E game without access to it.

Agreed. I read a lot of articles but far from all, and I downloaded a selection of those I really wanted to perhaps use/reference (IE rules related stuff, some adventures, etc). Now I have to download a whole magazine and remember which one contains what I want and rummage through them all every time I want to find it. Definitely a downgrade in magazine material utility all around.

Frankly, while I can understand how sticking to the pretense of a 'magazine' allows for periodic things, 'covers', and kind of generates some level of interest I think we're at a point where it would be best to just publish articles and move the focus to curating the whole collection and maximizing their utility, while continuing to add new material. This could greatly broaden the ultimate utility of the articles as well.

 

[Hussar]

/snip


That sounds great for the customers. Choose which ever one you want! But is there any good reason to buy both the books and the DDI subscription? Do these goods complement each other?

Consider the fact that print book sales effectively die after 3 months. Yes, you continue to sell a few books after that three months, but, something like 90% of your sales are done in the first three months. A DDI sub pays all year. Those who want the books will likely still buy the books. But, now you've sucked in all those people who didn't buy the book into paying for an entire year.

Plus, instead of a group having one physical book (just how many copies of, say, Tome of Magic does a group need?), you have 5 people paying a year's worth of subsciptions plus the possible sale of one physical copy.

The model is pretty well tested in other markets.

 

[dd.stevenson]

Consider the fact that print book sales effectively die after 3 months. Yes, you continue to sell a few books after that three months, but, something like 90% of your sales are done in the first three months. A DDI sub pays all year. Those who want the books will likely still buy the books. But, now you've sucked in all those people who didn't buy the book into paying for an entire year.

Plus, instead of a group having one physical book (just how many copies of, say, Tome of Magic does a group need?), you have 5 people paying a year's worth of subsciptions plus the possible sale of one physical copy.

The model is pretty well tested in other markets.

Which markets are you thinking of?

If you're thinking about, say, the hardcover-->trade paperback-->ebook model of the publishing industry, then I'm extremely skeptical that this is a useful model for the RPG splat market. Mainly because we've been told repeatedly that RPG splat books are low volume items and thus extremely sensitive to changes in sales numbers. Also because the DDI/physical book purchasing decision isn't a la carte--DDI is either on or off, and if it's on then you're immediately disincentivized from buying the physical book. (At least that's my understanding of how it works.)

 

[Blue]

That sounds great for the customers. Choose which ever one you want! But is there any good reason to buy both the books and the DDI subscription? Do these goods complement each other?

The books have the art, the fluff, the permanence (you don't have to keep paying), immediate gratification, and offline usage.

DDI have automatic errata, look up using the compendium (my favorite bit at the table), various tools in various states of completeness and functionality over the life of DDI, and the content from Dragon and from Dungeon, including art & maps as separate image files to print/reuse. Content was usually 1-3 months behind.

When there was new print content out regularly (1+ books per month) as well as more articles in Dragon and in Dungeon, the value for DDI was quite high for me. I still purchased occasion books like the one about the Astral Sea, but from a rules perspective the auto-errata on the compendium outweighed the books a lot.

Now it's reversed - there's little new content in published books and the magazines are a fraction the size. And the magazine articles that are coming out are much lighter in crunch. Basically I use the compendium for rules look up and the online character builder a bit. If this was all I was getting I wouldn't have signed up in the first place, but I'm not going to purchase loads of 4e at full price right before groups I play with potentially switch to Next (or something else).

Over the lifetime of DDI it works out to be a positive value for me, but this year's re-up so far has not been worth it in terms of new content.

 

[Hussar]

Which markets are you thinking of?

If you're thinking about, say, the hardcover-->trade paperback-->ebook model of the publishing industry, then I'm extremely skeptical that this is a useful model for the RPG splat market. Mainly because we've been told repeatedly that RPG splat books are low volume items and thus extremely sensitive to changes in sales numbers. Also because the DDI/physical book purchasing decision isn't a la carte--DDI is either on or off, and if it's on then you're immediately disincentivized from buying the physical book. (At least that's my understanding of how it works.)

Probably not all that different from regular published books. Like I said, you sell for maybe three months and that's it. Other than core books. With a DDI, you get everyone effectively buying one book a month. The print books are extra on top.