Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5698083" data-attributes="member: 82106">I'm skeptical they put millions into it. Software is expensive, but given that they've had a pretty clear roadmap for the past couple of years on VTT what I see is more a low but ongoing commitment to eventually getting there. I'd expect since their DDI strategy is WORKING they aren't really in a giant rush to get a product going that they don't even have a business strategy for yet.300k subscribers WOULD be bigger that M:tG. That would be well over $25m a year, which is likely bigger than all other RPG products in existence anywhere combined. I think at that point there would be a very different kind of noise coming out of WotC. Even 100k doesn't really jibe to me with what we see them up to. Sure, but you don't think 7 people spent their entire month on each article do you? The author gets a couple grand, the other six people spend some amount of time on it, but even assuming that amounted to a whole full-time person for the month, that's something like $15k all told to produce an article. Now x10 significant articles per month, that's far from nothing, but it isn't eating up anything like all the cashflow. I could easily see 62k subscribers being a very modest net return, but 100k? That would be $700k a month. Given I have direct experience with putting together large scale web apps I can pretty well guesstimate the IT side (hosting and some modest development like we actually see) is probably on the order of $100k a month. You have a couple sysops, a couple developers, a group manager, and some business ops, could even run to $150k. So I look at it this way, running DDI and producing content for it? That could easily run you into the $300k a month range. Again, the smell test, WotC doesn't seem overly excited by what they're making on D&D. It certainly isn't enough to show up in any Hasborg statements. Thus it can't be vastly beyond costs. They could be making a couple million bucks a year off it, but I'd be a lot less surprised to find out they have 70k users and it nets them a little money, which they may well be plowing entirely back into product development. That explains the slow pace of development and all the soul searching going on over there. Especially if the 5 years ago 4e business plan painted it as a giant cash cow and reality is it makes a few bucks. We really have little way of knowing what they actually spent on these things. I can say that if I were asked to bid on MB as a product the cost would be in the low 100's of K $, but it is hard to say what they've actually spent. The old MB was similar (probably less, stand-alone .NET apps are not that expensive to write). I imagine they reused a fair amount of the infrastructure from the old apps too. CB is a bigger nut to crack, given the complexity of PCs. I can easily imagine they've spent a couple million in 3 years on software, but if they've averaged 40k subscribers over the last 3 years, that's something like $9m gross, so it was a significant expense, but probably not the critical one (and also one you can scale up or down based on cashflow, unlike infrastructure).Eh, yeah, something like that. I just doubt they'd have been set back that much with 100k users. It is hard to say though. Frankly I don't think they're aiming at having the best VTT ever, at least not in the near term. They're looking to have a VTT that is good enough to be a selling point for DDI. They can afford to take the long view and go slow with it, keep their outlays down, build the whole DDI thing incrementally over time. I think they put a bit into a new thing like VTT, see how it looks, evaluate, go forward a bit more, see how that goes, etc.</blockquote>

Verification