How much do you suppose it costs to develop and maintain DDI?

[Emirikol]

How much do you suppose it costs to develop and maintain DDI? How profitable do you think it is?

jh

 

[Tale]

This seems like one of those questions you'll never find an answer too. However, I'd reason that it's more profitable than even the books.

 

[Shemeska]

I don't know how much it takes to maintain in its current form, but I was quoted a budget total for the original outsourced development by one of the people on the internal team. To say that it was quite large would be an understatement. Assuming it was even ballpark, and I have zero reason to doubt their details, it puts the "digital consolidation" and associated layoffs into perspective, as well as some other management related changes during the period.

At the moment, given the downsized staff and the likely lack of further major development (ie VTT is DOA) they're probably turning a good profit assuming they keep the subscriptions up. However the success they garner from that might depend on how that profit is considered versus the initial investment.

 

[Emirikol]

The VTT was a big promise..and they had to dump it.

If they do have 25,000 subscribers at $6.00...

jh

 

[Piratecat]

I'm going to make the half-assed prediction that we'll have the VTT by GenCon 2011. When I spoke to Greg Leeds last summer, he gave me the impression that this was a priority for them and that they wanted to make sure they got it right. I originally expected a skill challenge generation tool or an encounter generation tool to accompany the monster builder, but we haven't seen one yet despite its relative ease. That makes me wonder if they're working on something more complex like the VTT.

The Character Visualizer, though? I'm betting that's scrapped.

Let's say the estimates are correct and they have a few more than 25,000 subscribers at $6 a month. That's roughly $2M a year as a guesstimate. Budget-wise, that profit center would be supporting competitive salaries from at least five or six full time programmers plus editors, managers, freelancers, QA, bandwidth costs, and lots of overhead from other departments.

 

[Echohawk]

Let's say the estimates are correct and they have a few more than 25,000 subscribers at $6 a month.

I think 25,000 has to be a rather low estimate of the number of DDI subscribers, since there are currently 26,101 DDI subscribers who are also members of the DDI group in the Wizards Community part of their web site. Anyone who has a DDI subscription but who hasn't joined the community won't show up in that total, so presumably the actual total of paying DDI customers is quite a bit higher.

Here's how that number (DDI subscribers who are also Community members) has changed over the last six months, with these numbers being noted down on roughly the 6th of each month:

September 2009: 7972
October 2009: 14392 [+6420]
November 2009: 18911 [+4519]
December 2009: 21570 [+2659]
January 2010: 23816 [+2246]
February 2010: 26101 [+2285]

Numbers in square brackets are the growth each month. It seems as if the growth rate has plateaued since December, but is now holding steady at a bit more than 2000 new DDI sub/community members each month, which seems pretty healthy to me.

While we're on this topic, I wish there was an easy way to buy DDI subscriptions as gifts for other people. I'd love to buy subscriptions for some of my players as birthday presents, but at the moment, doing that is rather messy. I'd like to be able to pay for a subscription, and provide an email address of the person I'm giving the subscription to, and for them to then get an email with instructions on how to activate it, set a password, etc. If anyone from WotC is listening, please add this to your list of ideas. You'll make at least a few more sales from me.

 

[fuzzlewump]

While we're on this topic, I wish there was an easy way to buy DDI subscriptions as gifts for other people. I'd love to buy subscriptions for some of my players as birthday presents, but at the moment, doing that is rather messy. I'd like to be able to pay for a subscription, and provide an email address of the person I'm giving the subscription to, and for them to then get an email with instructions on how to activate it, set a password, etc. If anyone from WotC is listening, please add this to your list of ideas. You'll make at least a few more sales from me.

Imagine, $30 for the gift of D&D: The coming "Red Box" + a 1-month 'subscription card' to DDI.

 

[Alasomorph]

Imagine, $30 for the gift of D&D: The coming "Red Box" + a 1-month 'subscription card' to DDI.

That works for online MMORPG's, why not D&D.

 

[Nikosandros]

I think 25,000 has to be a rather low estimate of the number of DDI subscribers, since there are currently 26,101 DDI subscribers who are also members of the DDI group in the Wizards Community part of their web site. Anyone who has a DDI subscription but who hasn't joined the community won't show up in that total, so presumably the actual total of paying DDI customers is quite a bit higher.

I agree, especially since I don't see any great incentive to join the group on WotC site. I'm wondering what happens if someone doesn't renew the subscription? Is he automatically removed from the group?

 

[Umbran]

Let's say the estimates are correct and they have a few more than 25,000 subscribers at $6 a month. That's roughly $2M a year as a guesstimate. Budget-wise, that profit center would be supporting competitive salaries from at least five or six full time programmers plus editors, managers, freelancers, and lots of overhead from other departments.

Let's take this a step or two further...

Competitive salary plus benefits for a full time, solid developer or manager? Let's call that $100K each. Five Full Time Employees (FTEs) have now eaten a full quarter of that income. In my experience, development of a fully-featured, multimedia application takes a team of more like 10 people (developers, QA, and management inclusive) if you want it done well and in reasonable time. So now half that money is gone.

And we haven't started talking about the costs for the servers and hefty internet connectivity for same, licensing for development tools....

$2 million doesn't go as far as one might think.