Benjamin Olson
Hero
It's a matter of perspective. It is almost certainly very profitable for the investment made in it, but it doesn't extract money from most its consumers in proportion to use the way that many comparable cultural phenomena do.
There are plenty of people who play without owning much or any of the stuff. WotC actively encourages this by providing free basic rules in part to try to sell people on the paid content, but in part just because the network effects of more people playing means someone else buys more stuff to play with them. I've played with people who own nothing from WotC and with people who own a dozen 5e books. They may not always make much but there is no way WotC can lose money from someone playing the game.
The 5e PHB has been floating around the bottom of the 100 bestselling books on Amazon continuously for years now, and the other core books sell pretty darned well as well year over year (I've bought 3 PHBs at this point). The starter set(s) sell well enough that major retailers continue to stock them.
The profit margin on individual units of this stuff is pretty damned high. It is all sold for far more than what the manufacturing/printing costs are, even at deep discounts. There are also all the various digital sales, which have essentially no "printing" costs. The real costs are in designing, writing, and otherwise creating the materials in the first place, which means that having multiple products with years of extremely good sales is a big deal. They have not produced the sheer mass of 5e materials to buy that some editions have, but in publishing it can potentially be a lot more profitable to sell less of fewer overall books if it keeps sales focused on the books you already have already covered the sunk costs of creation for (certainly there is lower risk). At the moment the core books continue to generate profits with minimal effort. I don't have much of a sense for how campaign materials sell, but they keep people engaged with the product for another season and are perhaps more the promotional costs for the game than actual profit centers.
Evidently WotC's entire on-staff D&D team, including marketing, legal, etc, is about two dozen people (though obviously there are a large number of freelancers who work with them extensively). Overall a fairly lean operation. Much of what they do is license D&D brand minis, merch, possible upcoming movie, etc., and licensing is always a very low-overhead way of generating income. All and all, it may not be the huge cash cow that it's brand dominance and cultural impact would suggest, but 5e seems to be a pretty effective little money machine with no end in sight.
There are plenty of people who play without owning much or any of the stuff. WotC actively encourages this by providing free basic rules in part to try to sell people on the paid content, but in part just because the network effects of more people playing means someone else buys more stuff to play with them. I've played with people who own nothing from WotC and with people who own a dozen 5e books. They may not always make much but there is no way WotC can lose money from someone playing the game.
The 5e PHB has been floating around the bottom of the 100 bestselling books on Amazon continuously for years now, and the other core books sell pretty darned well as well year over year (I've bought 3 PHBs at this point). The starter set(s) sell well enough that major retailers continue to stock them.
The profit margin on individual units of this stuff is pretty damned high. It is all sold for far more than what the manufacturing/printing costs are, even at deep discounts. There are also all the various digital sales, which have essentially no "printing" costs. The real costs are in designing, writing, and otherwise creating the materials in the first place, which means that having multiple products with years of extremely good sales is a big deal. They have not produced the sheer mass of 5e materials to buy that some editions have, but in publishing it can potentially be a lot more profitable to sell less of fewer overall books if it keeps sales focused on the books you already have already covered the sunk costs of creation for (certainly there is lower risk). At the moment the core books continue to generate profits with minimal effort. I don't have much of a sense for how campaign materials sell, but they keep people engaged with the product for another season and are perhaps more the promotional costs for the game than actual profit centers.
Evidently WotC's entire on-staff D&D team, including marketing, legal, etc, is about two dozen people (though obviously there are a large number of freelancers who work with them extensively). Overall a fairly lean operation. Much of what they do is license D&D brand minis, merch, possible upcoming movie, etc., and licensing is always a very low-overhead way of generating income. All and all, it may not be the huge cash cow that it's brand dominance and cultural impact would suggest, but 5e seems to be a pretty effective little money machine with no end in sight.
