NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 5491856" data-attributes="member: 22424">The only number we have is the membership of one of the groups (I forget which one), which is believed to include many of the DDI subscribers, and no-one who isn't a subscriber. IIRC, I was told that the membership of that group was about 45,000 people.I'm always sceptical of statistics (and WotC have both means and incentive to inflate that number if they really want), so I'd be inclined to put the actual number of subscribers anywhere between 30,000 and 100,000. Still, however you slice it, it's still a lot of people.However...Even knowing the number of subscribers is only part of the story. Firstly, we have no way of knowing how many are high-value monthly subscriptions and how many are lower-value annual subscriptions.But more to the point, we have no way of knowing how much it's costing to develop and run the thing. The thing is, since starting work on the DDI, Wizards have put lots of resource into a 3D VTT that never worked, and a Character Visualiser that tied into it. Those both had to be scrapped. They also had to change tack on the Character Builder and Monster Builder, turning those from standalone to online-only tools. And work is now ongoing on a new VTT.I would not be at all surpised to find that the DDI has long since blown through it's initial budget, and all the money WotC has banked from ongoing subs, and is now barely breaking even (or not even) on the renewals as they come up.(And, worse, while this was going on, D&D took no fewer than three major hits to book sales: one due to the split with Pathfinder, one due to people using the Compendium instead of buying splatbooks, and one because 4e is now fairly well saturated.)This would certainly explain a lot about the state of the e-magazines.Still, I suspect that the powers-that-be at WotC probably recognise that the DDI still has the potential to be the way ahead for the game, and could secure the future of the game for years to come. How long they remain patient and willing to allow further investment, though...</blockquote>

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