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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dungeoneer" data-source="post: 6333832" data-attributes="member: 91777">Books are not the future.The publishing industry as a whole is in the midst of a sea change brought on by cheap, widely available digital content and increased competition from, well, everything. This is a problem for WotC and D&D too.People think 4e's divisiveness killed it, but I tend to think that any edition that launched in 2008 would have had problems with sales. Why buy books when you can get it all for free online?To some degree WotC gave away the farm with DDI, since once you had the character builder you didn't need books and once you had the compendium you didn't need monsters. But if DDI had not existed people would have gotten that content elsewhere and WotC would have gotten NO money instead of their $10/month. WotC has a real conundrum to solve. Game rules are incredibly easy to disseminate online. "Flavor" is nice to have, but you can play without it and most people won't pay for it. What's left? Art still looks better in a nicely bound hardcover, and some people are willing to shell out for good stuff. This suggests there might be a market for premium, 'deluxe' editions. But that won't support the entire game.Paizo has definitely hit on something with adventure subscriptions. If you can't get $50 a book from people you can at least get a few bucks from them every month. The fact that WotC has already improved the quality of their adventure offerings shows that they are thinking about this.Live events are still a good idea, because an 'experience' is something you can't put on BitTorrent. Of course you have to figure out how to make money off of them. There was a movement towards the end of 4e to sell collectible cards for use with organized play. It didn't quite succeed but I would expect them to try something like this again.A lot of indie games and publishers are really putting Kickstarter to work for them. If people want a book, get them to pay for it up front. Throw in goodies like "Your character appears in the book!" for backers who have serious cash to spend. Maybe even a big, established player like WotC can get in on this.Will any of this really work? Are there other, even more out-there ideas that might work instead? I have no idea. But I guarantee you, if WotC doesn't solve these problems, 5e will be even shorter-lived than 4e was.</blockquote>

Verification