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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 6925614" data-attributes="member: 37579">Agreed. I'm eyeing a couple of the campaign setting products, but at this time I'm only buying Pathfinder for lore and fluff. I need negative amounts of crunch. If I ever run Pathfinder again (and I might: I'd like to run Carrion Crown) I'll likely enforce harsh limits on the books and amount of books. I can't imagine PF2 working out. And it's doubtful I'll pick up Starfinder: if I want to run a science fiction game I'm more likely to go Star Wars or Star Trek. Or Eclipse Phase. If I do get the book it will be as a PDF only for review purposes. And then only if it's the standard Paizo $10.We're getting three hardcovers from WotC each year. Going down to one or two would be a pretty heavy drop in content. I haven't looked at it much.I was a Masquerade fan back in the day. But I picked up the major books for that. Again, content saturation: you only need to buy a finite number of books. I've thought of getting the Guide to Anarchs, which is the only big VtM hardcover I'm missing. But it's low on my priority list. But, honestly, VtM and VtR have a visibility problem now. You can't get the books in stores. You can't get them on Amazon. You can only get them Print on Demand, which is still only so-so in terms of quality. (The book's pages themselves warn they're not full bleed. And it's pricey.)This means it's really only selling to established fans. But that's a shrinking audience that is hard to sustain, since they already own the books. You can only sell people books they already own so many times...There's the historical charts here:<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/content.php?1984-Top-5-RPGs-Compiled-Charts-2008-Present#.WA2ZxuArJaQ" target="_blank">http://www.enworld.org/forum/content.php?1984-Top-5-RPGs-Compiled-Charts-2008-Present#.WA2ZxuArJaQ</a> with the latest here:<a href="http://icv2.com/articles/markets/view/35144/top-5-rpgs-spring-2016" target="_blank">http://icv2.com/articles/markets/view/35144/top-5-rpgs-spring-2016</a>And ENWorld's hot games list here:<a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/hotgames.php" target="_blank">http://www.enworld.org/forum/hotgames.php</a>WoD is high up on the former in terms of discussion, but it's Star Wars, Shadow Run, and Dragon/Fantasy Age that are selling.It's a Gold Best Seller. Which means >500 but <1000 sales. So including it's 12k Kickstarter backers, the book has sold likely <20,000 copies. Which is great for a small publisher, but a quarter of the number a D&D book is expected to sell. Which is the catch. A product that's a huge, phenomenal hit for any other RPG company isn't worth printing for WotC...(And when you consider the money the D&D RPG brings in each year would be a rounding error in the Magic the Gathering accounting books, it's a wonder they even bother. It's *almost* not even worth their time.) They did that during 3e and stopped. They likely did so for some reason. If they were making money hand over fist they would have kept licensing the products. It's probably preferable for them to retain the rights for the *chance* they could use it, rather than license it out for a nominal fee. (And have to compete with their own IP.)I imagine the money any 3rd Party studio could afford pay for the rights would be pretty low compared to WotC's numbers. And if the right movie or video game deal came up they'd want to be in a position to make use of the rights. The potential money is much higher than the actual money that would be gained... And the number of 3rd Party RPG studios that have the up front capital to pay for the license are teeny-tiny, and they'd be more likely to just make their own setting.I'd love that, but I doubt it'd be that successful. The 3e line had a lot of fan support and came hot off the heel's of the 2e setting, and it never really sold amazing numbers. Campaign settings in general sell so-so, 3rd Party stuff also has a bad reputation, and the most ardent fans of the setting already have the books. You don't need to buy another Ravenloft book as the setting hasn't changed: all the lore is the same. It's just a repackaging.They get 40% of sales for non-exclusives and IIRC 30% for exclusives. I imagine they get 25% from the DMsGuild. Still, only 0.52% of products are Platinum (301 total), 1.43% are Gold (836 total), and 3.45% are Electrum (2013). 72.65% of products aren't even Copper, which means they've sold <50 copies. 15,959 products are actually selling but 58,350-odd are just there. But that still ends up to a few thousand dollars each day. Minus bandwidth and hosting costs, the security and infrastructure, and more. And a half-dozen full time staff. The maintenance costs are probably pretty damn high.But you can't flip through the book in a store while browsing. You have to go to a very specialized website, which only some people will know of.</blockquote>

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