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Message: <blockquote data-quote="aramis erak" data-source="post: 6624476" data-attributes="member: 6779310">Responding to some issues several pages back...The reasons for books and movies tie together....A typical bestseller novel will sell several hundred to a million copies of the hardcover - bringing the imprint and publisher a dollar or two each, and a known author a quarter each... but will also generate 2 dollars or so profit for the booksellers and for the warehouser/distributor per copy. President Obama's book (from his senatorial days), for example, is around a million hardcovers at $25 or $30 per each... $30M in economic activity, plus the attendant wages of those employees adding on...  But also about $2-4 M for the imprint/publisher. And probably $250 K for Pres. Obama. Plus any pocket sales.Now, I don't expect Fantasy novels to do quite that well (but have read from Jim Baen that a top Sci-Fi or Fantasy bestseller sells over a quarter million copies in pocket and usually well over 100K in hardcover). Sure, Harry Potter set records... over 500 M copies of the first one...A combined movie and novel looks to make Wizards a couple million or so dollars after random house gets their cut - a movie will help book sales, and book sales will help the movie... add a videogame content release at the same time, and you get massive synergy in all three. It all funnels together. The RPG creates some awareness. More importantly, it provides a nucleus of already hooked fans clamoring for more, and if they can give that more with the (fairly inexpensive) novels, and get a third party to pay them a couple million plus a share of box office for a movie, all tied to the same setting...So, getting people playing is a loss-leader activity. It generates a ready made audience nucleus which will talk about and spread enthusiasm about the books and movies, and fuel the initial sales.  And as far as loss-leaders go, it's a pretty inexpensive deal, since they own the properties themselves. They're creating a market ready for a feature film and novels. Let's see...Slated for one year... about 30 short adventures. 2 long ones. 1 book (about 40 pages) of rules crunch (races and spells)... All of it focused upon building a communal public-play user-base. It's not like the passwords have been hard to figure out. This season's was figured easily enough from the player packet for the season. And they're good adventures. Not great, generally, but good. If my players for my home game hadn't insisted otherwise, I'd have been running those instead, and they'd have more magic items than they do now.</blockquote>

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