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="HomegrownHydra" data-source="post: 9433401" data-attributes="member: 6775557">The new core books have the same price as the 2014 core books despite having substantially larger page count and there being significant inflation over the last 10 years. So this notion is contradicted by WotC's actual behavior. Further, there are numerous major reasons why it's not likely that WotC will turn physical books into a purely limited, premium product:1. In order to continually grow profits new players need to be continually drawn into D&D and physical books are great at doing that because a) people see their friends with the books and think they look cool and b) they see the books on the shelves at stores.2. They provide a clear entry point into the game. Companies understand that offering a cheap and easy way to start buying their products is a great long term strategy because once someone becomes a customer the company can then push more products on them (such as digital offerings). Trying to maximize the profit of the first purchase is rarely a good strategy.3. Lots of people will buy both physical and digital products which will make WotC more money than those people only buying digital.4. With the standard offset printing used for books, the larger a print run the cheaper it gets for each book made which has a huge impact on profit. So there is a major incentive to maximize demand for print books because it not only means selling more books but it also makes more money off each book which is a massive boon. This is certainly why the new books can keep the same price as the old ones because while the cost of publishing has gone up a bunch in the last 10 years the popularity of D&D today is also far greater now which means they they can do far larger print runs that bring down dramatically the per unit costs. Doing limited print runs of premium books is a nice way to supplement the money made from the mass market books by giving the big spenders something to blow their money on but that can't replace the the mass market approach because limited print runs mean disproportionately more per unit costs that really eat into the profit.5. WotC wants game shops to be successful because that is where Magic is played which is their gargantuan cash cow so they want those shops to have plenty of print products to make money off of so they stay in business. That's why WotC gives them special privileges like letting them sell the books before the official release date and having them be the only place you can get the books with alternate covers.</blockquote>

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