I think that's really only a small part. I've taken part in several Kickstarters of 5e additional mechanical material, that have sold 1000s of copies. I have no doubt that if WotC had published the exact same material with WotC branding, it would sell orders of magnitudes more.
So if a model of car has its wheels reliably fall off, people will keep buying the model for a decade with no improvement. Got it.
Why? Why do you have no doubt? Is there some kind of market research to suggest this? Will it sell more than something they could divert those resources to?
There are dozens, if not hundreds, of companies that make add-ons for cars and trucks. Big companies don't go after the pennies, they go after the dimes and dollars.
The Ford Pinto was in model for 9 years. It exploded.
Artificer+ Summoner+Headmaster+Warlord would sell more than Strixhaven
Headmaster?
Because any product that WotC markets is going to sell more than an identical 3pp because it has the imprimatur of being "official", which is a very important consideration to a wide swath of the playerbase.
I am so sorry that bonus actions are confusing for you.
It's not really moving the goal posts to just consider what was in the game: latter aplats aren't really going to be on people's radar. We don't all about Magic of Incarn much for similar reasons.
Internal. It was an intentional design choice, made without sufficient consideration of how the market would receive such a product. It wouldn't have worked better at a different time.
Theoretical sales, but not necessarily actual sales. The D&D team has stated that publishing just to have options has been shown not to worl of theybare options that most players do not want.
The opposite doesn't hold either: just because something sells well doesn6mean it is low or high in some "objective" grade.of quality. It sells well because people want to pay money for it. Someone buys a cheap car or a predatory printer because they have to. Someone buys a game because they expect to have fun with it.
Strixhaven seems to be selling pretty well, what's your market research based reason to expect that would sell better...?
But per WotC themselves...they found out the hard way that is not true. Just because they release Magic of Incarnum or a PHB 3 doesn't mean that people will buy it.
I don't agree with this. First, no third party product is going to sell as well as even the worst D&D book put out by WotC. They simply don't have the resources, name recognition or advertising network. Second, third party products have a built in stigma with some people. I know that I personally automatically view them with suspicion, because there's no way that they playtested the material as well as WotC and don't have access to the exact game math. Third, they are mixed in with 10 bazillion other third party products and you have to slog through those products looking for that diamond in the rough.
I don't think it's particularly controversial to suggest that WotC released too much mechanical material during the 3.5 era, which started to dilute the impact any one book might have had. A "Book of Incarnum" for 5e would almost certainly outsell the 3.5 version.
A book with 4 new classes of popular archetypes would sell more that a player book with few player options in a niche genre.
i assume the reason they don't mind 3rd parties and the DMs guild is because they want to have us get our hands on things that they don't find it worth publishing...
If you make a claim, and then later, when called on the first claim, make a different claim and try to pretend that was what you were claiming all along, that is moving the goalposts. Also, trying to pretend that PHB3 is some obscure splat on the level of MoI is not classy.
But marketing is not really a "design choice", and it has nothing to do with the quality or design of the game as a game. If someone had responded to "Is 5e special" with "Yes, the marketing was really good" would you really have felt they were praising 5e?
Yep... I agree totally.
