D&D 5E Is 5E Special

[Parmandur]

A 5e book with a summoner class, a pet class, the artificer reprinted with 5+ subclasses, and 2-3other classes and more races would have sold like hotcakes,

A 5e book with a bunch of optional variants to change 5einto different genres and styles and match the fantasies of media after 1995 would have been a money printer.

5e missed out on a lot of sales.

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.

 

[Parmandur]

The economic argument that something that sells well is inherently good quality is always hilarious, but my printer decided to make make the 'cleaning my jets' noise just as I read it, reminding me that there's entire industries that thrive on purposefully making shoddy products. ~goes back to playing a 9 year old 'early access' videogame on a computer designed to die early.~

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.

 

[Parmandur]

Artificer+ Summoner+Headmaster+Warlord would sell more than Strixhaven

Strixhaven seems to be selling pretty well, what's your market research based reason to expect that would sell better...?

 

[Parmandur]

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.

If you think WotC material sells hundreds of times the number of copies of a book than a 3pp because their material is hundreds of times better, then we have very different views of the marketplace.

It has nothing to do with second guessing WotC. I don't particularly care what WotC sells. But what sells for WotC is the mark of officialness and widespread acceptance, not the quality of the material per se. Now, if WotC starts to release a bunch of shoddy, substandard material, that can certainly erode the value of their imprint, but we're very far from that point right now. 5e is quality material, and also at the right place at the right time, which is why their current material is so very successful. Much like each individual MCU movie, being part of the greater whole enhances each individual product.

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.

 

[Maxperson]

I think the question is... did any of these 3rd party products sell in the magnitudes that the WotC books did (IMO this is what constitutes whether "many" fans wanted it or not)? If a particular product did then it may have been worth it for WotC to publish a similar book for 5e. But if not, that product type probably wasn't published because they didn't believe there was enough of a demand to make it worthwhile.

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.

 

[TwoSix]

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 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.

And yes, even WotC can put something out for 5e and have it not sell if it's poorly targeted. If WotC put out the "Complete Book of Flumphs" as the Winter 2023 hardcover, it's not going to sell anywhere near as well as a Planescape or Dark Sun or a new Magic setting book is.

I just don't see it as remotely controversial to suggest that WotC books sell a lot because they're the official books. The fact that 5e is so widespread makes their books have higher intrinsic value than a comparable 3pp book, regardless of quality, simply because the barriers to use it (and discuss it) are so much lower.

 

[Minigiant]

Strixhaven seems to be selling pretty well, what's your market research based reason to expect that would sell better...?

A book with 4 new classes of popular archetypes would sell more that a player book with few player options in a niche genre.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I think the question is... did any of these 3rd party products sell in the magnitudes that the WotC books did

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 100 people want a redone magic of incarnum wotc doesn't want to waste time and money on it... but If I sold 100 copies on the DMs guild I would be happy

 

[glass]

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.

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.

At the end of the day, if you do not know much about 4e (or Magic of Incarnum), maybe don't make pronouncements about it on the Internet?

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.

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?

_
glass.

 

[Imaro]

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 100 people want a redone magic of incarnum wotc doesn't want to waste time and money on it... but If I sold 100 copies on the DMs guild I would be happy

Yep... I agree totally.