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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 7723306" data-attributes="member: 37579">You make two statements here:1) D&D should grow the numbers of total customers2) D&D should sell small products to many existing customers. The thing is... those might be contradictory. If you release lots and lots of small products, that floods the market. This makes it harder to tell what products are essential and what to buy first. It makes the expected cost required to play the game seem unnecessarily high. There's also the rules bloat factor. Having too many accessories makes the game unwieldy and harder to learn. Plus, with more products it's easier & quicker for the game to feel "finished" and people to stop buying and play other games. There's less keeping them coming back on a regular basis. And the fewer people playing, the less buzz there is for the game, which attracts even more new people.Right now, WotC is trying a different strategy with D&D. They're focusing more on "D&D the brand" than just D&D the roleplaying game. Instead of targeting one small audience with those small selling products, they're spreading them out across multiple platforms. They're doing the Neverwinter video game as well as the board games (both the Delve style like Tomb of Elemental Evil and Tomb of Annihilation but also Against the Giants, and Betrayal at Baldur's Gate). They have the miniature combat game, and the dice game, and the deck building game. Meanwhile, all those funnel new fans to the small RPG, which is focused on adventures. So people buy an adventure of their choice and the core rulebook. And the players at tables - instead of buying an accessory or splatbook - also end up buying the PHB. All sales are funnelled towards a single book, which is selling a surprising number of copies. And because there are fewer RPG products, when one is released it sells much better than more frequent and less special products; if instead of Volo's Guide to Monsters they released one small 32-page book every two months, they'd probably have sold more total books but fewer of each and made far less money. That said, they are doing the DLC aspect to some degree. That's the DMsGuild. For every buck spent on the site, they likely make at least a dime, which quickly adds up. ($5 to $10 per month for each major author, for 50 authors, for 18 months... and that's several thousand dollars for doing nothing.)It's funny how in the above you compare one company (WotC) to an entire industry (video games). It's extra amusing in that running a video game company is actually a very hard. It's a difficulty industry to make money on with lots of games companies going out of business. And there's no surefire way to be a success. And DLC isn't a magic money making wand, as plenty of companies have tried and failed to make money via that route. They're dependant on Magic the Gathering because they are the Magic the Gathering company. There's probably more people in janitorial or legal at WotC than there are working for D&D. The numbers are so large that D&D will never work as a safety net for MtG. That's like saying you should use your kid's babysitting money as a safety net. Magic the Gathering makes so much money, that when they balance the books, D&D's revenue is a rounding error. The difference between a high and low selling quarterly set of MtG cards has more impact on the company than all of fifth edition to date.I believe you're correct here. WoW was the first MMO to really be a mainstream success, and "beat" D&D. But we're still talking about a subset of video games. It's slightly unfair to pick a new genre or type of video game and use that as a yardstick. "Oh, clearly D&D is doing more poorly now than during 4e, because it was bigger than mobile gaming then, and now it's far, far smaller."</blockquote>

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