D&D General Is DnD being mothballed?

[Staffan]

Another part of the perceived slowness of the release schedule is the glaring omission of sourcebooks, which used to be the mainstay of the releases back in 3e. You have setting overviews, you have adventures, you have rules expansions, and you have monster books. But the closest we've gotten to geographically themed sourcebooks since the Sword Coast's Adventuring Guide are Storm King's Thunder and Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, both of which are primarily adventures with a small geographical description attached. There's nothing like 3e's Sharn: City of Towers or Faiths of Eberron (or for FR folks, City of Splendors: Waterdeep or Faiths & Pantheons). And while some of that stuff can be found on the DM's Guild, it's not integrated into D&D Beyond.

 

[Staffan]

Everyone was angry for what they explored doing, not what they actually did.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

If you explore a bank robbery or murder, people can get upset over you exploring it too, not just about you committing it.

Let's not try and make an analogy to inchoate crimes, unless you know what you're talking about. Also, this isn't a crime.

The terms were very draconic, they did not have a legal leg to stand on as far as revoking 1.0 (that was just posturing to pressure people into 1.1),

That's not exactly true. For reasons that were discussed ... in far too much detail here previously ... they did have a legal leg to stand on due to the issues with the OGL 1.0 and subsequent caselaw. Which is why, when they ended up going in a different direction, they went with the Creative Commons license.

and in their communication they were very firm that they would at best budge very little. So no, that was not an open ended exploration, it was an attempt at strong-arming which they lost as they turned out to be in the weaker position.

Again, as has been subsequently discussed, there were internal ... issues ... within WoTC at the time. Let's call them divisions. As far as we know, the choice to change direction was not because of legal reasons, but was because the external pressure from the community empowered the other people within WoTC in terms of direction.

Companies are people. Often a lot of people. With different thoughts and different agendas.

I grant them that they recovered and released the SRD under CC, but this was more than a friendly discussion among peers that they just started awkwardly

I will finish this by noting the obvious- there is something fundamentally wrong when we see a company propose doing a thing we believe to be incorrect, we mobilize people to argue against it, we successfully persuade the company to do ... not just the right thing, but to go above and beyond, and then choose to forever denounce the company because they ... what, listened to us?

It has been my observation that there are people (many of whom do not play D&D) who have an interest in taking WoTC down a peg*. Parasocial relationships are a helluva drug. And for that reason, they take every opportunity to try and re-litigate something that did not happen. But that's not really the purpose of this thread. If you want to be a hater, feel free to hate.** But you're not likely to convince anyone who doesn't already agree with you.



*Just as there are people who love WoTC no matter what they do.

**I would say, "Hate the players, not the game," but ... um ... weirdly, this is the one context where that is certainly not the appropriate saying.

 

[mamba]

That's not exactly true. For reasons that were discussed ... in far too much detail here previously ... they did have a legal leg to stand on due to the issues with the OGL 1.0 and subsequent caselaw.

no they didn’t, they had a tenuous argument to go to court, I doubt they had a chance at winning, what they did have however was virtually unlimited funds to scare others away from even trying that route

I will finish this by noting the obvious- there is something fundamentally wrong when we see a company propose doing a thing we believe to be incorrect, we mobilize people to argue against it, we successfully persuade the company to do ... not just the right thing, but to go above and beyond, and then choose to forever denounce the company because they ... what, listened to us?

‘too little, too late’ is a thing, so this is really an individual decision.

Personally I am not denouncing them and have bought D&D books they published since then. I am pushing back against what I consider to be false narrative

 

[Alzrius]

But your essential evidence for 3.5 being sustainable has been Paizo. Which was partly sustaining itself by treating its employees poorly.

You're conflating two separate issues that have been under discussion here. Even if we grant the premise that Paizo treated its employees poorly (and I think it'd be better if you linked to something about that rather than holding that it's true), I don't see that as only being the case because they were underpaying their employees (which seems to be what you're implying here). For instance, insofar as I know their employees aren't being underpaid now, and yet they're still using the same release schedule without issue.

I also do not understand holding the OGL debacle, never actually implemented and in fact more than reversed, more harmful to the community than actually causing measurable harm to members of that community.

It's fine to hold different opinions, but I don't see this as being impossible to understand. Whatever you may think of Paizo's pay rates, they didn't cause anxiety to an entire industry by making them think that their ability to do business was being undermined.

Edit: unless by “community” you mean “people who harvest views by being self-righteous on the internet.” In which case, WotC did them a solid.

Now now, you shouldn't be so down on yourself.

 

[Alzrius]

Little of both?

My point being, there is a huge difference between sales growth slowing and sales outright falling.

We know that sales were falling for 3.5. It wasn’t that they were stable or the rate of growth was slowing, sales were outright dropping.

The only way to stay afloat was to keep endlessly churning out another book. And that isn’t stable. It’s just not because too much rides on those initial sales of each title.

The slower release means that you aren’t taking sales away from the tails of older books. That’s the secret to 5e’s success afaik. That you have six or eight year old books that are still selling and selling well.

How many copies of a 2015 Paizo title do you think they sold this month? WotC is still selling thousands of SCAG copies a year. If the start banging out new books, those will inevitably lead to less sales of older titles.

I'm not sure that we do know that sales were "outright dropping" as opposed to "growth was slowing." Would you mind linking to something (and ideally quoting the relevant text) in that regard? Because again, Paizo was putting out essentially the same content, and it was stable. Even if Paizo isn't selling 2015 books, they're selling enough of the books that they put out that their bottom line seems to be doing just fine, and then some. Likewise, I don't think that it's "inevitable" that newer books will be sold at the expense of older books; that's a presumption that I have yet to see evidence to support.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

no they didn’t, they had a tenuous argument to go to court, I doubt they had a chance at winning, what they did have however was virtually unlimited funds to scare others away from even trying that route

And you are basing this on .... your extensive knowledge of the relevant law? Your knowledge of how licensing IP works? Your specific prior knowledge of caselaw regarding same? Years of experience litigating these issues?

Let's just say that I will respectfully disagree with your assertion.

‘too little, too late’ is a thing, so this is really an individual decision.

Personally I am not denouncing them and have bought D&D books they published since then. I am pushing back against what I consider to be false narrative

I agree that there is a false narrative; I will disagree as to whether you're pushing against it, or pushing it.

Anyway, it is what it is. This is old news. You're welcome to your opinion and I don't think that this is likely to be a productive conversation, or that this conversation is appropriate for this thread.

 

[Alzrius]

I find it hard to disagree with Alzrius's point that it is clearly possible for a RPG company to have a much faster product release schedule than 5e's and still be successful. However, it probably isn't possible for WotC to have a much faster print schedule and still be (sufficiently) successful, at least not using their current business model.​

Thank you for reading what I've been saying, instead of reading into it. I seem to recall that several posts ago, I mentioned that WotC would likely need to adjust quite a few aspects of their current model to make a release schedule like Paizo's work, but that it was far from necessarily being unsustainable. I'm still not sure why that's such a hard sell for most people.

 

[Alzrius]

Why exactly is this important?

Because I keep seeing this narrative (i.e. of the inherent inevitability of failure of that type of release schedule) and it strikes me as becoming one of those "everyone knows" things that's actually more myth than fact. I don't particularly care for that, so I find it worthwhile to counter it here.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Thank you for reading what I've been saying, instead of reading into it. I seem to recall that several posts ago, I mentioned that WotC would likely need to adjust quite a few aspects of their current model to make a release schedule like Paizo's work, but that it was far from necessarily being unsustainable. I'm still not sure why that's such a hard sell for most people.

As I previously said, it's because the specific consumers for Paizo and WoTC are different.

Paizo largely relies on a subscription model for people that are deeply invested - the "hardcore." WoTC relies on mass sales to casual gamers and new gamers, including a large number of players under 15.

In other words, Paizo can afford to target a small part of the community, whereas WoTC cannot.

That's why it's a hard sell. Different companies have different business models to target different consumers.