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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9166570" data-attributes="member: 8461">This isn't a reply to what I posted, it's a reply to a caricature of what I posted. No one is saying that companies should only publish "for love of the game." Rather, there's a sentiment that putting out multiple crunch products a month, every month, is both necessarily and self-evidently going to lead to financial ruin for a TTRPG company. This is a false narrative, one whose untruth is fairly obvious if you look at the next-most successful such company after WotC/Hasbro.What you're responding to, at best I can tell, is a presumed charge that profit maximization is somehow "wrong" or "bad," neither of which was what I said. I was pointing out only that it's not "unsustainable" or "unprofitable" to publish books at the pace WotC published 3.5, which we know because there's another company that's done just that for years and years and is both sustainable and profitable...or are you saying that you've peaked at Paizo's books, and know that they're not profitable or sustainable?Here's the thing about profit maximization that most people seem to intuit, but often struggle to articulate: that "make as much money as possible" comes across as, shall we say, more ethically dubious than "offer the best product/service you can, and financial success will follow." The latter sentiment is one that no one has a problem with, and while you can absolutely suggest that it might not be true that simply being the best is enough to lead to financial success, the idea that your goal is to make as much money as you can – realistic though it may be – inherently carries the idea that how you do that is, at best, a secondary concern, which understandably opens you up to charges (rightly or wrongly) that quality isn't your first and foremost goal.That's without getting into ideas of how much money is, or should be, "enough." Even taking into account issues of inflation and purchasing power, there's a point where setting ever-increasing target goals ceases to look like (or actually be) anything realistic, let alone relatable. Fifteen years or so ago, Ryan Dancey told us all that Hasbro wanted D&D to earn $100 million per year. Now, <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/estimating-d-d%E2%80%99s-revenue-teos-abadia-crunches-the-numbers.700417/" target="_blank">as far as we know</a>, it's doing just that...and yet the CEO of WotC is saying it's "undermonetized" (and the target number I've heard, admittedly from second- and third-hand sources, is closer to $500M annually). Given that $100M in 2007 dollars doesn't (insofar as I know) equate to $500M in today's money, it's hard for me to have sympathy for that inflated target, presuming that it's correct.I'll refer you to <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/ben-riggs-what-the-heck-happened-with-4th-edition-seminar-at-gen-con-2023.699181/" target="_blank">this thread</a>, where Ben Riggs stated that the primary reason for the switch from 3.5E to 4E was because WotC/Hasbro executives saw how much money World of Warcraft was making, and wanted to get a slice of that pie. That 3.5 wasn't profitable anymore was never (that I recall) put forward as an issue.I mean, no disagreement there; I think a lot of the sentiment that you seem to take issue with is just that corporatism tends to interfere with the processes that result in the best content, rather than being orthogonal to those processes. That's a mindset that I think has some credibility to it.</blockquote>

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