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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 6276669" data-attributes="member: 37579">I think a longer edition is a healthier edition. To me, the matter comes down to the cost of making books. Aside from publication costs you have the time it takes to write, develop, playtest, edit, layout, and format the book. Plus the art, which is huge. Books are expensive. While you need to pay the printing cost every time you only need to pay the design cost of a book once. So the first print run has to sell a large number of copies to turn a profit while the second print run has to sell far, far fewer.So the longer it is in print, the more times you reprint and get it back on the shelves, the more money you make. As such, it's healthy for the game to have a series of core books that are always on the shelves. There can be lesser books that come, go out of print, and vanish. But the big books, the tentpole books, should always be available and should always be in stock at stores. But, the company cannot get greedy and have too many expected books. That's hard on retailers. A couple every year is fine. Making a new edition is costly. D&D5 didn't take much longer to make, being started in 2011 and finished in 2014 compared to the 2005 to 2008 of 4e. However, serious work on 4e didn't really begin until 2006 and 2007 when they started relying on freelancers to generate books. And there were books the entire time rather than the lengthy dead stretches of this development period. There was almost a whole extra year of paying staffing costs with almost no money coming in. Big debt, which is something the core books also have to pay off before they can be considered "profitable". Making a new edition on a regular basis means getting into debt again and again. But the longer an edition can last, the longer the staff is working on stuff that generates immediate profit, the better the company should be doing.</blockquote>

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