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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 6279137" data-attributes="member: 22424">True, to a point. While everyone who subscribes has their own reasons to do so, my guess is that the overwhelming majority subscribe for the tools (specifically the Character Builder and/or Compendium). Both of these benefit a great deal from having a signficant amount of material in them. (And, whenever a new edition comes out, there's an immediate demand for WotC to "fill in the gaps" - Eberron players 'need' Warforged and Shifters, many people 'need' Psionics, there are monsters that people 'need', and so on.)So it makes sense to put out quite a lot of support material quite quickly - probably the equivalents of PHB2&3, MM2&3, the first round of "* Power", the "Adventurer's Vault", and a few other products. That gets the CB & Comp well-stocked with stuff to the benefit of subscribers, and it fills in the gaps pretty well for people to convert their games.The problem is that once you've done that, you've already saturated the game. Adding more stuff to the tools is almost certainly a matter of sharply diminishing returns - most people who will subscribe for 'stuff' have already subscribed. And all your best-selling books are out and done.And that's you, at most, two years into your release schedule (because (horrors!) people actually want those books).Now, you can start looking into niche subjects (Frostburn, Libris Mortis...), or you can start doing a second round of splats but, alas, these just don't sell all that well. Unless you're willing to accept a dramatically reduced income stream, it's already time to start looking at a new (half-)edition. Not good.(Unfortunately, it was also worse for 4e. As we know, DDI subscriptions canibalised sales of those best-selling books. We don't know by how much, but we do know that a not-insignificant number of people subscribed rather than buying the books. And, frankly, with books like "* Power" that's a no-brainer - the DDI is just a better way to get that content, and would be even if the books were free. But we also weren't, and probably still aren't, at the point where WotC could just drop the print delivery entirely and instead deliver splat material online-only - many people would simply refuse. What this probably meant is that the lost sales due to DDI subs reduced those "best-sellers" to a point where they were barely worth printing, while the DDI itself didn't achieve the (absurd) targets WotC had set for it. Instead of one reasonable success, they had two relative failures on their hands.)It will be interesting to see what WotC do with 5e. My gut feeling is that we won't see a dedicated 5e DDI (we'd have heard about it by now), but that we'll also see very little in-print support for the edition - those 'gaps' will probably remain unfilled. It appears that WotC have decided to focus on D&D as a brand, and with a multi-platform offering, of which the TTRPG is only a tiny (and probably the smallest) part. We're just not worth supporting.Indeed. WotC have produced barely a dozen adventures, ever, that reached the heady heights of "okay".Again, agreed. What works for Paizo won't work for WotC, and vice versa.The problem with this is that most groups don't use any published setting at all and the vast majority of groups that do use a published setting only use one. This very sharply limits your ability to publish settings - any given setting will saturate if supported indefinitely, but multiple settings compete against one another. In that regard, I think Paizo have been very wise to stick exclusively with Golarion, and WotC are wise to likewise focus heavily on FR, but it does mean that these are rapidly heading to saturation.(There's no reason, of course, that the DDI couldn't be used to support the other TSR settings (or Eberron), or even to introduce an entirely new setting - since subscribers get everything anyway, this gives them the ability to experiment significantly with content. With such a subscription service they don't need to sell customers on each new product; they just need to do enough to avoid them cancelling - a much easier proposal.)</blockquote>

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