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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7667065" data-attributes="member: 42582">The threshold isn't "no one".I really don't know what WotC's financials look like. I can only guess based on my very limited knowledge of book authorship in another field. But let's think about a 128 page hardback. That's in the neighbourhood of 100,000 words, maybe more depending on font and artwork. (I think it's around 500 words per full column.)Between authoring, development, editing, art etc, how much labour goes into that? To make the maths easy I'm going to call it an even year, at salary plus on-costs of $100,000. (I don't know how much WotC's designers and editors get paid, and I don't really know US salary structures in general. For their sakes I hope that my estimate of a year's salary plus on-costs is low rather than high!)If WotC sells a book for $50, presumably around $12.50 makes it back to them, and after printing and distribution costs let suppose they see $10 (that seems a bit generous, but I'm rounding wildly in any event).That would set the break-even point at 10,000 books sold.I gather that the Menzoberranzan book sold fewer than 1000 (I think [MENTION=87792]Neonchameleon[/MENTION] has the source for this). I don't know what the sales were for the 4e books you mentioned.See my maths above. What evidence do you have of the likely demand?When they say the settings are a strength, they mean that the IP in the settings is a source of wealth and revenue for WotC, because D&D customers have a fondness for that material.But as Perkins explained, in a round-about way, they are still trying to work out how to leverage that IP, and setting books are not intended to be a big part of that.Sure. For me, it would be nice to have a copy of my 4e PHB fully errata-ed, plus power books with all the information from Dragon and the supplements compiled, etc. But I won't be getting that either!Correct. This is already the situation. It's why they're cutting down on the number of books they publish, because most of their customers don't buy books beyond the core.Do you really think your mul conversion (from 2nd ed AD&D or 4e) is going to break your game? If so, run it by the eyes of ENworld!The answer is probably "not much"! They haven't exactly been coy about their lack of intention to publish many books.On settings, Chris Perkins has told you that you'll be getting stuff in a surprising format/medium. Given that sourcebooks and UA wouldn't surprise many people, we can probably rule them out.It's a huge step above that: it's putting the products back into (digital) print. Which is precisely what counts as supporting a setting, or a game line. A few years ago these boards were full of threads saying "Bring back PDFs". Now WotC has done so. That's support!Yes, the DriveThru indexing could be better, so you can see what's available under various product lines, settings, authors etc - but perhaps someone online has already done that (I don't know, I haven't looked).I'm not trying to change how anyone feels. I'm just pointing out that settings are supported: if you want to start playing your game in Greyhawk, or Dark Sun, at least - those are the two I've looked at on DriveThru - it's cheap and easy to do so.This suggests to me that you are a very atypical WoTC customer.I'm sure if there were 10,000 or 100,000 Nellisirs out there ready to buy books, the publication schedule might look different!</blockquote>

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