Hussar said:
There's one point that I keep bringing up with regards to the OGL.
How do you make it work with the DDI?
I'd say the same way that offering free PDF downloads with subscription-based print products, plus an online System Reference Document (and a fan-generated wiki of OGL materials) works for Paizo, but that's just me.
Right now, even though we haven't had a new WOTC product in over a year, they STILL have around 80000 subscribers. That's somewhere, as a was mentioned, between 5 and 8 million dollars a year. That's HUGE in a market that's only worth 30 million dollars total. WOTC controls between a quarter and third of the entire market with a single product that costs them virtually nothing to keep running.
There are a large number of assumptions here that are not necessarily true.
The big fiction is that there's any way of measuring the number of DDI subscribers. There's not.
The numbers that get so often cited are self-reported by WotC - which creates credibility problems right there, not because WotC is necessarily dishonest, but simply because it's in their business interests to make sure that they never admit that something of theirs is floundering (unless it's part of a strategy to tell you how their new thing is about to fix all of that). These numbers are always going to be high, because that makes them look successful.
Moreover, the number of subscribers are pretty clearly something manually tabulated, rather than being auto-generated by a program based on the number of subscriptions at any given moment. The way you know that is that the numbers should be varying by some not-inconsiderable degree on at least a per day basis, as at any given time people will be signing up or cancelling their service. That these numbers are relatively static for long stretches shows that someone is going in and manually toggling them at various intervals - which casts further doubt on their reliability.
The idea that the DDI makes them money equal to X subscribers times Y dollars per month over a 12 month basis is also fatally flawed, as that's a measure of gross revenue, not net. I know that some people scoff at the idea that producing the DDI costs any significant revenue at all, which is an excellent way of easily identifying the people who don't know about the costs that go into maintaining (let alone updating) a system of any type, let alone an internet-based one. Make no mistake, it does not cost WotC "virtually nothing" to keep the DDI up and running, and the total profits it makes them (presuming the subscription numbers are even close to accurate) is not the gross.
Finally, the market estimation of $30 strikes me as something that needs citing, but bear that in mind against Ryan Dancy having told us that Hasbro set annual targets of $50-$100 million annually for D&D as a brand. Even in the highly-suspicious circumstances that they're actually making $30 million net profit off of the D&D, that's not nearly enough.
Finally, the DDI at this point consists of little more than the 4E tools, which are naturally going to become less valuable over time as 4E becomes an unsupported game. That's not edition warring - unsupported games lose profitability fairly rapidly; it's why Paizo decided to make Pathfinder its own RPG to begin with, rather than just continuing to print 3.5 supplements. Keeping the DDI at 4E-levels of profitability will require a not-insignificant investment to make it a 5E-compatible tool, regardless of whatever else they decide to do with it...and as mentioned, that's a time-and-money sink, potentially a huge one.
The DDI is not the cash cow a lot of people seem to think it is.
If you go with an OGL PHB, an entirely open PHB, it will take about a week before people put up free character builders and whatnot. We saw that before. Within a month of 4e coming out, you had for pay character builders going up. They got shut down, because the GSL doesn't allow for that. But an open 5e? That just opens the floodgates.
Not particularly - HeroLab hasn't been the death of any particular game, and in fact it's common for smaller companies to tout their HeroLab compatibility. Quite simply, the idea that another pay-for character builder is a serious threat to, well, anything is like saying that having an SRD will make people give up on buying Core Rulebooks. It's demonstrably untrue, and has been for years.
Now, how many new PHB's do you have to sell in order to make up the losses to the DDI and the steady revenue stream that represents? How do you have an open 5e and still protect that cash cow?
See above. These questions are based on premises that, when scrutinzed, are suspect at best.
