Doug MacCrae said:
Selling dead tree rpgs isn't a strong business model, it never has been. Tying it to minis seems a good move though, from a business PoV.
Why bother with the plastic of the 20th century when you can have the bits and bytes of the 21st at your disposal?
Minis -- especially for the high-school-and-up crowd, are even more niche than pen-and-paper RPG's. There's no reason WotC can't also have a good minis line going, but D&D is bigger than minis, and to tie the two together would be to shrink D&D, tethering the success of D&D's medium-sized niche to the minis' itty-bitty niche.
I'd think that D&D's best bet is in lowering the barriers of entry until they're effectively 0, and selling the goods and services and subscriptions (the DDI!) to players. 95% of the game is free (95% of players play for free), 5% is paid convenience or customization, and that 5% is so big due to the low barrier of entry, that it can pay for the other 95%.
The place where that model works best is online, where Moore's Law kicks in and makes the cost of higher volume (storage, bandwidth, etc.) itty bitty.
Books have their own advantages, and D&D can (and, IMO, should) keep the book side, but there's no reason that the books have to be published in five-year product line increments that are inflexible within their lifespan. D&D is much better served by being flexible and amorphous enough to ooze into every niche it can, which is better represented by something like the Flat World Publishing model: arrange the rules you want into a custom campaign book for your game, and publish it via Print-on-Demand (or get it electronically via some DDI/virtual table top interface!).
Cadfan said:
They still have to sell books, so even when they aren't changing the ruleset, they're slowly updating army books for each army one by one.
Well, you don't need to sell books. You can sell print-on-demand luxury items. You can sell customizable online experiences. Heck, look at GaiaOnline, selling you friggin' bunny hats to wear on Easter. The DDI, I think, helps put the first chink in the concept that D&D is tied to books.
I think books are key to D&D, and that they shouldn't go away, but I also think that D&D isn't tied directly to book sales. If WotC stopped publishing books tomorrow, they'd still have monthly income from the DDI...heck, I'd bet a good chunk of people would keep the DDI, even if they didn't have any books to own. Not everybody, but probably enough to keep D&D profitable in that model, given the low cost of adding more stuff to the DDI.
Cadfan said:
I think that a big part of the group of people who throw up their hands and scream and quit the game over edition wars are people who were going to quit anyways, simply because people grow, change, like new things, stop liking old things, and sometimes it takes a jolt to get them to actually move on. New editions can be that jolt.
Why would OSRIC sell a single copy if people who gripe about edition changes just wanted to stop playing? Why would Pathfinder have a single subscriber? Why would any retroclone ever exist? Why would Necromancer games try for a "1e feel"?
No, there are plenty of folks out there who want to keep playing just fine, and find that the new changes don't groove with how they want things.
There should be no reason that D&D looses these customers to Pathfinder just because it can't simultaneously publish for two rule sets. If Capcom can make a new 8-bit Megaman game and give Nintendo profit from those who want it, a third party publisher should be able to make a new 3e adventure and sell it through WotC so that WotC gets a cut of those who want it.
The edition treadmill can't keep going forever (though it could probably go for another edition or two), especially given how each table ultimately plays it's own random D&D pastiche of house rules and homebrews in the end anyway. WotC would be much better served selling people what they want, rather than telling people that they should change their games every five years (which, if you're lucky, is two 1-30 level spreads, assuming you have a group that stays together for that long).
