Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4866477" data-attributes="member: 2067">Heck yeah! This is pretty smart for WotC, I think: the first taste is free. If someone had to pay for these products, even a smaller price, they'd be less useful as that first toe in the water.But giving it away certainly means that the only thing limiting you from trying out D&D 4e are all those other barriers to entry (Biggest One: Arranging six people's schedules to meet once a week on a regular basis, and keeping it that way). <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Part of my scheme was that WotC wouldn't be producing much in-house: crowdsourcing could probably work fairly well for D&D design and development. Half the staff for twice the demand sounds pretty good to me. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />The competition from older editions already exists (OSRIC and Pathfinder are what I mentioned). The market is already fragmented (and each edition only increases the fragmenting). The only difference now is that WotC isn't getting money from people following those out-of-print lines. It's possible to support an edition of D&D without an extensive and expensive in-house development staff, because there's not a huge gap between the paid designer and the hobbyist in this industry, at least in terms of game design quality. [sblock]So the flow of information kind of looks like this, theoretically:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol"> 1e D&D Fan makes a really keen 1e D&D adventure!</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol"> 1e D&D Fan posts his really keen adventure to the Official D&D Website</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol"> Other users see his stuff online, for free (or maybe for a monthly fee; or maybe that 1e D&D fan had a monthly fee as a "supporter," and most people get it for free, or whatever). Possibly they use it in their own games. So far, WotC hasn't paid out anything (and, in fact, may have already made money), but development and design work is already completed.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol"> A bunch of other 1e fans see the adventure, and comment on it, and rank it. Seems like they think it is pretty awesome! It gets 4/5 +1 Maces! The comments left say things like "Gygaxian brilliance!" and "OMG Flumphs have never been so cool!" One of D&D's own designers was all "I want to have your babies!"</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol"> Some 1e DM sees the adventure. She thinks it is keen, and wants to use it! Woo! But she also doesn't like using a laptop at the table (she is Old School, after all), so she gives WotC $30 to print it out and send it to her. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol"> WotC now has $30 for basically just sitting there. Some of this goes to pay the costs of PoD. Some of this goes to pay the costs of setting this thing up in the first place. Some of it goes to that 1e D&D Fan who made the adventure in the first place. Maybe some of it goes to the current D&D design team, which consists of 4 people who know various points of all editions, and who basically get paid to boink around in the slush pile and critique peoples' work (and, of course, are free to submit their own). Maybe they make a "traditional" book for one of the editions once every three months or so. Making the material better ultimately makes WotC more wealthy, since high quality yields higher demand. </li> </ol>[/sblock]WotC would not be competing with themselves if they brought the other editions home to roost, because they would not be developing much in the way of new material themselves -- they'd get the new material for brand spankin' free, and they'd get paid whenever anyone printed out ANYTHING from their website, no matter the edition. Except it wouldn't cost nearly the same to produce, because WotC doesn't need to produce much of anything (aside from infrastructure). New content would, in fact, be cheaper to produce, since 95% of the work would be done by fans, for free.Again, look at how Flat Earth Publishing supports multiple different kinds of classes and multiple professors. Or, heck, how Wikipedia gets stuff with a higher quality and relevancy than any set of Encyclopedia Brittanica, without paying anyone one red cent (aside, of course, from the infrastructure). WotC and the gaming industry couldn't follow any of those models verbatim, but it could certainly exploit the similarities where they exist (in the case of the latter, people who do good work for no pay; in the case of the former, supporting essentially one unique publishing opportunity per customer). OSRIC. Pathfinder. Castles & Crusades. Hell, in a certain light, GURPS and RIFTS and the Storyteller System, and Buffy!There's plenty of demand out there for stuff that WotC isn't making. Some of it even makes a tidy profit! WotC can certainly plug into a large portion of that, though they'd need to explore nontraditional options.</blockquote>

Verification