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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kaisoku" data-source="post: 4076865" data-attributes="member: 58447">It can cost the end user less while still producing same levels of profit for the company. It all depends on the cost involved in producing.Creating a physical copy of a book costs money. So does distributing (shipping costs, individual store mark ups, etc), as well as taxes and levies (for the end user). WotC makes a set amount of money selling a book... but still only a portion of what it costs the end user.On the other hand, providing rules online costs WotC bandwidth and salary for a website maintenance/update team. This would be drastically cheaper than the above scenario for the end user.Also, making it a monthly fee gives a steady income of cash to WotC without having to rely on things like new book releases, or holiday book sales, and slumps in between, etc. Holidays will still have some factor (new people coming into the game because others bought them a subscription, etc), but a subscription base seems much more stable overall.Since it costs WotC less to bring everything to the end user, it will cost less for the end user as well, without cutting into WotC profits. If anything, a more stable income of profits and depending on how much cheaper it is to maintain, they could come out ahead. Making it cheaper overall will help pull in more buyers too.Now, that isn't to say this can't still be screwed up. Like was mentioned, you get what you pay for. It's not a hard copy, so you can't sit in a comfy chair and read the rules. If you don't have access to the internet (out at the cottage, etc) you may or may not be able to even access any of the information at all.And if WotC decides to go for the greatest profit margin possible, they may slack off on maintaining the bandwidth/website maintenance. Imagine having to wait for weeks for the new rules because they haven't updated the website yet... or for a WoW reference, "Server full, you are position 152 in queue".. or just "504 - Gateway Timeout".I would suspect that they'd be looking at giving this a bit more effort than the Character Generator they tried in 3e... but then again, who knows. They did hire some new folks for their website stuff, didn't they?</blockquote>

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