What is not a huge amount of revenue to you?
Say you make a 100,000 doing whatever it is you do. An opportunity comes along to make another $500 by working a minimum-wage job, which, BTW, it would cost you 1000 to commute to.
That's the kind of opportunity Hasbro is looking at when it comes to making any sort of effort to gain market share in TTRPGs.
A business cares about every revenue stream unless something is a complementary product or a loss leader. D&D is not a loss leader.
At this point it's a potential loss leader, in that it's a property they want to maintain so that it can be used to launch something in a larger, more profitable market. It's probably not operating at a loss, though, since costs must be really low with only two developers...
On the forums the edition war was words. Between WotC and Paizo it was measured in dollars and cents.
There was never a WotC-Paizo war. Certain of their fans acted like there was, and they reaped the benefit of those wallet-votes, but it was never a zero-sum game. The success or failure of D&D at the time rode on it bringing in huge numbers of new players and selling virtually all of them DDI, even though DDI was a shadow of what had been promised. It never came close to that - the few established fans who both bought pathfinder, and pointedly wouldn't touch D&D products didn't make a difference to that failure.
Yet that hasn't happened since D&D took the dominant position in the TTRPG market.
Actually, D&D had some very close competetion from WWGS (Storyteller/WoD) in the late 90s. Also, not coincidentally, when D&D was not really showing up to the party because TSR had failed.
How much of their previous market did they recover? That is the question. D&D used to be number one by quite a margin.
No knowing that - the data just aren't available. But it's also not important. D&D wasn't going to break out by dominating a tiny market a little more than it already dominated it, only by building a much larger market. They were willing to sacrifice existing customers to create a better, more accessible game that had a shot at doing that, it just didn't pay off.
Now D&D is back to it's old formula and dominating the market again. All it had to do was put out a familiar core-3 book set.
Miniscule compared to the other divisions?
Yes. D&D probably makes millions in revenue, maybe even more than 10 mil (more than half the guestimated TTRPG industry). Top CCGs make over 100 mil, and WotC, IIRC, has more than one of those. Hasbro total revenues are over 4 billion. So, yes, D&D represents tenths of a percent to Hasbro.
This is a strange time. D&D is actually getting more publicity than I've seen in the past. It has made it on major TV shows like Community and The Big Bang Theory. They have made some movies about gamer culture. The gaming subculture is getting more publicity than I've seen in my entire life. It's never been cooler to be a comic book reading, gaming nerd. How to take advantage of that economically? That is the question. I'm wondering at this point if it can take advantage of the increased popularity and publicity associated with nerd culture.
It's really been going on for a while now. A 3.0 PH made an appearance on a national TV commercial (for a washing machine, I think it was - the theme was 'smart meets beautiful,' and a D&D-playing science nerd was the 'smart'). LotR movies hit the mainstream almost 15 years ago. Nerd chic has been around a while, it may well run it's course before too long. Yet, while console games and MMOs and comic book movies have cashed in big time on that trend, TTRPGs, long thought of as being 'held back' by the nerd association have languished. Even with 3.0 going back to the dungeon and the OGL goosing the otherwise niche industry.
Traditional D&D didn't get on the nerd chic bandwagon, a very ambitious well-supported non-traditional D&D couldn't make the leap, either, and now D&D is back to a very traditional form and has minimal in-house resources.
Splitting their market did not help with this endeavor. I still wonder why they chose to take a game with a dominant market share in the TTRPG market into a direction that would splinter their customer base.
It's pretty clear, really, to grow beyond that limited market. CCGs and MMOs were raking in orders of magnitude more revenue than TTRPGs, even though MMOs were derivative of TTRPGs, and CCGs used the same distribution channels, and there was tremendous crossover among players of the three. D&D had changed relatively little in the preceding 33 years, so it must have seemed like a good idea to change it substantially, even at the cost of alienating some existing fans, in the hopes of capturing a larger portion of the much larger fanbases represented by MMOs, CRPGs, CCGs, and other mainstreamed nerd-culture franchises, and getting them onto a subscription service. They succeeded in making a much more accessible, modern, technically superior game that did seem (IMHX) to retain new payers better than TTRPGs had in the past, they succeeded in making it mesh well with on-line tools. They also failed to deliver those tools, and failed to promote the game enough to get a large number of new players trying it, to be retained, at all.
The failure that mattered was the failure to grow far beyond the size of the TTRPG market, not the failure to increase dominance within that market.
Mearls seems to have the game back on track. He is definitely using metrics to keep it on track. I wonder why D&D didn't use a similar approach in the past. Then again the tools Mearls is using may not have been in place at the time. I know tools for business metrics have substantially improved over the years and thereby the results obtained by their use.
I'm sure solid metrics have been available throughout the Hasbro years, and informed the 3.5, 4e, Essentials, and 5e rev-rolls.
Yet, in a sense, the 3.0 rev-roll, conceived by the old WotC crew who were D&D fans, and did have full decision-making powers, was arguably the most successful from our PoV. It didn't grow the hobby by leaps and bounds, but it did revitalize it, and set up the OGL, which essentially guarantees that D&D-ish games can always be published, cynical business decisions notwithstanding.
