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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celtavian" data-source="post: 6664501" data-attributes="member: 5834">Pokémon and magic. Both were making a ton. Their card game division was the big prize.What is not a huge amount of revenue to you? A business cares about every revenue stream unless something is a complementary product or a loss leader. D&D is not a loss leader. It's revenue stream was monitored. I doubt they spent that kind of money on both. A lot of Pathfinder's customers did not like 4E. That's why they left to begin with. On the forums the edition war was words. Between WotC and Paizo it was measured in dollars and cents.I don't think sustaining was the reason. I think the loss of market share sent a very clear message that they needed to change. I think Mearls and company have very clear directions to take back market share from Paizo. Rebuild the brand to what it was.I agree to a degree. TTRPGs will never be the video game market. Probably not even the card game market. D&D is a game that appeals to a portion of the population that enjoys TTRPGs. It's a matter of tapping that market and creating a dominant position that allows you to make money. With tight financial controls, you build a healthy revenue stream.It might have worked if they didn't splinter their market with a game that failed to maintain their customer base. All my friends love being able to work off their laptops. They just didn't like the game WotC produced. Yet that hasn't happened since D&D took the dominant position in the TTRPG market. No one has been close to D&D prior to this. No one has ever used an old D&D system to do it. It's not done in business. Allowing someone access to your old system and fans of that system is a bad business idea. How much of their previous market did they recover? That is the question. D&D used to be number one by quite a margin. That margin was substantially reduced by Paizo and Pathfinder by directly taking customers and associated revenue from WotC. How much? Substantial enough to piss the corporate business people off.Hard to know. That's why the range I listed was wide. It could have been up to 50% at its peak, but probably closer to 30 to 35%. Even that is a giant chunk of the pie. If someone takes a 1/3 of your customer base, the someone it is taken from is not happy. It did when its market share wasn't splintered. It doesn't matter if it is 70/30 in favor of WotC. Or 60/40. That's a lot of lost revenue and customers. No business tolerates that even if it is a small piece of a larger company.What is miniscule revenue to you? Miniscule compared to the other divisions? Or miniscule amount of money like not reaching the millions? Are you saying a company doesn't care about one of its revenue streams because it isn't large? A minor consideration to The President of Hasbro? Hasbro is a game company very used to managing games with smaller revenue streams. It is the aggregate of all their games that makes them money. I'm sure they have profitability metrics in place that must be met. A lot of pressure comes down on D&D management to meet them. I would say that makes it major to the guys involved in that division.It did work well enough. 3.0 and 3.5 was a Golden Age of D&D.  New ideas rejuvenated the hobby. The OGL worked in a positive manner to support the hobby. The game was flourishing. It isn't like the book bloat was a surprise. 2E had a huge glut of material. The previous model seemed to be introduce a new edition, if it was popularly received, roll out books as fast as possible to take advantage of the momentum until they stopped selling, do it all again. 5E is one of the first editions where a truly different model is being sought.Paizo's model is slightly different. They produce a lot of books. They sell on a subscription basis. It seems to be working for them. So 3.0 to 3.5 to Pathfinder produced a lot of books. I'd have to see profit margins to know if it was beating the current methodology Mearls is using. He seems to have different sales metrics for determining success and a different sales model he is trying.Yes, it does. Good executives watch every revenue stream. If the TTRPG market is 15 or 20 million. D&D probably aims to take half of that. That is a substantial enough revenue stream to take note of. I wonder what the margins are like. Given it is a hobby, I would think the margins are relatively high given the consumer will spend discretionary income with a reasonably high price point possible for the company. Very few people will spend $50 for a novel. Gamers will drop that on a game book without a second thought. If you have a dominant, relatively high margin TTRPG business, if well run it can be an attractive revenue stream.For most of our lives TTRPGs have been run by small companies usually owned by hobbyists. 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.It did. The OGL was hugely successful. Until it bit D&D in the ass and wasn't. It doesn't take many business mistakes to seriously a damage a business. I wouldn't be surprised if Mearls and company aren't getting asked stupid questions like, "Can you write the OGL so we can have all the positive effects of the 3E OGL with none of the negative effects?" They're probably sending it to a legal team for review. The legal team keeps sending it back saying, "Too open-ended. No company can ever have the game for free again. Try again." It will. Not named D&D perhaps. That would be pretty sad. Like you, I've been playing a long time. When I was young, I didn't give a rip about the business of D&D. I just loved the game. After studying business I found the different methods of building an RPG business interesting. I never entered the business because it is a hard business to make money on. D&D was probably one of the only brands making big money relative to the market. Maybe the Vampire Game during the Anne Rice induced vampire craze, but that fad seems to have slowed considerably. D&D has been like the IBM of TTRPGs. It's the big daddy that has sustained. Around it TTRPG companies come and go, it keeps the lighthouse on in the TTRPG market. If D&D were to fail, that would be disappointing.I'm wondering at this point if it can take advantage of the increased popularity and publicity associated with nerd culture. 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. 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.</blockquote>

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