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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 5696910" data-attributes="member: 22424">Only WotC. Everyone else is merely speculating.The only number we have is that there are just over 62,000 members of one of the community groups that is somehow connected to DDI subscriber numbers. We believe that this represents a lower bound on subscriber numbers, and that the actual subscriber numbers are somewhat higher, although how much higher is anyone's guess.Actually, that's not true. We also have some other numbers. We know that the lowest-priced subscription option works out to $6 a month. We know that in 2002, Dragon magazine had around 50,000 subscribers, and I know that my subscription worked out to around $3 an issue. (I took out a max-length subscription just before they stopped doing multi-year subscriptions. IOW, I had the lowest priced option.)Now, we know (well, strongly suspect) that DDI has some unknown number of additional subscribers, but we also know that Dragon of 2002 had some unknown number of non-subscriber sales plus an unknown revenue from advertising.So, where does that leave our comparison? Does DDI bring in twice as much as Dragon did? Four times? Ten times? We don't have enough information to reliably guess.Then there are the costs to consider. DDI has the benefit of not being in print, which is obviously a very significant saving (printing costs, plus distribution, warehousing, and whatever else).On the other hand, DDI has significant server costs. It has the cost of content not just for eDragon but eDungeon also (in print this was, of course, separate), plus the costs of developing and maintaining the tools. And the sunk costs for the previous versions of the tools, the Gleemax fiasco, and the 3d Virtual Tabletop. (It's also worth noting that print-Dragon didn't really canibalise book sales. We know that DDI has had at least some effect on sales, and especially sales of the crunch-heavy books that were generally the biggest sellers of the past.)There's an awful lot of information that we just don't have. For me, the big unknown is the real number of subscribers. But if 62,000 is close to the actual number, then I would be very worried about the health of DDI - the reason I took 2002 as my point of comparison was that WotC very nearly cancelled the magazines at that time, as they were considered not worth the effort. In the end, they licensed them out to Paizo instead.That's a very real possibility. I would expect that such a decision would be made based on the number of subscribers, not some notion about the number of people who are 'waiting' to subscribe, or people who might subscribe, or any other people who are not subscribing. Either it's doing well enough or it is not.At this point, if DDI goes, I expect D&D as a whole (or at least as an RPG) to go with it. We would almost certainly continue to see D&D licensed as an MMO, as a board game, as a movie, maybe even as a CCG. But I don't see it continuing as an RPG in the absence of DDI, and I certainly don't see Hasbro/WotC selling it on, unless Bill Gates is a closet gamer and decides that he's willing to pay silly money for it.Frankly, I hope DDI has 100,000 subscribers that we don't know about.</blockquote>

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