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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Valdur" data-source="post: 3004959" data-attributes="member: 40953">To avoid getting sidetracked into a debate on accounting theory few people here care about, I will go with your interpretation since it's a moot point, for our purposes, how you classify the writing and editing costs.  You contradict yourself on points 1 and point 2.  "Not all products require comparable investments".  That means that your upfront costs (fixed costs) are not as high for some products, namely supplements.  If you keep your fixed costs/investment low and sell the books for more than the core books (as just about all supplements do) then you can make quite a bit of money.  It doesn't matter if you sell 10 books at a $5/book profit or 5 books at a $10/book profit, the result is the same.  It's possible to up the profit in either scenario but cutting costs or increasing price. Without access to internal numbers, we can only guess at how well WoTC does at this for either the high volume (core) or low volume (supplement) books. I would take any statement made by Ryan with a grain of salt. He is expressing his own personal  view and not the company's. "The question is, should WoTC should maintain a staff of game designers? Can it justify that kind of overhead?" - mmadsenExcellent question. I really don't think so. There really is no justification for an RPG company to maintain a large staff of designers unless it is constantly pumping out new and profitable products.  If not, then an RPG company should maintain a small number of talented designers on staff to advise management and serve as a nucleus for a larger design team (made up of independent contracters) when the time comes for a major new project.  The only potential downside I see is not being able to hire the designers when you need them. In the case of WoTC that shouldn't be a problem given the prestige and financial muscle of the D&D brand.</blockquote>

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