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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 6043712" data-attributes="member: 22424">This is incorrect.With 3e, the overwhelming majority of profits were from core rulebooks. Indeed, the entire d20 strategy was based on the notion that third-party supplements would drive sales of PHBs, sparing WotC the need to produce those (low-margin) items themselves.With Pathfinder, the item that drives the company does indeed seem to be adventures, specifically their Adventure Path product. However, this is somewhat misleading, because it's not adventures that are generating the revenue - it's subscriptions. Because Paizo know they have N-thousand guaranteed sales every month (and lower, but still M-thousand guaranteed sales of each supplement), they can produce product to their heart's content.As far as I can tell, with 4e the thing that drove revenue was DDI, which again is a subscription-based service. But adventures were certainly not a major revenue-generator... otherwise, WotC would have made more of them!If I were in charge at WotC, and assuming my goal was "make money", I believe my strategy would be built around a single* core rulebook, paired with as strong a DDI offering as I could reasonably deliver. I would almost certainly never publish more than a tiny number of adventures in-print, never more than a single setting in-print, and almost all in-print supplements would be little more than printed (and errata-ed) copies of material that had already been seen on DDI.* I would go with a single core rulebook, gambling that what we lost in sales of three books we could make up in selling the single book more widely. Which may not be the right gamble, of course! I would also be sorely tempted to make my Starter Set a deluxe boxed set that included that same core rulebook as the key component.Edit: Of course, if I were in charge at WotC and implemented this, I expect we'd probably lose a lot of money in doing so. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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