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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 6237740" data-attributes="member: 37579">IT MAKES NO DIFFERENCE!If something is costing you sales of a product, it doesn't matter if it's a separate line or a different presentation of the core rules. This is one of the reasons D&D Essentials was such a mistake. Having four books with the same rules (Players Handbook, Heroes of Fallen Lands, Heroes of Forgotten Kingdoms, and the Rules Compendium) divided sales. While there was likely some overlap, not everyone bought everything and many people probably bought just one. Which would be even worse if this was the strategy from launch, as people would pick one from the start.Having two variants on the rules might mean more total sales. And it might mean more total players. But it means less money for the company. Odd but true.Some mostly made-up math to demonstrate. I'm making up the numbers, lacking the actual figures from WotC, but this is more proof of concept. Let's say it costs $5000 to make a book. Plus printing. This pays for the art and writing and editing and development. It's likely quite a bit more. So for every copy that gets sold, half the profit pays for printing and half pays the production costs. Let's say WotC makes $10 per copy of a $50 book. Which is probably pretty close being around 20%. Which means WotC needs to sell 500 copies to make any profit. And if they sell 1000 copies they've made $500. If they release two books that compete for an audience and each sells 1000 copies (2000 total sales) then WotC has made a cool $1000. However, if they instead doubled down and only released the one book, and it sold 1500 copies they've lost out on 500 sales! The 25% of the audience might people people who were not buying both or people who were only interested in the other presentation. However, despite losing 500 sales, WotC made the same amount of money.Now, keep in mind, the production cost is quite likely in the tens of thousands, so the "break even" point is many hundreds of sales.</blockquote>

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