Peraion Graufalke
First Post
It doesn't affect fighters and warlords much. The cleric has largely lost his secondary role and gained nothing in return, which has been discussed to death on several boards. Some posters like it, many don't. YMMV.
What's changed?
- Thread starter Kzach
- Start date
It doesn't affect fighters and warlords much. The cleric has largely lost his secondary role and gained nothing in return, which has been discussed to death on several boards. Some posters like it, many don't. YMMV.
I think WotC have a very good idea, how many copies of their books are sold.
They'll know quite well why they decided against releasing the overhauled PHB in print.
'A lot of people' may not be enough to make it as profitable as they'd like it to be.
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Yeah, as others have said, it may well not be enough to warrant the switch. However, note that AV1 in particular seems to be getting pretty hard to find. They aren't reprinting a lot of the older books (maybe not any of them) currently. This may well indicate that at some point they will be putting out a revised set of 4e books.
In general, the concept of publishing books on DDI first sounds like a nice theory. It may well work, and they may well switch to such a concept in the future, but it would be a HUGE change in business model. D&D has been successful for the most part over the last 30+ years with basically the existing business model of printing hardbacks and putting out a new edition every 5-10 years, with maybe a modest revision here and there in between. Overturning that business model isn't going to happen overnight. It will be done very cautiously and slowly over time. The first step was having DDI at all. The second step is polishing it and releasing a lot of secondary content there while the whole production workflow and all the other aspects of DDI are tried out and sorted. We might well see a third step where DDI sees the release of all the new stuff first, then it gets revised and published in hardback form, but we also may not. It might just take too big a bite out of sales to do it that way. I'm purely speculating but I would not be surprised if they give it a try in the near future and release a book online first to see what happens.
The set of RPG rule books that ever get more than one printing is pretty small, and most of them have been various editions of the D&D 'core 3'.
As Jhaelan said... they had the chance to publish a psuedo new version of the first PH with all the errata attached in the Class Compendium. Doesn't the fact that they were all set to go to print with it and then changed their mind tell us that they've run the numbers on how much it costs to print, ship, and stock on shelves, (plus eat up if it doesn't sell and the books get sent back to the distribution warehouses) and that it just isn't worth it? Despite how many of you continually claim "well, *I'd* buy it!"?
Why any of you think you can run WotC's business better than they can is beyond me.
Why any of you think you can run WotC's business better than they can is beyond me.
This is a sound observation.
The people who make decisions about what to release and what not to release don't just behave randomly (even if it seems like that from outside sometimes). As DEFCON notes they HAVE to run the numbers for them to have make the kind of decisions they recently made.
'A lot of people' saw Terminator: Salvation or Daredevil, two films that made a decent enough amount of money to cover their costs (and more) but those were still 'below expectations' which is why no one ran off to make follow ups in a jiffy.
My point is that 'A lot of people' is a very nebulous and subjective figure, not a hard quantity, and even then that quantity needs to be looked at in relation to the endeavor that is to be undertaken.
And I say this as someone who would buy an errata-ed PH.
So you dont, okay fine.
But for those who do, we dont want to F around online, we want to have our game with books that we can rely on while we play our game.
Maybe you are the sort who doesnt like to read real books, but buy them on line and cosy up to a lap top when you want to read a good book.
LOL, well put, 100% correct
Dannager
First Post
Or tablet, or e-reader, or whatever.
But the costs of physical product distribution are very high. You have to print the pages. You have to package the final product (binding, in most cases, but also box sets occasionally). You have to store the product. You have to ship the product. You have to maintain stock of the product.
The costs of digital distribution are very low. All you have to do is create the product and set up a secure digital shopfront (or subscription service).
Yes, there are people who would be angry if they could not get physical copies of their desired D&D products.
Those people, quite frankly, are holding the hobby back to a certain extent. Removing the cost of producing and distributing physical product when you can distribute the same product digitally is a huge potential boon to the industry. It's a little disheartening to know that, in order for the tabletop RPG industry to get where it's obviously headed, it's going to have to plow through a lot of reluctant, vocal gamers in the process.
