My question to you is: how much material from those books see actual play at your table? Have you played a full Numenera campaign or a full 13th Age campaign since they've been out?
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There's totally a population of people out there who buy RPG books and then just read 'em and stick 'em on a shelf, maybe use them as part of their rich galaxy of options. Pathfinder probably sells to a lot of those folks right now. 3e and 4e sold via that strategy, too. So clearly there's a market.
But there is a cost to going after that market. If you're making one game, and you keep splatting it, that game is going to look bloated and unwieldy in short order
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That hurts your RPG as a whole. You sell to a smaller and smaller number of people, and your books become more and more niche products until you have spiraled out of profitability and BAM, it's time for an edition re-boot
Ron Edwards wrote an
essay about this 15-odd years ago that still seems somewhat apposite to me:
Once upon a time, there was a roleplaying game. It was a spiffy book with glossy covers, in hardback or clothbound, available at Walden's and Kroch's & Brentano's, as well as at Weird Eddie's Roleplaying Emporium down the street. It was not just the one book, nay, it was "supported" by an ongoing stream of supplements detailing rules and settings, and no end was in sight. Customers showed up with their middle-class paychecks in hand, to buy their kids the Third Edition for Christmas. . . . Movie contracts and toy manufacturers beckoned, someday. It was Nirvana. It was the Holy Grail. It was an apple-cart heaped high with gleaming Granny Smiths. It is Ye Olde Myth of roleplaying games. . . .
Exactly two roleplaying games in twenty-five years have managed to latch onto a short-lived teen trend: AD&D in the late 1970s and Vampire in the early 1990s. Trend over? Game over. Especially since now we now know TSR's "reign over the industry" in the 1980s to be a complete mirage. And for everyone else, I ask this: has any roleplaying game ever managed to pay, out of sales profits, for its production and advertising for more than one year? . . .
If you buy into the Myth, be real about what you're selling! It's not a game, it's a book related to a large assortment of stuff. When stuff isn't fashionable any more, it gets ignored. And as far as stuff goes, the RPG itself takes a distant second to t-shirts, jewelry, and coffee mugs. . . .
Roleplaying is not a mainstream activity, it ain't socks and it ain't collectable. We cannot expect an expanding demand . . .
Realize you will probably not make a lot of money. If you want to make a lot of money, pray to get lucky in the teen-trend sweepstakes or find something else to sell.
Now Edwards is writing as a critic of TSR et al's practices, but his points can easily be flipped around: if you want to make money from selling an RPG, you need to either ride a trend or use your RPG as a pathway to selling something else.
The one point where Edwards seems to be wrong, which relates to your post, is that RPGs
are collectables, at least for a smallish market. Most PF subscribers must have more material than they have ever used or will use. I know that I have 5 shelves (a total of 3 metres) of RPG stuff, a fair bit of which I will never use except in the loose sense as "inspiration". Over the past 6 years, when the main RPG I have played has been 4e, I have probably spent around $2000 (Australian dollars) on RPG materials, about 2/3 of that on 4e stuff.
Whether it is feasible to keep a business going selling this sort of stuff to purchasers like me I leave to others to work out! I agree with you that it is not necessarily good for the
game that so much material be produced, but as Edwards explains that is a secondary consideration from the business point of view:
[T]he priorities of those who sell roleplaying games are almost entirely opposed to those who actually play them. For most products, this is not the case -- socks are sold to people who wear them, and socks which are not wearable tend not to sell very well; therefore, merchants tend to sell wearable socks. (We'll leave aside the distinction between socks -for-looks and socks -for-action.) For roleplaying games, however, the game-seller's primary interest is to sell tons and tons of books.
Whether or not those books get used to play the game is irrelevant to a commercial pubisher's business, except in so far as play is a cause of the purchase of more books.
