NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6528698" data-attributes="member: 2067">The slightly counter-intuitive thing going on there is that the RPG plays a HUGE role in adding value to the brand, even if it doesn't bring in a lot of money from raw sales. There's some arcane business calculus involved, but suffice it to say that even if WotC isn't selling enough RPG books to light their cigars with $100 bills, selling those RPG books is the biggest reason why they can sell the D&D license to others at a significant mark-up. It is not every brand that reaches 4 hours/week of engagement with over a million people for the last 40 years. The way D&D does that is primarily through the RPG, so the RPG becomes the vehicle for other products.Compare it to a movie theater model. The movie theaters don't earn a lot of money from showing movies, but the movies are what get people in the door to buy the popcorn and soda that the movie theater makes money off of. But the movies they show are not "just an adjunct" -- those are the things with budgets in the millions and new ones every week and massive technological investments. In Brand-land, the RPG might be like that movie -- the reason they're able to sell other things. Not that there's no risk of diluting the RPG, just that if they do that, then they're hurting the brand's value overall, worse than if they make a bad movie or a bad card game or whatever -- it's a poor business decision, because marginalizing that cascades through to the other properties. If a movie theater only showed awful movies, or was known for its Nazi Propaganda nights or whatever, it wouldn't be selling a lot of soda or popcorn.In other words, the picture is a lot bigger than "what brings in the most money." It often is in large, complex businesses.</blockquote>

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