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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 7876100" data-attributes="member: 87792">The problem with your analogy is that you are comparing position to numbers here. So let's take a strong selling franchise that's still running. The Fast and The Furious. Just because the MCU overtook it doesn't make it non-profitable and just becauseAs for editions that did worse - the big thing companies care about is profitability and the bottom line. And by that standard I'm pretty sure that D&D 4E, D&D 5E, and Pathfinder all did better than D&D 3.5. And probably better than D&D 3.0 (and certainly better than 2e).Why? Subscription models. In order to make any money D&D 3.5 had to sell you a nice solid hardback which WotC had to print. The costs for that were high and there was a significant chance if they overprinted of WotC making a loss; the margins were not great and the risk was significant. How many copies of e.g Shining South or Dragons of Eberron were sold and how much do you think they made? Did they even make a profit? (We know the TSR equivalents didn't).4e had D&D Insider, 5e has D&D Beyond, and Paizo has its Adventure Path Subscriptions. And frankly these things are a license to print money - there is no risk to them because you know how much people are making. I can't find much information on how much money Paizo makes - the only thing I can find is <a href="https://www.owler.com/company/paizo" target="_blank">a very sketchy estimate of about $10 million/year</a>. Which would make them one of the biggest RPG players around by an order of magnitude. We know from Ryan Dancey that the goal of 4e was to hit $50 million/year to be a Hasbro Core Brand - and that it failed at that. We also know that D&D Insider subscriptions continued after the launch of 5e - and we could find out the number still going by looking at the WotC forums until they shut them down in 2015 as the D&D Insider forum had membership numbers. D&D Insider was either $10/month or $70/year (and yes this is two or three times the cost of D&D Beyond). From memory at the time of shutdown of the forums in 2015 (long after the 5e launch and more than two years after new material stopped coming out) 4e was still making millions of dollars a year from DDI - and all of it basically pure proft.And that's why people want you on subscription models - it's the Gym Membership model. Get a sub and keep paying it - the gym makes more money if you don't go than if you do.And in my current 5e group as far as I'm aware between us we have one copy of the 5e PHB (there might be two), one copy of Xanathar's Guide to Everything, and a copy each of the Stranger Things and Rick & Morty boxed sets. That's ... not a lot of profit for WotC.  The volume of players is high, but with two whales at the table and most of us with quite a bit of disposable income WotC has made pennies.</blockquote>

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