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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SiderisAnon" data-source="post: 4116214" data-attributes="member: 44949">I recognize this is splitting hairs a bit, but there is a point: It's not the consoles, actually. In fact, some of the companies take a loss on consoles at times. Where they make their money is on the games. You only buy one X-Box, but you might buy twenty games over the next few years, plus rentals from your local Blockbuster, plus strategy guides, plus whatever other consumables they can sell you.And that's the point. Video games really are a form of consumable. They get used up. You get bored with them, or you finish them, or whatever. You go get a new one. Sure, you might go back and re-use them occassionally, but they're basically "used up".With gaming, the consumables are primarily in the adventures. You go buy the "console" when you buy the PHB, DMG, and MM. After that, you can play without every buying anything else. If they sell you adventures, you buy them, use them up, and then have to go buy a new one because you're adventure group has already seen that one and you can't reuse it. (I'm generalizing, I realize.)Some things are a bit more gray area. Miniatures get used over and over, so they're not really consumables. They're more like buying a really cool controller for the consoles. (I'm showing my age. I actually typed "joystick" instead of "controller", and then remembered they don't call them that anymore.)This is a marketing model that WORKS. You make more money off of the consumables than off of the original product. It's why printer companies are willing to sell printers at a loss in order to get you to buy the ink cartirdges. (HP ran a line of Apollo printers for several years in an experiment. They lost money on EVERY printer they sold, but could make that up within a few ink cartridges.)I think that WoTC getting back into the adventure market is a GOOD thing. It will help keep up the profits. When profits are up, they can afford to do high quality game books for our favorite hobby, which is important to us. It also means Hasbro will let them keep doing their thing, which is also good for our hobby.Now wrapping back to the original post on market share, I think that consumables are important. People want pre-packaged goodness from their purchases. They want fairly quick and easy use. Sell them the console (single core book/box set) and then have a plethera of adventure modules and other add-ons ready for them to use so they can keep playing anytime they want. Make it as easy as going down to the FLGS and there will be something I can pick up and run for my next game, WITHOUT massive prep time and WITHOUT having to buy two other splat books because of material used in the module. (Splat books could then have their own line of modules.)If you make it easy to game, more people can do it. New audience increases the total market, and allows you to grow your piece of the pie, even if the percentage never increases. It would also allow D&D to gain a bigger share of new gamers if D&D was soemthing that could be played easily if you don't know what you're doing, as opposed to GameX which might not have any ready adventures for you to pick up and run.I honestly think that we older players forget the value of adventures to new gamers. Not everyone knows how to wing it yet, nor how to write their own. Too many adventure modules that I've read have been over-complicated and hard to prep, too expensive, or both.As a clarification: I realize that WoTC cannot sell the three core books at a loss and hope to make money on the later products. Unlike an X-Box, you don't need to buy any more than the "console" because you can write your own games easily.Really?  No.Well, okay, in both groups we wear too much black.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />(And I'm hoping this counts as grandma friendly): Besides, do you know how hard it is to do that whole rock-paper-siccors things with someone who is chained up?</blockquote>

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