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<blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 6614411" data-attributes="member: 37579">There is no evidence they made lots and lots of money either, especially since they kept rebooting the game moving from 3.0 to 3.5, 3.5 to 4e, 4e to Essentials, etc. And this ignores all the other problems with a heavy release schedule (bloat, power creep, intragroup conflict, option paralysis, the &quot;wall of books&quot; intimidation, etc).&nbsp;Complete Mage likely sold well, but not as good as Complete Arcane, which was out first. And Complete Arcane likely didn't sell as well as the PHB. Each new book, even if it is a good book, will sell a diminishing number of copies. And that's the catch, each new release has fewer and fewer sales so it's an unsustainable product cycle with a finite lifespan, which makes it problematic from a business perspective. So relying on this as the primary source of revenue is tricky, especially for something so staff intensive. The core books did well and then successive books did increasingly poor. And it tried to avoid the atrophying sales of 3e by insisting everything was core.4e had other problems. It's books were divided between classes so there was little reason for everyone to buy all the books, and since most contained new subclasses, they were most beneficial to new characters and not existing PCs. Still, it's hard to use 4e as the basis for anything. Its successes and failures are really non-representative.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Jester David, post: 6614411, member: 37579"] There is no evidence they made lots and lots of money either, especially since they kept rebooting the game moving from 3.0 to 3.5, 3.5 to 4e, 4e to Essentials, etc. And this ignores all the other problems with a heavy release schedule (bloat, power creep, intragroup conflict, option paralysis, the "wall of books" intimidation, etc). [I]Complete Mage[/I] likely sold well, but not as good as [I]Complete Arcane[/I], which was out first. And [I]Complete Arcane[/I] likely didn't sell as well as the PHB. Each new book, even if it is a good book, will sell a diminishing number of copies. And that's the catch, each new release has fewer and fewer sales so it's an unsustainable product cycle with a finite lifespan, which makes it problematic from a business perspective. So relying on this as the primary source of revenue is tricky, especially for something so staff intensive. The core books did well and then successive books did increasingly poor. And it tried to avoid the atrophying sales of 3e by insisting everything was core. 4e had other problems. It's books were divided between classes so there was little reason for everyone to buy all the books, and since most contained new subclasses, they were most beneficial to new characters and not existing PCs. Still, it's hard to use 4e as the basis for anything. Its successes and failures are really non-representative. [/QUOTE]

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