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Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jimmifett" data-source="post: 5278038" data-attributes="member: 55006">This "superspeed" has been pointed out since at least the 80s. I feel it's actually slower than 3E, but that's my opinion.  They gauge thier sales numbers for previous similar products, guestimate potential sales, and fire off a suitable print run. Printing too many is costly at the printer, and costly at the store level as stores don't want to sit on inventory (it's taxable) if it doesn't sell, and thus wotc hears about it.If a line doesn't sell as well, they don't print as many of the next in the line or cancel the line altogether. Simple business sense, and it looks to me as if they have been following it, experimenting and seeing what works.  While i'm not entirely certain, i believe that if you don't make some attempt to protect your brand / product, your investors can sue you. If it were my product, i'd want to break the kneecaps, burn down the house and salt the fields of every pirate that stole my hard work, but that's just me <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devil.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":devil:" title="Devil    :devil:" data-shortname=":devil:" /> Wotc is proven to have a hard time with digital initiatives, so until they can come up with a solution to make pdf style profitable, yet more secure, I don't blame them for taking thier digital ball and going home when ppl urinate in thier soda.  Not when you have to devote personnel to editing and layout for a digital version. You have page numbers that will be adjusted, and you would have to track down all the references to that particular page and make sure it's updated. This is not impossible, could probably be automated somehow(not familiar with publishing and layout side of the software industry), but it takes time, money, and they have a hard enough time preventing "page xx" from making it to final product. It becomes a balance of cost vs return on investment. If there is enough demand for that from recurring paying customers, then it becomes an option to explore, but not if the whole product is available, always updated, in a pdf that everyone and thier cat can pirate.  POD is expensive. You have paper type costs, ink costs, binding costs (cheap, perfect, or layflat among many options), cover costs (hard vs soft), etc. Publishers make money by ordering large print runs to reduce cost of printing. Wotc is not in the POD business, they are in the mass market publishing business. Offering products via POD also reduces Brand, as now you have cheap quality non-knockoffs that do not reflect the product proper, weaking the image of the brand to investors who expect some semblence of quality for a brand they invest in, esp if they are the big fish in the market.  Enough ppl complained at random minis. Random minis were profitable. When the switch to combination of random and non-random occured, it was the death of the minis game. Add in increasing production costs, shrinking economy, thus shrinking audience with available funds to spend on your product, and as a company, you have to decide if a side product is worth hanging on to, or re-purposing. I'm guessing they had numbers from event reporting showing a decline in the mini game and projected it out into a flailing economy. If it wasn't performing well during a good time, it's not worth keeping on life support during a bad time. Taking a look at core product, it looks like the minis were kept on to support the RPG in a more limited scope. If the minis continue to perform poorly, i expect them to be cancelled all together.   More for me <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=";)" />Wotc can't win here. To make quantity cheap enough requires reduction of production costs, which lowers quality, and then everyone complains about the quality sucking. Improve the quality, and the cost goes up, and everyone complains about cost. Only choice is to find that balance that moves product and puts money in the bank.  DDI may very well be a long term plan to buffer the bottom line, but you can't rely on a subscription model. During flagging economies, among the first to go in a penny-penching family is unjustifiable monthly expenditures.MMOs, paid website subscriptions, netflix, etc. I've had to cut a lot of such things myself. Meanwhile, a physical product, you've already sold it to distributors and made your money. It's up to them to sell it w/ markup and make thiers. Additionaly, we often forget on these forums that just because *we* take computers as ubiquitous, not everyone has a computer, or if they do, are unwilling to buy something online. There are several at the flgs i play at that don't have email, yet play DND and PF. A lot of products I wouldn't even know about if I didn't see them in my flgs and thumb through them. Don't get me wrong, I think there is definately a space for what you want, but it's not a very big one in the market (just very vocal on forums), and the investment to even experiment, let alone profit with that space is very large. Is it financially practical? I'm guessing people with a lot more research behind thier belts than us look at this question at least once a quarter.</blockquote>

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