@Clint_L Maybe because some sound like they do...
But seriously. WotC isn't a bookseller, it's an IP holder. The licensing for BG3 seemed to fall under WotC earnings, so why not the rest? Revenue between licensing and 'bookselling', might not seem like a lot, but what are the profits of each? What are the risks of each? I'm looking at the growth of a similar niche company like Games Workshop, which is also an IP holder, but primarily sells miniatures. And what I'm seeing there is that after decades of essential mismanagement, they've been growing steadily, as is the licensing income.
In the case of GW (where the numbers are a lot more transparent) licensing is about 6% of revenue, but about 15% of profit. Their revenue has been growing by ~10%, while their licensing has been growing by ~20%. And before you say "But this isn't a comparable company!", they've faced similar issues. Did their RPGs and board games internally for a long time, but eventually licensed it out. Have had very long troubles with software development/maintenance internally for things like armylist building, and social/subscription efforts that tend to fail spectacularly. Luckily they realized early that they can't do computer games themselves, thus they have been licensing that out for forever, with mixed success. They are still growing.
WotC doesn't just do books, they also do cards, they've done boardgames, they've done miniatures. Those have all been spunoff and/or licensed out. Why? Not profitable enough? Can't imagine when their parent company has been in the toys and boardgames business for something like 80 years... Looking at the 3e digital tools, that failed spectacularly, that was only saved by an external party via licensing. Similar shenanigans happened over the last two decades. I can only conclude that their corporate culture is not capable of doing this and do not have much preserference, that is all management failure. Not surprising when you see how they treat their personell (the always looming threat of Christmas firings).
There seems to be a LOT of 'fake it until you make it' attitude with WotC/Hasbro. They do not start projects with realistic expectations, with realistic timelines, and realistic budgets. The ideas aren't bad, just the scope and the (created) expectations are bad. The attitude of we have the biggest IPs in our niche (D&D and MtG), so we need to be the biggest in everything! Especially after exploding growth during the pandemic, a situation where WotC/Hasbro were able to ride the wave the world gave them. Not well mind you, but there was so much money being thrown around that they thought it was all them...
Licensing from FVTT is absolutely peanuts for WotC/Hasbro, but when you have a 100+ of those tiny income streams, they suddenly are a non-insignificant part of your revenue stream and a significant part of your profit. With very little risk and virtually no costs. And when you can cultivate quality licensors small streams become bigger and sometimes will hit the jackpot (like with BG3)...
And why was licensing underperforming? Maybe because WotC wasn't actually licensing things out, like to VTTs. Are their D&D movie toys not selling well? Gee, how is that possible when the movies don't perform that well, which isn't surprising to most of us.
There have been very iconic characters in a couple of the D&D settings. Elminster, Drizzt, Volo, Vecna, Strahd, etc. Quite a few successful novel lines were sold based on those characters. But with FR WotC killed a lot of those off with 100+ year jumps in the timeline. With Dragonlance they virtually killed the setting for two decades or so and it's return to D&D RPG products wasn't exactly well received. Places like Waterdeep and Neverwinter are iconic, you can only sell those so much before they run dry. Characters can do anything and travel anywhere. You don't make a movie/series about The Yawning Portall inn, but you could make one about characters or events. Those might take place at iconic locations, but are people really reading a book because it takes place in The Yawning Portall inn or because of the story that onfolds there? I found The Yawning Portall inn RPG book heavily disappointing for example! It wasn't about the inn at all or what lies beneath it or even around it...
I think WotC has been killing and deluting their IP for the last 15-20 years. With the only reall brand recognition really remaining being D&D and to a far lesser extend Forgotten Realms. Everything else shows up occassionally. People recognize the name D&D as
the RPG, getting introduced to it by others that have had a long nostalgia for it. A large part of their lifesupport has become third party publishers using D&D as the rulesset with their own expansions that WotC won't do. WotC recognized this, thus the OGL debacle and their wish to wring quite a bit of money from their third party publishers. Without realizing that they deluted their own brand so much that most of those third party publishers weren't as dependent on D&D as they initally thought.
A 3D VTT is a great idea, just not for a lot of us hanging around here. It has great growth and revenue potential. But it needed to stay way longer in the oven, it needed to release optimized, for more platforms with more content. This should not have been a couple of years 'get rich quick' scheme, it should have been a 10-20 year project. But having seen how WotC operates, this was never realistically going to happen...
