WotC WotC needs an Elon Musk

[Bolares]

He's making massive changes at Twitter, you have to expect a pain period, we won't really be able judge for at least 5 years.

Twitter can't survive 5 years like this. Musk put a lot of colateral up to buy twitter, he needs is to make money NOW. That's why he is trying all that to try and bring capital. That's why he made the whole twitter blue debacle.

 

[Mecheon]

Presumably in World of Warcraft, everyone pays the same subscription fee? But with D&D traditionally the hardcore fans have vastly more per-capita expenditure. 5e was actually innovative for the RPG market by focusing more on growing the player base than on maximising sales to hardcore fans.

You can 'technically' play for free, so most hardcore players don't pay the subscription fee at all. This is done by buying Tokens from the Auction House, which give you 30 days, and you use your ingame gold to do so.

Mind, do note that means someone else has to buy the token. But it isn't the hardcore players paying

He's making massive changes at Twitter, you have to expect a pain period, we won't really be able judge for at least 5 years.

Mate, there's an exodus going on at the moment that makes the great Female Presenting Nipples Exodus of Tumblr seem weak. If a competitor can come along and not shoot itself in the foot immediately (hi mastodon), it ain't going to last 5 years

 

[humble minion]

I would argue the hardcore are willing to spend more on D&D regardless of their in me.

Eg in 90's I didn't have much money. Alot of my disposable money went on D&D vs cigarettes, pot, booze.

Posting here you're more or less hardcore by default.

I suspect the D&D whales to use a magic term support D&D more than casuals. One whale probably spends more than 5-10 casuals.

I suspect D&D (the WotC product line, not the broader game) is less dependent on whales than it ever has been.

Thing is, unless you go big into the peripherals like miniatures, there's a pretty hard limit to what even the most enthusiastic whale can spend on WotC D&D these days. There simply isn't enough product coming out for things to be otherwise. At 4-5 books per year, if you get one D&D book for Christmas and another for your birthday, you've can comfortably get hold of 50% of WotCs entire D&D book output. It's not like 1991 when TSR would have released probably 50+ books (plus novels on top of that) and only the TRUE hardcore could have possibly read them all even if they did buy them. Sure, there's 3rd party publishers so the amount that our whale can spend on D&D products has functionally no limit, but as the spend increases, the fraction of the cash that WotC gets inevitably decreases simply because they don't have any more product to sell.

 

[Mallus]

Musk put a lot of colateral up to buy twitter, he needs is to make money NOW. That's why he is trying all that to try and bring capital.

Those billion dollar interest payments add up!

To be fair to Elon, there are ways to make Twitter profitable, or at least an asset to his wider business empire.

None of them involve free speech, however.

 

[Remathilis]

Think it adding monetaized video to Twitter, at better compensation levels is a great idea, it's the only path to profitability for Twitter, and a lot of YouTube creators have been fed up with YouTube for years now.

Twitter might have an edge over YouTube already, the lack of moderation has allowed me to watch whole movies on Twitter that would have been flagged on YouTube for copyright.

 

[Remathilis]

the question is in dnd where could that go past onednd as that is the safest bet they have right now they will need new content to bring people in thus what would it look like?

They are going to use the next few years to keep to safe bets: refreshing the Core books, a revised campaign setting of one of the three two big settings (FR or Eberron). We know what 2023 has going forward; there are no radical projects there. The vtt is the only project with any risk/reward.

I just don't think wise money is on any radical changes in the next 2 years for a lot of brands.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

Will this theorical billionaire-savior-genius make the 4e character builder (offline) available on DMsGuild?

Installing and patching it from old installs is becoming tedious, and initiating new players to 4e without a builder is pretty hard; the books arent that great to gather all the pieces of the game.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

They are going to use the next few years to keep to safe bets: refreshing the Core books, a revised campaign setting of one of the three two big settings (FR or Eberron). We know what 2023 has going forward; there are no radical projects there. The vtt is the only project with any risk/reward.

I just don't think wise money is on any radical changes in the next 2 years for a lot of brands.

FR is a very safe bet for 2024, it gets some kind of book every edition change, folks have been begging for a meater update since the SCAG came out, but the D&D movie Honor Among Thieves gives them an even larger audience to sell it to (they might even call it Doris Guide to the Forgotten Realms as a movie tie in, or maybe they will use the Chris Pine's Bard's name, I forget it, or Simon the Sorcerer). Honor Among Thieves has already breathed new life into the nearly dead FR novel line.

 

[Oofta]

He's making massive changes at Twitter, you have to expect a pain period, we won't really be able judge for at least 5 years.

The problem is there's no logic or reason behind those massive changes. He's just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks Unfortunately many of those things he's throwing go "boom". Twitter likely needed to reduce headcount, but not by firing half the staff with no thought to transition. Not by arbitrarily tossing out and almost immediately reversing idea either. It makes no sense to have software developers literally print out their code from the last month so that it could be reviewed to prove their worth only to have them shred it all the next day when it becomes obvious how stupid that was. It makes no sense to expect everyone in the company to spend every waking moment working "hard core", it's incredibly counter productive to put in too many hours for more than short bursts.

Whether Musk likes it or not, Twitter relies on advertising for revenue. Companies that don't want their advertisements associated with misogynistic, intolerant hate speech or blatant conspiracy theories are looking for excuses to cut back on advertising budget anyway, may as well cut it from Twitter. I don't think Twitter did moderators to make the space safe for users (although that was part of it as well) as much as to please the corporations that spend their money on ads.

When it comes to D&D, there simply is no secret sauce. Some of their current success is pure luck and timing. The current release does appeal to at least some old players such as myself and roughly 1/2 of my current group. Hard core players, whatever that means, have always been a minority. People that want old school products can still get those old school products and WOTC is happy to make a few bucks here and there with the long tail sales. But you can't grow without attracting new players and nowadays you don't need those old school players to do that, you just need an approachable game that's relatively easy to pick up.

Does D&D need to grow and evolve? Of course. But it doesn't need someone to blow up the entire business model in the hopes that, like a phoenix, a new better company will grow from the ashes.

 

[DarkCrisis]

Speaking of MMOs, just want to give a shout-out to Project 1999 the Classic EQ fan server.

Classic EQ (and its first 2 expansions) is still the best MMO experience IMO.