WotC's Nathan Stewart: "Story, Story, Story"; and IS D&D a Tabletop Game?

Forbes spoke to WotC's Brand Director & Executive Producer for Dungeons & Dragons, who talked about the 5th Edition launch and his vision for D&D's future. The interview is fairly interesting - it confirms or repeats some information we already know, and also delves a little into the topic of D&D as a wider brand, rather than as a tabletop roleplaying game.
Forbes spoke to WotC's Brand Director & Executive Producer for Dungeons & Dragons, who talked about the 5th Edition launch and his vision for D&D's future. The interview is fairly interesting - it confirms or repeats some information we already know, and also delves a little into the topic of D&D as a wider brand, rather than as a tabletop roleplaying game.

In the interview, he reiterates previous statements that this is the biggest D&D launch ever, in terms of both money and units sold.

[lq]We are story, story, story. The story drives everything.[/lq]

He repeats WoTC's emphasis on storylines, confirming the 1-2 stories per year philosphy. "We are story, story, story. The story drives everything. The need for new rules, the new races, new classes is just based on what’s going to really make this adventure, this story, this kind kind of theme happen." He goes on to say that "We’re not interested in putting out more books for books’ sake... there’s zero plans for a Player’s Handbook 2 any time on the horizon."

As for settings, he confirms that "we’re going to stay in the Forgotten Realms for the foreseeable future." That'll disappoint some folks, I'm sure, but it is their biggest setting, commercially.

Stewart is not "a hundred percent comfortable" with the status of digital tools because he felt like "we took a great step backwards."

[lq]Dungeons and Dragons stopped being a tabletop game years or decades ago. [/lq]

His thoughts on D&D's identity are interesting, too. He mentions that "Dungeons and Dragons stopped being a tabletop game years or decades ago". I'm not sure what that means. His view for the future of the brand includes video games, movies, action figures, and more: "This is no secret for anyone here, but the big thing I want to see is just a triple-A RPG video game. I want to see Baldur’s Gate 3, I want to see a huge open-world RPG. I would love movies about Dungeons and Dragons, or better yet, serialized entertainment where we’re doing seasons of D&D stories and things like Forgotten Realms action figures… of course I’d love that, I’m the biggest geek there is. But at the end of the day, the game’s what we’re missing in the portfolio."

You can read the full interview here.
 

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Failure depends upon the criteria imposed...

When corporate explicitly expects being #1, and you come in #2, you have still failed, even if you make money, because the board is going to see the VP saying the team failed to meet expectations.

HasBro expected D&D to remain #1 in the market. It failed to do so.

Not a bad game. Not a total failure as a game (as the psychotic support for it shows), but it was a failure from the corporate view.

No, it didn't. It expected WOTC to bring in 50 million dollars. That doesn't necessarily mean being the number one RPG. After all, had, say, the VTT taken off on Xbox as it was supposed to, it could very well have been that the subscriptions would have made WOTC much bigger than Paizo, despite Paizo selling more physical product.

There is no evidence to suggest that Hasbro expect D&D to remain #1 in the market.

And, nice, "psychotic support". Let that edition warrior flag fly brother.
 

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No, it didn't. It expected WOTC to bring in 50 million dollars. That doesn't necessarily mean being the number one RPG. After all, had, say, the VTT taken off on Xbox as it was supposed to, it could very well have been that the subscriptions would have made WOTC much bigger than Paizo, despite Paizo selling more physical product.

There is no evidence to suggest that Hasbro expect D&D to remain #1 in the market.

And, nice, "psychotic support". Let that edition warrior flag fly brother.

It didn't succeed at the $50M mark, either.

If it had remained #1, it might still be the dominant edition (and I'd not be playing a current D&D) despite not making $50M.
If it had made $50M, it might still be the dominant edition even if it hadn't remained #1 (but probably would have been).

Ryan Dancey has mentioned (in 2013) that there was an expectation of remaining #1 when 4E came out. Mearls has mentioned the $50M annual target. Either way, it's a failure from the corporate side.
 

As far as I know it's not being converted to use with 5e, and that makes sense as it's not really a tool well-suited to a 5e style of rules and gaming.

Okay this line is a little confusing... why are a character builder and monster builder tool not well-suited to a 5e style of rules and gaming?
 

The operating costs involve server and software maintenance. I would assume that is in the neighbourhood of $100,000 a year (a bit of salary, a bit of machinery), but maybe I'm underestimating. Computing is not my field.

What about the costs for the articles & art being published in Dungeon and Dragon...

Honestly, your estimate of $100,000 seems low to me (I have experience with enterprise level business apps, so admittedly my view could be skewed towards the high side for an app like this)...but then again my original point was that we actually don't know any of this... I mean it's easy enough to just throw out numbers but what are the real basis for them?

Whatever the startup costs were - and I personally have no idea, but would assume more than $1 million but fewer than $10 million - they were well and truly sunk by 2012.

I've indicated my back-of-the-envelope estimate for DDI revenues over the time of 5e's development. The startup costs don't affect those, do they?

When determining whether something was a success... I think start up costs would matter alot, not sure what them being "sunk" has to do with whether a project is successful or turns a profit.

Just as an example, with numbers pulled out of the sky...If DDI cost a total of 30 million to get up and running... Until DDI earns above that 30 million you can't consider it to have made a profit? If it never earns above that 30 million... you actually lost money on the project and it isn't actually funding anything directly.

It's like spending 30 million on a movie and then the movie only makes 10 million at the box office... it doesn't matter that the costs to create the movie are sunk... it's a flop and didn't turn a profit if it only made back 10 million.
 
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Let that edition warrior flag fly brother.


Kettle...


Really? In all your posts, you've never called 4e a failure? Ever? Never ever? Somehow I find that hard to believe, but, it's true, stranger things have happened.

But, yes, of course 5e was funded by the rerelease of pdf's, because, obviously, nothing 4e could possibly make money in order to fund anything.

I mean, good grief. We have a pretty good idea that DDi had somewhere in the neighbourhood of 50k-100k subscribers during the 5e development. That number was tested and retested a number of times and shown to go up or down when you subscribed and went on the WOTC forums. So, it's a fairly solid number.

Do you honestly believe that D&D reprints are making several million dollars per year? Really? Never mind that it was what, late 2012, early 2013 before Drive Thru RPG started selling the reprints again. The first playtest packet came out in late 2012, IIRC. How were the pdf's funding development? What, they decided to close their doors, and just hope that the reprints would pay the bills? In a publicly owned company? Do you honestly believe that's how things work?

This isn't about "poor 4e victims" here. This is about the wilful rewriting AGAIN of history. As I said, it's pretty bloody obvious that the only reason that the DDi couldn't have funded 5e, is because people are invested in the idea that 4e must be a failure in all things. Because if it wasn't a failure in all things, that calls into question what things it might have been successful at. And we obviously can't have that. All things 4e must be excised from D&D.


Pot...
 

"You calling me a psychopath?.... I'll kill your whole family if you call me that!" MST3K: Werewolf (Yuri and Crow)

"I'm really sorry. You are clearly not a psychopath. My mistake." ibid. (Mike Nelson)

"I can't believe people call me a psycho, I'm gonna take those people's heads and carve em' into ashtrays." ibid. (Tom Servo)
 




Failure depends upon the criteria imposed...

When corporate explicitly expects being #1, and you come in #2, you have still failed, even if you make money, because the board is going to see the VP saying the team failed to meet expectations.

HasBro expected D&D to remain #1 in the market. It failed to do so.

Not a bad game. Not a total failure as a game (as the psychotic support for it shows), but it was a failure from the corporate view.
Why should gamers use the corporate metric? What value does it bring to my table when deciding on games to run?
 

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