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

redrick · Apr 28, 2015

I jumped back about 20 pages to see how this whole conversation started. Here is what I found. [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] replied to a statement by [MENTION=6790888]HonorBoundSamurai632[/MENTION] about WoTC "punishing" consumers for supporting or not supporting a certain edition. He suggested that this line of thinking was akin to 4e players complaining about being punished by WoTC through the release of 5e. The statement of 4e "financing" the development of 5e was part of a throwaway statement dismissing the argument that 4e fans were somehow entitled to something, because they contributed to Wizards financially while Wizards went about developing a new, non-4e product. He wasn't building some grand thesis about the terrible injustice done to 4e fans by mean awful Wizards, who stole the 4e fans money and then spent it on a bunch of good-for-nothing grognards and 3e fans. He was saying, "that thesis is not valid!" (Or at least that was my takeaway. Correct me if I'm wrong here, [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION].)
[MENTION=48965]Imaro[/MENTION] then responded, demanding that [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] properly cite his "claim" that 4e financed 5e. Which isn't even a claim that [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] exactly made, but he seems to believe that it is reasonable to assume that 4e's revenue during the public playtest of 5e helped contribute to the bottom line of the D&D division at Wizards, and allowed that department to spend 2 years and millions of dollars investing in the next edition. I agree with [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] — it is reasonable to assume that 4e's revenue (through DDI) was significant, and that the presence of some black on the ledgers could only have been a positive when the D&D department asked Wizards to pay for a lengthy and expensive public playtest. But he really is under no obligation to "prove" that to [MENTION=48965]Imaro[/MENTION] or anybody else. He presented it as conjecture, and isn't using it as evidence for any broader statement about the success or failure of 4e.

Why did I just waste the last 30 minutes of my life doing this little internet archival research?

Quotes below.

HonorBoundSamurai632 said:
it's not MY fault that sales started dropping off at the tail-end of 3.5 (some of those books felt like they weren't even playtested.) It's not my fault that 4th Edition didn't make Hasbro the kind of money Hasbro was hoping to see. It's not my fault that Pathfinder was such a success. Some of the things that WoTC is doing, it feels like I'm the one being punished for not supporting 4th like I did the previous editions to it.
Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...-D-amp-D-a-Tabletop-Game/page18#ixzz3YdEVoT9K

pemerton said:
This makes no real sense to me - it would be like 4e fans complainging that we are being "punished" although it was the sales of 4e books and DDI subscriptions than financed the development of 5e.

WotC is a commercial publisher and manager of intellectual property. They're not a charity. They don't owe duties to anyone to publish particular books about particular things. If they think a book is a good commercial prospect, they will publish it. Otherwise they won't. It has nothing to do with "fault" or "punishment".

Mistwell · Apr 28, 2015

goldomark said:
You've said before that you refuse to see it. This is just a continuation of this.

Why did Paizo continue to publish 3.5 compatible books when it was doing its playtest for 3.75 (Pathfinder)?

Simple answers are often the best: *drumroll* it was profitable.

Revenues sure, but profits? We do not know. Once DDI covered its cost, what was left? We do not know. Saying it financed 5e's R&D is just an unsubstantiated claim.

What is rational conjecture is that 4e wasn't a success financially and this is why it was so short lived and D&D went on a 2 years hiatus. Developing 5e was a risk, a gamble taken by WotC, as Jeremy Crawford said. Because exects didn't see the brand as profitable and needed Mearls to convince them.

You make assumptions left and right. DId Paizo continue to make 3.5 stuff during that time for profits, or merely cash flow, or maybe just to keep employees working while they brought some money in to mitigate the loss? You don't know which it is, but you declare "profitable" to be fact with nothing to support it but your instincts. Then you do the opposite with DDI - we don't know how profitable it was, so you imply no statement should be made one way or the other. Really? That didn't stop you the sentence prior, concerning Paizo. It just depends on what side you happen to be discussing in the moment, to determine which standard you will slide over to.

So much of this seems to be based on your instincts. So I think it's fair to ask (obviously you don't have to answer), what is your personal business experience that you're basing these declarations on?

redrick · Apr 28, 2015

goldomark said:
You've said before that you refuse to see it. This is just a continuation of this.

Why did Paizo continue to publish 3.5 compatible books when it was doing its playtest for 3.75 (Pathfinder)?

Simple answers are often the best: *drumroll* it was profitable.

Revenues sure, but profits? We do not know. Once DDI covered its cost, what was left? We do not know. Saying it financed 5e's R&D is just an unsubstantiated claim.

What is rational conjecture is that 4e wasn't a success financially and this is why it was so short lived and D&D went on a 2 years hiatus. Developing 5e was a risk, a gamble taken by WotC, as Jeremy Crawford said. Because exects didn't see the brand as profitable and needed Mearls to convince them.

These are different circumstances and not really comparable. Pathfinder was explicitly designed to be a logical extension of 3.5, with strong backward compatibility with that system. Any 3.5 material purchased could easily be converted to run in Pathfinder. 5e, by comparison, was expected to be very different from 4e, so folks are less likely to buy a product for a system that they don't plan to be using that much longer.

Also, how large was the public playtest for Pathfinder? I don't know. Wizards not only started working on the next edition, but also started running their playtest at game stores as part of D&D organized play. They wanted everybody, fans of 4e included, to start engaging with the new rules system. They also published and sold several adventures for D&D Next while it was still in development.

Now, as to profitability of 4e, well, we really just don't know. The presumed profitability of D&D 4e at the start of the public playtest for 5e isn't really an indicator on the profitability of 4e earlier on in its release cycle. Nor is it an indicator on the profitability of DDI, which didn't rely on new material to drive its revenues. (There is more than enough material coded into the DDI system to last any gaming group for quite some time, and the fact that it's still online is a testament to the fact that many gamers are still willing to pay a monthly subscription for it, long after any new content has been generated.)

Wizards might very well have decided that new books for 4th edition would not be profitable, or at least not profitable enough. They might have decided that the potential payoff of a new, massively popular 5th edition would be far bigger than the diminishing profits of splat books for 4e, and focused their energy on 5e to maximize those returns. If you have limited resources, you will invest those resources in whatever will generate the most long-term profit, even if there are other places you could invest those resources that would generate modest short-term profit. All sorts of reasons could have gone into that decision. 4e being unprofitable is just one possible explanation.

I can stay in my neighborhood and make $8 an hour at a local coffee shop. Or I can spend an hour on the train, making no money, in order to get to an office where I can make many times that. I could have stayed in Texas, making $12 an hour working small-time, but I chose to move to New York City, where I spent several months getting myself established, but ultimately make much more money.

Wicht · Apr 28, 2015

redrick said:
Also, how large was the public playtest for Pathfinder? I don't know.

Since you asked, I braved the very bowels of the internet to uncover this dark, secret, known only to a select few, but, ironically enough, published in a wiki.

There were about 45,000 downloads of the playtest material, and the feedback portion of the playtest elicited over a 100,000 posts. Also, the entire print run of the hard-copies of the Beta rulebook completely sold out.

redrick · Apr 28, 2015

Wicht said:
Since you asked, I braved the very bowels of the internet to uncover this dark, secret, known only to a select few, but, ironically enough, published in a wiki.

There were about 45,000 downloads of the playtest material, and the feedback portion of the playtest elicited over a 100,000 posts. Also, the entire print run of the hard-copies of the Beta rulebook completely sold out.

Why thank you! I'm not a Pathfinder person and unfamiliar with those particular internet bowels, even if they happen to be published on an easily google-searchable wiki for all to see.

So that was definitely a large public playtest! In that respect, the Wizards and Pathfinder circumstances seem comparable. On the other hand, it still doesn't change the fact that Pathfinder was created with the intention of backwards compatibility with 3.5. Which makes it a little easier to sell somebody material for 3.5e while also engaging them in the beta for 3.75e.

Anyway, I really don't know that much about Pathfinder, or Paizo's business, or ultimately Wizards' business, so I'ma stop speculating beyond that.

UngainlyTitan · Apr 28, 2015

DEFCON 1 said:
I definitely agree that one of the strengths of the 4E design was the easier ability to port the game to the virtual tabletop, but I wouldn't wipe away the sales of the D&D pre-painted miniatures, poster maps, and Dungeon Tiles for use at the face-to-face table as inconsequential though. I think the money that could be brought in from all four (minis, maps, tiles, VTT) all had a hand in spearheading 3E's miniatures evolution towards what 4E became. But then losing one of those four so early in the game's lifespan probably did reduce the game's ceiling ultimately. I think that's fair.

Never said that they were inconequential but that the traditional market was not where they planned to really expand D&D. That the original plan was to massivly expand the game in the online area and that that 4e was built to show very favourably as an online game. that is my take of where they planned to go to make D&D a $50 million game.
Personally I think that hte idea had some merit but the execution on the software side was truely awful. The VTT was vapourware and Gleemax was an abomination.

pemerton · Apr 29, 2015

redrick said:
that was my takeaway. Correct me if I'm wrong here, pemerton.

No correction needed!

redrick said:
he really is under no obligation to "prove" that to [MENTION=48965]Imaro[/MENTION] or anybody else. He presented it as conjecture, and isn't using it as evidence for any broader statement about the success or failure of 4e.

Yep. I've really not got anything to add on the issue of 4e's success/failure to this post I made on these boards over 4 years ago:

pemerton said:
4e resembles a game like The Dying Earth. I've never read the Vance stories, but feel that I could run a game of Dying Earth from the rulebook. It gives me the "vibe" and "meta-setting", plus tips on how to set up situations/scenarios that will exploit that vibe to produce a fun session.

My feeling is that 4e was written with the intention to be GMed in this sort of way. I say this because (i) it fits with the game's emphasis on the encounter - combat or non-combat as the basic unit of play; (ii) it fits with the obvious effort to create that default atmosphere, with the gods, race backgrounds and so on in the PHB and the little sidebars in the Power books; (iii) when you look at the original MM (with most of the campaign info located in skill check results), plus think about how skill challenges should play out (with the GM having to make calls about NPC responses, and other elements of the gameworld, on the fly in response to unpredictable player actions), and even look at the whole emphasis on "situations" rather than "world exploration" as the focus of play, the game seems intended to support "just in time" creation of world details, using "points of light" and the default atmosphere as a framework for doing this in; (iv) it fits with the absence of a developed setting.

<snip>

When 4e game out, I posted on these forums that WotC apparently agreed with Ron Edwards that a narrativist-oriented RPG focusing on situation and character-driven play would be more popular than a simulationist RPG focused on the players exploring the world and/or stories that the GM creates for them. Such a belief seems the only way to explain the presence, in 4e, of all the features I've mentioned above.

At the time I tended to assume that WotC weren't just speculating but actually knew- unlike Ron Edwards, for example, they have marketers and market researchers on their payroll. But it seems they may have got it wrong.

For someone like me, who wanted a game like the one they produced, it's turned out to be a lucky error. The tone of Essentials, though, plus the release of Nentir Vale, suggests that WotC might be pulling back, and trying to turn 4e into a more traditional RPG.

Was 4e a financial failure? I don't know, but it seems unlikely, given the RPG group were given a chance to have another go.

Was 4e a project failure, in the sense of not meeting its internal goals? Probably. Certainly, the digital stuff seems not to have realised its aspirations.

Was 4e a cultural failure? In one sense, yes - as per my self-quote, it did not bring the D&D community with it in the way that (presumably) WotC hoped. In another sense, obviously not - there is clearly now a large and flourishing culture of "indie"/"light narrativist" FRPGers, whether playing 4e, or DungeonWorld, or 13th Age, or other systems, and 4e undoubtedly helped build and reinforce that culture.

Mistwell said:
I think it's fair to ask (obviously you don't have to answer), what is your personal business experience that you're basing these declarations on?

You didn't ask me, but it's probably fair for me to reply. I'm not a business person, I am an academic lawyer and philosopher. My knowledge of commercial matters draws on my teaching of various aspects of commercial law, and my personal and professional contacts with commercial lawyers. Upthread I've indicated the bases for my speculations: I've sketched out some conjectures for DDI revenue (based on likely number of subscribers plus monthly rates), and have equally said that I don't know much about the cost of maintaining a system like DDI.

Here, repeated, are my conjectures on revenue: over 2 years, I'll call it 50,000 subscribers for 18 months (I'm deliberately contracting the time period to allow for drop-offs in subscriptions towards the end of the period). And I'll call it $5 per month. (There is no DDI option that cheap, but I'm allowing for transaction costs.)

That makes it $4.5 million. Which is $2.25 million per year.

I then suggested this is enough to pay 15 employees, at salary + on-costs of $150,000 per year. Again,that is conjecture in relation to salary scale but doesn't seem too crazy (salaries of $100,000 plus 50% on-costs).

I don't know how big the D&D team was during the playtest. I also don't know what the revenue from boardgames and reprints was. And I don't know how much it costs to maintain DDI, though I've guessed around $100,000 per year for a part-time software person plus some hardware and power costs. If that's a crazy underestimate I'm happy to be corrected - it's just a guess on my part.

DEFCON 1 said:
Who I'd really would love to see posting about this topic are the people who played and enjoyed 4E as a game but still consider 4E a failure (in either design or financial concerns)

I've reposted a four year old quote of mine above, in relation to 4e's popular uptake.

As for design issues, from the same post:

pemerton said:
Unfortunately, though, the rulebooks don't do much to support GMing this sort of game. A contrast is provided by The Dying Earth rulebook, which does offer tools to help the GM with this sort of situation-based preparation and play.

For 4e, this is really provided by Worlds and Monsters. Good art, interesting stories, and (most importantly for a GM) good discussions of the way in which those stories have been designed to help make an interesting game. Big chunks of this book should have been incorporated into the 4e DMG, in place of (what are in my view) unnecessary or overlong parts of it like the tedious discussion of giving adventure locations personality and the random dungeon generation. If they had been, that would have gone some way - though not all the way - to helping GMs run games in the sort of fashion that the rulebooks seem to intend.

Other well-known design flaws in 4e, besides the gaps in its GMing advice, are:

* The differential scaling for attacks/defences vs skill/DCs, which makes it hard to integrate the two in action resolution, especially at Paragon tier and above;

* Adding to the above, the abstraction of skill challenge resolution can be hard to integrate with the concreteness of movement and positioning in combat resolution;

* PC building has needless fiddly bits (eg the use of stats and items in generating attack bonuses, some of the issues around defence scaling, etc; I gather that 4e Gamma World showed how a lot of this could be cleaned up);

* Related to the above, many feats are largely redundant and some powers could be improved too (eg building in scaling where feasible rather than having improved versions be completely new powers);

* The game could give explicit advice on integrating the rest cycle and the disease/condition track to help support lingering injuries, gritty exploration, etc.

Those are probably the main, widely accepted flaws among those who play and enjoy the game.

fjw70 · Apr 29, 2015

$100k in salary per EE? I doubt Mearls even makes that much. Most of those people are probably in $40-60k range.

Hussar · Apr 29, 2015

Halivar said:
I played and enjoyed 4E. I believe ultimately, however, that it failed to serve me as a player, but it served WotC just fine. The goal (IMHO) was the pump out as much content as soon as possible for a quick cash-in. I mean, in half the lifespan of 3.x we got just as many books, covering just as many options. It was the glut of 3.x with the hose opened wide. Now maybe someone has better stats than me and can prove me wrong, but that is my impression from what I saw at the time.

I think 4E would have been more successful for me if the PHB1 and 2 and had been combined, and then no further player options released. I think the edition would have lasted longer, as well. BUT, that was not WotC's plan for the edition in any event. I am thankful for the new approach.

Umm, you do realise that WOTC's release schedule during 4e was about half of that of 3e right?

Hussar · Apr 29, 2015

redrick said:
Why thank you! I'm not a Pathfinder person and unfamiliar with those particular internet bowels, even if they happen to be published on an easily google-searchable wiki for all to see.

So that was definitely a large public playtest! In that respect, the Wizards and Pathfinder circumstances seem comparable. On the other hand, it still doesn't change the fact that Pathfinder was created with the intention of backwards compatibility with 3.5. Which makes it a little easier to sell somebody material for 3.5e while also engaging them in the beta for 3.75e.

Anyway, I really don't know that much about Pathfinder, or Paizo's business, or ultimately Wizards' business, so I'ma stop speculating beyond that.

Well, that's a bit of a question isn't it? WOTC's playtest numbers are considerably more than 45k individuals. It's listed as 175 000 in the DMG. There's a fair difference in scale.

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

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