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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kramodlog" data-source="post: 7669158" data-attributes="member: 55961">I didn't mention 4e's profitability. I said it wasn't a financial success. Those are different. What we do know is that it wasn't a financial success. The first evidence comes from Ryan Dancey and the 50 million$ target that D&D didn't manage to reach. The second is market share loss. The rise of Pathfinder, the decline in ICv2's rankings, Mearls saying they didn't mean to lose half their fans, Monte Cook saying D&D only has a third of its base, Essentials, the fiddling with the release schedule of 2011 and finally 4e's cancellation are all indicators of that loss. The two year hiatus could fit in there too. Lack or loss of profits would also contribute to it not being a financial success, but we do not know anything about that a side from some people's wishful thinking.We have no idea if 4e turned a profit and turning a profit doesn't mean that is a profit that is interesting. It is relative to whom you're dealing with. For a 3PP making 50,000$ could be pretty awesome. For WotC/Hasbro, 50,000$ seems low and not worth it, but hey how knows right? What we can deduce from DDI is that it covers it maintenance cost, cause it wouldn't be up if it didn't. WotC ain't a charity. We can assume some profitability, since just maintaining it for the sake of it doesn't make much sense. But how profitable and where those profits go we have no idea and to say that it financed the playtest is pure speculation. We do not know how Hasbro, WotC and D&D are structured financially. Where does the revenues of DDI go? Does it help pay the salary of Jen from legal at WotC or only those who directly work on 5e? Does WotC has  a policy of getting revenues so? Big corporation can be very complexe, and saying revenues just go into paying salaries of employees is over simplifying. Even if it were that simple, we have no idea how many employees DDI could cover.  Heck, we have no idea if they actually wanted to release a new edition in 2014. For all that we know, the first playtests were just market research. Exects might have said "if you get X number of people to respond to the first three playtests, we'll finance the rest of the R&D and launch of 5e". From Crawford's comment about how they had to convince exects and give them frenquent reports, that seems plausible.</blockquote>

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