Personally, I'd like to see more lore. Yeah, more Dragonlance, Greyhawk etc would be great, but even if they just want to stick to Faerun. Give me more Lore about the areas other than the Sword Coast. What's going down in Thay? What's happening in Cormyr? The Silver Marches, Moonsea, Mulhorand. There is so much geography that they really haven't explored and half of the work is already done in previous editions.
I know there's some stuff in the adventures, but it's light compared to a full book on one area, I don't really want new adventures. They're fine and all, and have some interesting stuff, but lots of campaigns that people run are long running, so they want world content rather than by-the-book adventures. I'm not saying scrap adventures. I'd probably keep the adventure release schedule as is, but throw in maybe 2 more source books each year.
And collectibles. D&D is really under monetised in fan collectibles.
A- WotC is a billion dollar corporation. That's $1,000,000,000 .
B- DM's buy the books. This is the way it's always been. What's changed is that the modern game isn't as much fun to DM as past editions were. When I started playing 40 years ago 80% of players also DMed and we all bought our own stuff. Today that's down to 20%.
So here's an idea, if they want more money, they should make a better product. Make it fun to be a DM again and this whole problem goes away...
A- WotC is a billion dollar corporation. That's $1,000,000,000 .
B- DM's buy the books. This is the way it's always been. What's changed is that the modern game isn't as much fun to DM as past editions were. When I started playing 40 years ago 80% of players also DMed and we all bought our own stuff. Today that's down to 20%.
So here's an idea, if they want more money, they should make a better product. Make it fun to be a DM again and this whole problem goes away...
Why don't you have fun DMing? Serious question. I'm a forever DM and I love it.
Here's the thing about TTRPGs specifically and social games generally; and I'll frame it in an adage that gets passed around the game design community a bit in various forms. The sotry goes thus:
Executive: "These freeloaders! They aren't paying me enough to play the game I spent money making! This is outragious!"
Designer: "Actually; they are helping you keep making money."
Executive: "How!? How many people who don't pay me am I supposed to allow to use my product!?"
Designer: "As many as you can get."
...
In a social game, which D&D IS, and shall always be; sorry Chris; you aren't going to change that; players, yes, even ones that "don't pay their fair share" in terms of money, ARE your game's content. Even the best TTRPG product ever produced (And let's not beat around the bush; WOTC is FAR from making that of late) would be so many worthless words on paper or in digital bits without players to play it and a GM to run it. A good analogy is the advent of the phone; if one person owns a phone, the device is worthless, it only becomes valuable when there are more people to use it.
WotC made 1.3 Billion in revenue in 2021, alone. It's working just fine, unless you're a greedy POS.
Yes, and over a billion of it was from Magic: the Gathering. D&D is worth roughly ~150M, in comparison. We're being put through all this because D&D isn't worth a quarter of what Magic is and the suits want to change that.
What can we do about that?
100% dead serious response -
Demand more, higher quality first party products.
Imagine the content schedule they could have supplied if they invested a fraction of what they're spending on a new VTT on monthly adventure modules.
They could also sell additional electronic products, like book pdfs. Refusing to sell pdfs first party barely even slows down people pirating books as pdfs - high quality scans are out almost as soon as paper hits the streets. But people like me will buy the same book twice to get a paper and digital copy, so long as I can keep the digital copy and read it how I want (as a pdf).
The thing is, most people don't buy many books. I once heard they'd done some market research and found out that the vast majority of players buy only four books. Not 4 per year, but four per edition. And one of those will be the PHB, so really, we're down to three. This was back in the olden times when all the books were dead tree, so who knows how well that number has aged. But that, I understood, was one of the driving factors for the current slow release schedule (at least, slow compared to other editions). They'd rather produce fewer books, but try to make ones that will sell better, than make lots of books, and most of them don't sell well. Sure, us forum dwellers will pick up more than the average person, but we're a fraction of the game-buying public.
Yes, we ****ed up. Freebooters need to ante the **** up and help support their game if they want it to survive. Sell more digital dice, sell character sheet cosmetics packs. Sell subscriptions to the website, and put stricter limits on content sharing. You wanna give Master subscribers only one content sharing channel and charge us another fifty bucks a year for more sharing? Charge per campaign instead of per player for content sharing? Fine. That's fair. Hell, you want to put the same limit on homebrew you do on characters? Five subclasses, five magic items, five spells, etc. per free account? Go ahead. Too many people use free homebrew to sidestep having to buy resources here on the website anyways, I understand why you'd want to limit it even if I don't agree. You wanna be straight with us for once in your life and just outright say "We can't keep making D&D if only one person in every five to eight players buys stuff"? Do it up. Because you're right. That's not fair.
honestly...this, playing in several westmarches over the years on discord, the unified cry of most of them is "**** ddb because everythings stuck behind a paywall, why use that when i can just look it up in ******* and use a different service to make my sheet, whats gonna happen hm?"
this. this is what happens when to many people pirate, or cheat a company out of its earned money, they crack down and **** all of us.
and while this isnt the way for them to do it and its killing the community, we also need to stop doing the constant pirating or free bootlegging shit if we want our game to remain fun too. or else we are gonna lose it
But making a character sheet has... always been free? It's literally a piece of paper that you put stats on.
I appreciate what you're trying to say, but I disagree on a fundamental level - what I hear when I see both of your comments is this idea that somehow we're not giving enough money to D&D, and that if we loved the game we'd give them more money so they could 'survive'.
The issue is they are not struggling to survive; they posted record breaking profits last year. There is nothing about their current environment that is making it monetarily difficult to survive, they are thriving actually.
Secondly, a lot of the things you're both talking about - character sheets, homebrew etc. are fundamentally free parts of the game. It'd be fine for D&D beyond to charge for fancy character sheets, don't get me wrong - but I don't see there being any reason why we should expect to pay to make a new character, or pay to play a game of D&D. At the end of the day the things they need to be focusing on monetizing are fun additions that are not required to play the game, but people buy them anyway because they love the game and want to participate. That is the best (and in my opinion only) way for this game to thrive, because then the people who have no money can still participate and play, making the player base larger, and the people who have money can choose to spend it if they want to, and will do so because they are having such a good time playing D&D with their friends.
Nickel and diming people is not a good way to build a brand, especially when a lot of what your brand is hinges on the idea of what D&D is and started as; an affordable paper and pen imagination game that any teenager can play using bottlecaps as minis and graph paper for maps. Taking that away from the spirit of D&D feels fundamentally wrong.
Except that's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying on westmarches on discord there's a culture of refusing yo pay ddb at all but using their content for free basically.
May have worded it wrong but that's what I'm saying, and there are folk who are purposefully running around pirating stuff and shit like that when they are well off Enough to pay for stuff Or bragging that they used theor friends campaign to look at a subclass in hb that's a copy of the original so they don't have to pay
Exactly. If it's more convenient for me to do it the "wrong" way, then I'll likely do that. If it's more convenient for me to do it the right way, then I absolutely do that. Luckily, I own all the content on ddb other than dice because I make good money and I was happy to pay for the convenience. The moment you make it less convenient for me, is the moment I replace you with something else. Either another system, or another way of doing things.
I dunno man, at this stage people are advocating for taking away purchased content unless you have a high enough tier sub. Not Wizards, mind you - forum users. Consumers actively asking for themselves to pay more, to receive less. Apparently buying everything isn't good enough anymore.
I've seen people claim that the "haters" are astroturfing for Paizo or just a couple of people hopping from account to account, but the cult of "Wizards can do whatever they want, we should give them as much money as possible and thank them for the privilege" seems a bit more suspect to me to be honest.
I think its actually more along the lines of:
Group A - doesn't like the negative attention/constant dissent of all the forum posters and as such are frustrated as such, accusing others of being "1 post accounts" or "account hoppers". I also think most of this group has been desensitized to these money grabs, sort of like how MTX wasnt in the gaming space 10 years ago, but now its basically everywhere and you see people defending it.
Group B - Is mad that wizards overstepped and continues to greedily try to grab things they shouldn't but are being a bit abrasive due to the charged atmosphere. (I have been guilty of that recently myself. The mods have... enlightened me on that. One I agree with, the other not so much. Smite me mods if you wish, you know what I speak of.)
First and foremost, good thread, some good points, and nice to see no shade being thrown in it.
D&D has always had the "sharing" problem. Maybe not so much in the Red Box days, but it is one of the reasons why the Complete Class books of 2e became a thing (every player wanted to get at least their favourite class if not more). Only DM's buy adventures, main buyers of the DMG and MM too. This means that for the most part, a new group springs up, at best, everyone buys a PHB, one person buys the DMG, MM, and an adventure/campaign. They play for a year, and during that time a setting/options book or two has come out and an adventure/campaign or two has come out. The DM will buy all of them (maybe), and half the players might pick up the setting/option book. And therein lies the problem, see it COSTS the same amount of money to actually produce any of those things on a page by page basis, allowing that there is an equal percentage of artwork within. They try getting around a bit of it with bundling, but there will NEVER be equal demand.
The compromise for them should be for the digital access of the PHB and Options books to be unshareable. This would suck for many, my family included, but it would be "fair", and also increase revenues for the company.
To digress slightly, one of the initial goals of the OGL was to outsource adventures to 3PP's because they never actually made money for TSR or WotC, break even every now and then, but the number which actually were in the black can be counted on one hand, as in one per full edition average.
Skins, electronic gidgets and gadgets, I don't see the value. Regardless of what the myopic suits at WotC believe, the majority of groups play in person, and probably always will, barring tyrannical lockdowns "for the people's own good."
First of all: yes, I know. These are stupid, nobody except other community people with no voice and no influence reads 'open letters'. Chris Cao and his corhorts will never see this message. But I have to try. Because you know what? They were right. D&D is undermonetized. Too many people are too proud of never spending a single dime in support of their hobby, crowing about how they use free services and their friends' purchases to do all their D&D. It's not fair to ask the forever DM of any given group to be the only person buying any resources, players need to chip in too. If you profess to love D&D, then you should've been tossing the team a few bucks when you could instead of being actively proud of never supporting the game you claim to hold so dear.
Thing is, most books are designed for only DM purchase. Players start buying and reading adventure books, monster manuals etc etc and then DM's are upset that they know everything and are meta gaming. Hell, most players don't usually want to read an adventure book and ruin the twists and surprises. Even lore, DM's tend to want to drip feed that as it becomes relevant/learned in game. They don't want players to read the entire Sword Coast Adventurers Guide. This is in no way advocating piracy. I agree, every player should own the Players Handbook if they can afford it. Beyond that... books aren't really designed for players. Maybe they could look into changing that somehow.
I don't really use D&D's digital service beyond this forum, so don't have much of an opinion on the monetization opportunities of that. I'm more a bricks and mortar guy.
WotC made 1.3 Billion in revenue in 2021, alone. It's working just fine, unless you're a greedy POS.
Yes, and over a billion of it was from Magic: the Gathering. D&D is worth roughly ~150M, in comparison. We're being put through all this because D&D isn't worth a quarter of what Magic is and the suits want to change that.
D&D annual revenue with the game at a high point is only $150M? That is fairly shocking to me. Things make a lot more sense knowing this.
WotC made 1.3 Billion in revenue in 2021, alone. It's working just fine, unless you're a greedy POS.
Yes, and over a billion of it was from Magic: the Gathering. D&D is worth roughly ~150M, in comparison. We're being put through all this because D&D isn't worth a quarter of what Magic is and the suits want to change that.
D&D annual revenue with the game at a high point is only $150M? That is fairly shocking to me. Things make a lot more sense knowing this.
This is part of why that "revenue cut" part of the proposed 1.1 OGL was such a deal-breaker: the margins for most third party publishers on TTRPG books are NOT very high at all. WOTC is already by far the biggest fish in the pond; it's Scrooge McDuck shaking down Spongebob for his wage from the Krusty Krab; the effort cannot possibly be worth the squeeze alone, it wouldn't net them much. Ergo: it was not for revenue, it was to torpedo competition.
Crikey...ok. Let's get some thoughts down on this.
First, some perspective. D&D is not struggling. It's not going to go under any time soon. They take a massive cut from every sale and they're on a high right now with 5e. They're taking money quite nicely, they're not coming to us cup in hand because the hobby will die if we don't cinch up our belts. They've seen dollar signs because they're making X amount of money currently, and realised they're only selling to roughly 1 in 5 players, what could they make if they sold to all of them! And that's fine. That's what businesses do. Unlike many at the moment, I understand how things work, and that's normal. It can be good even - depending on how they do it. More on that in a moment. However, let's cut the poor sap routine. They don't need to get more to pull their weight. They're doing just fine, they just want an even larger salary, when it's not small as it is. Not our problem.
D&D is really expensive for those of us as it is. Ignoring essentials, I can confidently say that D&D sucks up more of my income than anything else in my house. That is in no small part due to the large margins they make. Demanding more money for the same service is not on. It's expensive and I can't really afford to spend more, especially if they're not adding more to my quality of life. There are a lot cheaper ways to have a hobby. I like D&D, and most of my stuff is on-brand, but if they want to make me pay more for the same service, I'll have to go third party - or just stop and go homebrew.
Now, is there a valid way to get more money out of the playerbase? Absolutely. There are two general ways a business can make more profits. Find ways of cutting corners and screwing your customers so they pay more for the same, or find ways to make products more appealing so you can provide quality service to more customers and make more profits through volume. The former is only acceptable in my eyes if the business is struggling to stay afloat. WotC is not. Remember Spelljammer? That's what happens when you cut back on content and jack up prices because, rather than earning extra profits, the company just wants to wring extra profits from the consumer. It's that thinking that kills the hobby. So what can they do to genuinely earn more money?
Target player consumers more. Last night a lad asked me what would be a good purchase for him as a player in terms of books. After thinking, my response was...PHB and TCoE, with a half hearted suggestion of MotM for the races. Everything else is primarily aimed at the DM. There are books like Fizban's that...have like two subclasses and a handful of subraces...for £30-£40. Astoundingly poor value for a player, even if it is a great book for the DM. Spelljammer has 6 races...and charges a fortune. This hybrid format (mixing adventures with player content like races, subclasses, etc) is great for DMs but really poor for players. That's shocking - here's Hasbro moaning about how players don't pay for books, and they're only selling two books for players! Does it really take a genius to figure out that if they want to sell more books for players...they should sell more? There is plenty of space for this. More races, more classes & subclasses, guides, and so forth. The space isn't limitless, but they can do more than two.
Improve the quality of their adventures. A lot of DMs don't buy them and do homebrew. Some of those are never going to change (and that's fine), but many do homebrew because published adventures are hit and miss, and even the good ones have significant problems. Often those problems could have been ironed out with basic QA...but no. Instead, do better ones. Ones that don't require rewriting in order to play. We have a problem when the most praised adventure in the forum is so fundamentally flawed that I'm wondering what was going through their head when they wrote it. Others were better...but if you want to sell adventures, make it so I can reliably pick any adventure off the shelf and be confident that it will be good. The only thing that should make me regret it is if the style/genre is not to my taste - which is easily preventable with a blurb explaining that on the back. If WotC did that, they'd get more DMs enthusiastically buying adventures rather than just homebrewing.
Diversifying. We're seeing this is some ways, like the campaign sets and so forth, but even in the game itself would be great. I'd love to try Eberron, but with only a setting guide and no official adventures... it's a no go. If they released adventures and things for different settings, I'd be willing to try them out as well.
This is dependent on information not available to me, but...consider the price point. I mean, I balk and have to think about new books because they're just so expensive. Perhaps lowering the price will bring the game into more people's budget range and drive more sales.
Sort out the introductory sets. There are three currently available. The old Starter Set had a bad adventure that would put off many inexperienced DMs, as well as being expensive for what it was. The new Starter Set has a terribly short adventure (3 levels, really?), and the new Essentials Kit is ok...but really nothing special, with a really bare bones adventure. It was worth it when it had the DDB stuff...but now, I can't recommend it. Get a semidecent adventure that works well for new DMs, put the stuff from Essentials Kit in with it and sell it. It's not hard. At the moment, my recommendation is to use free stuff (or things not sourced from WotC, which is the same thing in their eyes), which is lost revenue for them. Get decent starter kits that will garner excited new recruits to the hobby.
There are plenty of ways WotC can earn more profits from the hobby while doing what such a company is supposed to do in capitalism - by improving the state of the hobby. We don't need to pretend they're hard done by.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
Crikey...ok. Let's get some thoughts down on this.
First, some perspective. D&D is not struggling. It's not going to go under any time soon. They take a massive cut from every sale and they're on a high right now with 5e. They're taking money quite nicely, they're not coming to us cup in hand because the hobby will die if we don't cinch up our belts. They've seen dollar signs because they're making X amount of money currently, and realised they're only selling to roughly 1 in 5 players, what could they make if they sold to all of them! And that's fine. That's what businesses do. Unlike many at the moment, I understand how things work, and that's normal. It can be good even - depending on how they do it. More on that in a moment. However, let's cut the poor sap routine. They don't need to get more to pull their weight. They're doing just fine, they just want an even larger salary, when it's not small as it is. Not our problem.
D&D is really expensive for those of us as it is. Ignoring essentials, I can confidently say that D&D sucks up more of my income than anything else in my house. That is in no small part due to the large margins they make. Demanding more money for the same service is not on. It's expensive and I can't really afford to spend more, especially if they're not adding more to my quality of life. There are a lot cheaper ways to have a hobby. I like D&D, and most of my stuff is on-brand, but if they want to make me pay more for the same service, I'll have to go third party - or just stop and go homebrew.
Now, is there a valid way to get more money out of the playerbase? Absolutely. There are two general ways a business can make more profits. Find ways of cutting corners and screwing your customers so they pay more for the same, or find ways to make products more appealing so you can provide quality service to more customers and make more profits through volume. The former is only acceptable in my eyes if the business is struggling to stay afloat. WotC is not. Remember Spelljammer? That's what happens when you cut back on content and jack up prices because, rather than earning extra profits, the company just wants to wring extra profits from the consumer. It's that thinking that kills the hobby. So what can they do to genuinely earn more money?
Target player consumers more. Last night a lad asked me what would be a good purchase for him as a player in terms of books. After thinking, my response was...PHB and TCoE, with a half hearted suggestion of MotM for the races. Everything else is primarily aimed at the DM. There are books like Fizban's that...have like two subclasses and a handful of subraces...for £30-£40. Astoundingly poor value for a player, even if it is a great book for the DM. Spelljammer has 6 races...and charges a fortune. This hybrid format (mixing adventures with player content like races, subclasses, etc) is great for DMs but really poor for players. That's shocking - here's Hasbro moaning about how players don't pay for books, and they're only selling two books for players! Does it really take a genius to figure out that if they want to sell more books for players...they should sell more? There is plenty of space for this. More races, more classes & subclasses, guides, and so forth. The space isn't limitless, but they can do more than two.
Improve the quality of their adventures. A lot of DMs don't buy them and do homebrew. Some of those are never going to change (and that's fine), but many do homebrew because published adventures are hit and miss, and even the good ones have significant problems. Often those problems could have been ironed out with basic QA...but no. Instead, do better ones. Ones that don't require rewriting in order to play. We have a problem when the most praised adventure in the forum is so fundamentally flawed that I'm wondering what was going through their head when they wrote it. Others were better...but if you want to sell adventures, make it so I can reliably pick any adventure off the shelf and be confident that it will be good. The only thing that should make me regret it is if the style/genre is not to my taste - which is easily preventable with a blurb explaining that on the back. If WotC did that, they'd get more DMs enthusiastically buying adventures rather than just homebrewing.
Diversifying. We're seeing this is some ways, like the campaign sets and so forth, but even in the game itself would be great. I'd love to try Eberron, but with only a setting guide and no official adventures... it's a no go. If they released adventures and things for different settings, I'd be willing to try them out as well.
This is dependent on information not available to me, but...consider the price point. I mean, I balk and have to think about new books because they're just so expensive. Perhaps lowering the price will bring the game into more people's budget range and drive more sales.
Sort out the introductory sets. There are three currently available. The old Starter Set had a bad adventure that would put off many inexperienced DMs, as well as being expensive for what it was. The new Starter Set has a terribly short adventure (3 levels, really?), and the new Essentials Kit is ok...but really nothing special, with a really bare bones adventure. It was worth it when it had the DDB stuff...but now, I can't recommend it. Get a semidecent adventure that works well for new DMs, put the stuff from Essentials Kit in with it and sell it. It's not hard. At the moment, my recommendation is to use free stuff (or things not sourced from WotC, which is the same thing in their eyes), which is lost revenue for them. Get decent starter kits that will garner excited new recruits to the hobby.
There are plenty of ways WotC can earn more profits from the hobby while doing what such a company is supposed to do in capitalism - by improving the state of the hobby. We don't need to pretend they're hard done by.
1. They kind of shot themselves in the foot with 5e removing any benefit of having different species when you can just custom your way to whatever you want. Sure you could do it before, but they've codified it so now all new species are meaningless outside of you can write the name down on the sheet digitally. I'm not dogging the change, just showing how it's not even a seller for players anymore.
2. If they just made better adventures and sold modules on the current VTT's life would be grand.
3. Diversifying is hard. Why diversify when you can just paywall things people already have, so that they have to pay for what you were already giving them? Genius!
4. I think there's a lot of pricing research that could turn out a higher revenue and be beneficial to players. Sadly, they don't think that far ahead, guaranteed.
5. I personally think this goes hand in hand with 2. Just make better products that people want to buy.
A- WotC is a billion dollar corporation. That's $1,000,000,000 .
B- DM's buy the books. This is the way it's always been. What's changed is that the modern game isn't as much fun to DM as past editions were. When I started playing 40 years ago 80% of players also DMed and we all bought our own stuff. Today that's down to 20%.
So here's an idea, if they want more money, they should make a better product. Make it fun to be a DM again and this whole problem goes away...
Why don't you have fun DMing? Serious question. I'm a forever DM and I love it.
I've probably GMed close to 2 dozen different games and 5e is probably the least fun to do so. Mainly because DMs are mostly unsupported. Just look at the 5e Monster Manual. As a reference book it's garbage. For most you just get a stat block and a pretty picture drawn on a coffee stained napkin. We don't even get actual physical descriptions. How tall is a Bugbear?? Medium. Thier campaign books are designed to be read like a book rather than be a game aid. They're removing more and more of the lore and ecology. Why do I need to buy a book if all it says is "just make it all up yourself"??
One D&D will be the most generic of all generic fantasy games. The player options we've seen in the "playtests" look pretty good but the DM stuff... oh, that's right. There really isn't anything to make my job as a DM easier.
It's almost as if they're targeting thier product to the people they know don't buy the books. Maybe they should fix that instead of trying to fleece us through valueless microtransactions...
WotC made 1.3 Billion in revenue in 2021, alone. It's working just fine, unless you're a greedy POS.
Yes, and over a billion of it was from Magic: the Gathering. D&D is worth roughly ~150M, in comparison. We're being put through all this because D&D isn't worth a quarter of what Magic is and the suits want to change that.
D&D annual revenue with the game at a high point is only $150M? That is fairly shocking to me. Things make a lot more sense knowing this.
Don't be fooled!! The number 2 rpg company is Paizo and their annual revenue is maybe 30 million. WotC makes more on D&D than every other ttrpg company combined!! There isn't any more money to bleed out of this community.
First of all: yes, I know. These are stupid, nobody except other community people with no voice and no influence reads 'open letters'. Chris Cao and his corhorts will never see this message. But I have to try. Because you know what? They were right. D&D is undermonetized. Too many people are too proud of never spending a single dime in support of their hobby, crowing about how they use free services and their friends' purchases to do all their D&D. It's not fair to ask the forever DM of any given group to be the only person buying any resources, players need to chip in too. If you profess to love D&D, then you should've been tossing the team a few bucks when you could instead of being actively proud of never supporting the game you claim to hold so dear.
WotC made 1.3 Billion in revenue in 2021, alone. It's working just fine, unless you're a greedy POS.
Yes, and over a billion of it was from Magic: the Gathering. D&D is worth roughly ~150M, in comparison. We're being put through all this because D&D isn't worth a quarter of what Magic is and the suits want to change that.
D&D annual revenue with the game at a high point is only $150M? That is fairly shocking to me. Things make a lot more sense knowing this.
Don't be fooled!! The number 2 rpg company is Paizo and their annual revenue is maybe 30 million. WotC makes more on D&D than every other ttrpg company combined!! There isn't any more money to bleed out of this community.
Makes more revenue does not equal making money, making a good return on investment or sustainable revenue.
You also seem to be assuming that everyone plays who is ever likely to play, i.e. that it is only the existing player base that is relevant.
And I actually am not sure any of this really applies to Pazio anyway. They do not seem to be using any Hasbro trademarks or copyrighted material.
Except in this case we know it does. WotC's profit margin is over 40% and they generate 72% of Hasbro's overall profits.
No, I don't. You seem to assume that no one ever stops playing. The percentage of D&D's share of the market has grown steadily. This isn't some secret.
Paizo is used as a comparison. WotC isn't barely scraping by on thier measly 150 million revenue. They're dominating the market already. No one comes close to the money they're already making.
First of all: yes, I know. These are stupid, nobody except other community people with no voice and no influence reads 'open letters'. Chris Cao and his corhorts will never see this message. But I have to try. Because you know what? They were right. D&D is undermonetized. Too many people are too proud of never spending a single dime in support of their hobby, crowing about how they use free services and their friends' purchases to do all their D&D. It's not fair to ask the forever DM of any given group to be the only person buying any resources, players need to chip in too. If you profess to love D&D, then you should've been tossing the team a few bucks when you could instead of being actively proud of never supporting the game you claim to hold so dear.
A- WotC is a billion dollar corporation. That's $1,000,000,000 .
B- DM's buy the books. This is the way it's always been. What's changed is that the modern game isn't as much fun to DM as past editions were. When I started playing 40 years ago 80% of players also DMed and we all bought our own stuff. Today that's down to 20%.
So here's an idea, if they want more money, they should make a better product. Make it fun to be a DM again and this whole problem goes away...
Why don't you have fun DMing? Serious question. I'm a forever DM and I love it.
I've probably GMed close to 2 dozen different games and 5e is probably the least fun to do so. Mainly because DMs are mostly unsupported. Just look at the 5e Monster Manual. As a reference book it's garbage. For most you just get a stat block and a pretty picture drawn on a coffee stained napkin. We don't even get actual physical descriptions. How tall is a Bugbear?? Medium. Thier campaign books are designed to be read like a book rather than be a game aid. They're removing more and more of the lore and ecology. Why do I need to buy a book if all it says is "just make it all up yourself"??
One D&D will be the most generic of all generic fantasy games. The player options we've seen in the "playtests" look pretty good but the DM stuff... oh, that's right. There really isn't anything to make my job as a DM easier.
It's almost as if they're targeting thier product to the people they know don't buy the books. Maybe they should fix that instead of trying to fleece us through valueless microtransactions...
Some advice: When the book doesn't tell you, make it up. Keep notes if you feel the need to for anything that comes up often and you have trouble remembering.
Your players will love you all the more for it.
It also lets you fit things more to your world. Frankly, I almost never use the MM. If they were to fix anything in it I would say to fire whoever set the CR's. If they are no longer with the company, hire them just to fire them again. Then hire someone with a clue to do them in some sensible manner.
I've been playing for 40 years so I'm pretty familiar with making up my own stuff. That was pretty much the default way to play the game when I started.
My point is that if Wizards wants to sell more books, those books need to provide value beyond pretty pictures. My 1e books aren't much to look at but they do a better job of helping me run a game.
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Personally, I'd like to see more lore. Yeah, more Dragonlance, Greyhawk etc would be great, but even if they just want to stick to Faerun. Give me more Lore about the areas other than the Sword Coast. What's going down in Thay? What's happening in Cormyr? The Silver Marches, Moonsea, Mulhorand. There is so much geography that they really haven't explored and half of the work is already done in previous editions.
I know there's some stuff in the adventures, but it's light compared to a full book on one area, I don't really want new adventures. They're fine and all, and have some interesting stuff, but lots of campaigns that people run are long running, so they want world content rather than by-the-book adventures. I'm not saying scrap adventures. I'd probably keep the adventure release schedule as is, but throw in maybe 2 more source books each year.
And collectibles. D&D is really under monetised in fan collectibles.
A- WotC is a billion dollar corporation. That's $1,000,000,000 .
B- DM's buy the books. This is the way it's always been. What's changed is that the modern game isn't as much fun to DM as past editions were. When I started playing 40 years ago 80% of players also DMed and we all bought our own stuff. Today that's down to 20%.
So here's an idea, if they want more money, they should make a better product. Make it fun to be a DM again and this whole problem goes away...
Why don't you have fun DMing? Serious question. I'm a forever DM and I love it.
Here's the thing about TTRPGs specifically and social games generally; and I'll frame it in an adage that gets passed around the game design community a bit in various forms. The sotry goes thus:
Executive: "These freeloaders! They aren't paying me enough to play the game I spent money making! This is outragious!"
Designer: "Actually; they are helping you keep making money."
Executive: "How!? How many people who don't pay me am I supposed to allow to use my product!?"
Designer: "As many as you can get."
...
In a social game, which D&D IS, and shall always be; sorry Chris; you aren't going to change that; players, yes, even ones that "don't pay their fair share" in terms of money, ARE your game's content. Even the best TTRPG product ever produced (And let's not beat around the bush; WOTC is FAR from making that of late) would be so many worthless words on paper or in digital bits without players to play it and a GM to run it. A good analogy is the advent of the phone; if one person owns a phone, the device is worthless, it only becomes valuable when there are more people to use it.
The thing is, most people don't buy many books. I once heard they'd done some market research and found out that the vast majority of players buy only four books. Not 4 per year, but four per edition. And one of those will be the PHB, so really, we're down to three. This was back in the olden times when all the books were dead tree, so who knows how well that number has aged. But that, I understood, was one of the driving factors for the current slow release schedule (at least, slow compared to other editions). They'd rather produce fewer books, but try to make ones that will sell better, than make lots of books, and most of them don't sell well. Sure, us forum dwellers will pick up more than the average person, but we're a fraction of the game-buying public.
Except that's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying on westmarches on discord there's a culture of refusing yo pay ddb at all but using their content for free basically.
May have worded it wrong but that's what I'm saying, and there are folk who are purposefully running around pirating stuff and shit like that when they are well off Enough to pay for stuff Or bragging that they used theor friends campaign to look at a subclass in hb that's a copy of the original so they don't have to pay
I think its actually more along the lines of:
Group A - doesn't like the negative attention/constant dissent of all the forum posters and as such are frustrated as such, accusing others of being "1 post accounts" or "account hoppers". I also think most of this group has been desensitized to these money grabs, sort of like how MTX wasnt in the gaming space 10 years ago, but now its basically everywhere and you see people defending it.
Group B - Is mad that wizards overstepped and continues to greedily try to grab things they shouldn't but are being a bit abrasive due to the charged atmosphere. (I have been guilty of that recently myself. The mods have... enlightened me on that. One I agree with, the other not so much. Smite me mods if you wish, you know what I speak of.)
@Yurei1453
First and foremost, good thread, some good points, and nice to see no shade being thrown in it.
D&D has always had the "sharing" problem. Maybe not so much in the Red Box days, but it is one of the reasons why the Complete Class books of 2e became a thing (every player wanted to get at least their favourite class if not more). Only DM's buy adventures, main buyers of the DMG and MM too. This means that for the most part, a new group springs up, at best, everyone buys a PHB, one person buys the DMG, MM, and an adventure/campaign. They play for a year, and during that time a setting/options book or two has come out and an adventure/campaign or two has come out. The DM will buy all of them (maybe), and half the players might pick up the setting/option book. And therein lies the problem, see it COSTS the same amount of money to actually produce any of those things on a page by page basis, allowing that there is an equal percentage of artwork within. They try getting around a bit of it with bundling, but there will NEVER be equal demand.
The compromise for them should be for the digital access of the PHB and Options books to be unshareable. This would suck for many, my family included, but it would be "fair", and also increase revenues for the company.
To digress slightly, one of the initial goals of the OGL was to outsource adventures to 3PP's because they never actually made money for TSR or WotC, break even every now and then, but the number which actually were in the black can be counted on one hand, as in one per full edition average.
Skins, electronic gidgets and gadgets, I don't see the value. Regardless of what the myopic suits at WotC believe, the majority of groups play in person, and probably always will, barring tyrannical lockdowns "for the people's own good."
Thing is, most books are designed for only DM purchase. Players start buying and reading adventure books, monster manuals etc etc and then DM's are upset that they know everything and are meta gaming. Hell, most players don't usually want to read an adventure book and ruin the twists and surprises. Even lore, DM's tend to want to drip feed that as it becomes relevant/learned in game. They don't want players to read the entire Sword Coast Adventurers Guide. This is in no way advocating piracy. I agree, every player should own the Players Handbook if they can afford it. Beyond that... books aren't really designed for players. Maybe they could look into changing that somehow.
I don't really use D&D's digital service beyond this forum, so don't have much of an opinion on the monetization opportunities of that. I'm more a bricks and mortar guy.
D&D annual revenue with the game at a high point is only $150M? That is fairly shocking to me. Things make a lot more sense knowing this.
This is part of why that "revenue cut" part of the proposed 1.1 OGL was such a deal-breaker: the margins for most third party publishers on TTRPG books are NOT very high at all. WOTC is already by far the biggest fish in the pond; it's Scrooge McDuck shaking down Spongebob for his wage from the Krusty Krab; the effort cannot possibly be worth the squeeze alone, it wouldn't net them much. Ergo: it was not for revenue, it was to torpedo competition.
Crikey...ok. Let's get some thoughts down on this.
First, some perspective. D&D is not struggling. It's not going to go under any time soon. They take a massive cut from every sale and they're on a high right now with 5e. They're taking money quite nicely, they're not coming to us cup in hand because the hobby will die if we don't cinch up our belts. They've seen dollar signs because they're making X amount of money currently, and realised they're only selling to roughly 1 in 5 players, what could they make if they sold to all of them! And that's fine. That's what businesses do. Unlike many at the moment, I understand how things work, and that's normal. It can be good even - depending on how they do it. More on that in a moment. However, let's cut the poor sap routine. They don't need to get more to pull their weight. They're doing just fine, they just want an even larger salary, when it's not small as it is. Not our problem.
D&D is really expensive for those of us as it is. Ignoring essentials, I can confidently say that D&D sucks up more of my income than anything else in my house. That is in no small part due to the large margins they make. Demanding more money for the same service is not on. It's expensive and I can't really afford to spend more, especially if they're not adding more to my quality of life. There are a lot cheaper ways to have a hobby. I like D&D, and most of my stuff is on-brand, but if they want to make me pay more for the same service, I'll have to go third party - or just stop and go homebrew.
Now, is there a valid way to get more money out of the playerbase? Absolutely. There are two general ways a business can make more profits. Find ways of cutting corners and screwing your customers so they pay more for the same, or find ways to make products more appealing so you can provide quality service to more customers and make more profits through volume. The former is only acceptable in my eyes if the business is struggling to stay afloat. WotC is not. Remember Spelljammer? That's what happens when you cut back on content and jack up prices because, rather than earning extra profits, the company just wants to wring extra profits from the consumer. It's that thinking that kills the hobby. So what can they do to genuinely earn more money?
There are plenty of ways WotC can earn more profits from the hobby while doing what such a company is supposed to do in capitalism - by improving the state of the hobby. We don't need to pretend they're hard done by.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
1. They kind of shot themselves in the foot with 5e removing any benefit of having different species when you can just custom your way to whatever you want. Sure you could do it before, but they've codified it so now all new species are meaningless outside of you can write the name down on the sheet digitally. I'm not dogging the change, just showing how it's not even a seller for players anymore.
2. If they just made better adventures and sold modules on the current VTT's life would be grand.
3. Diversifying is hard. Why diversify when you can just paywall things people already have, so that they have to pay for what you were already giving them? Genius!
4. I think there's a lot of pricing research that could turn out a higher revenue and be beneficial to players. Sadly, they don't think that far ahead, guaranteed.
5. I personally think this goes hand in hand with 2. Just make better products that people want to buy.
I've probably GMed close to 2 dozen different games and 5e is probably the least fun to do so. Mainly because DMs are mostly unsupported. Just look at the 5e Monster Manual. As a reference book it's garbage. For most you just get a stat block and a pretty picture drawn on a coffee stained napkin. We don't even get actual physical descriptions. How tall is a Bugbear?? Medium. Thier campaign books are designed to be read like a book rather than be a game aid. They're removing more and more of the lore and ecology. Why do I need to buy a book if all it says is "just make it all up yourself"??
One D&D will be the most generic of all generic fantasy games. The player options we've seen in the "playtests" look pretty good but the DM stuff... oh, that's right. There really isn't anything to make my job as a DM easier.
It's almost as if they're targeting thier product to the people they know don't buy the books. Maybe they should fix that instead of trying to fleece us through valueless microtransactions...
Don't be fooled!! The number 2 rpg company is Paizo and their annual revenue is maybe 30 million. WotC makes more on D&D than every other ttrpg company combined!! There isn't any more money to bleed out of this community.
This is an awful take...
Except in this case we know it does. WotC's profit margin is over 40% and they generate 72% of Hasbro's overall profits.
No, I don't. You seem to assume that no one ever stops playing. The percentage of D&D's share of the market has grown steadily. This isn't some secret.
Paizo is used as a comparison. WotC isn't barely scraping by on thier measly 150 million revenue. They're dominating the market already. No one comes close to the money they're already making.
Yeah, it seems to be a trend with these posts.
I kind of disagree with you on 1. With the advent of custom backgrounds, you can just build your own species and call it whatever you want.
I've been playing for 40 years so I'm pretty familiar with making up my own stuff. That was pretty much the default way to play the game when I started.
My point is that if Wizards wants to sell more books, those books need to provide value beyond pretty pictures. My 1e books aren't much to look at but they do a better job of helping me run a game.