What I hear: “Our leadership, who either ran WotC or are currently running it don’t understand any of the products WotC makes, nor do they care to.”
On a fuck up this big, a demonstration you are so disconnected from your customer base, the buck stops at the top.
Instead it’s one of the peons ‘out in front’ of this and shielding upper managment from the wolves. Says all you you need to know about the management style, culture and the future of WOTC under that leadership. All care, no responsibility…that’s what I always look for in a leader.
We already saw it with concerns about Magic. People asked them about it and they talked about how people at dinner parties loved them or whatever the fuck (I forget the details, but it was the dumbest most tone-deaf shit ever). Then they told people to not buy their products.
The comments section under that article would seem to indicate most folks aren’t buying it. Literally in some cases I guess lol.
I’m a single data point, but they pulled me back into MtG with the D&D expansion, then I quit again 3 months later when they were releasing the 2nd expansion in 3 months. It was like a new set every 60 days you had to spend hundreds of dollars on to stay competitive. It was too much too fast.
Not to mention that Alchemy shit!
The game has worked that way since they started doing new sets after Alpha and Beta, though. Four Standard sets a year, forever. The thing that’s bad now is that there are also a million supplemental products every year, which is terrible for everyone who plays formats in paper other than Standard and Pioneer, which are only ever affected by the four Standard sets a year.
The irony of D&D is that they probably did undermonetize in a lot of ways.
There have been like, 6 actual books and a smattering of specialist/setting stuff.
You have PHB, DMG, MM, Tasha’s, Xanthar’s, Volo’s and then I stopped paying attention.
Compared to every other edition there was very little. Which was good after the nightmares of 2nd and 3rd editions for a lot of people, but odd in that in a given year you likely see a single flagship book from WotC.
I remember modules back in the day; not gigantic books with back to back adventures, just little booklets. I wonder where those disappeared to for more modern D&D and whether they would have helped keep the profits up in a not-horrible way.
I agree. Individual adventure modules used to sell at a lower price point than a book, but you can issue many of them.
As far as books, I don’t want a million more but 1/yr is too slow.
I used to buy at least a module a month back during basic/ad&d days. Seeing a new one pop up was awesome! I’d wondered why they totally moved away from these.
It doesn’t help when they release tentpole sourcebooks like the new Spelljammer that are bad and create controversy in opposition to their stated inclusivity claims.
Man that sounds like a gaming model for people who looked at 40k and said “that isn’t going to burn through my disposable income fast enough, there must be something else…”
Actually the answer to that is that they weren’t money makers. So instead of wasting time and money on making a ton of them, WotC decided that they’d make this OGL thing so other people could do it for them. Worked pretty good for quite a while as I understand it…
One of their stated goals in the early days of 5e was slowing down the release schedule and focusing on quality. They managed the former. I’ll leave opinions on the latter to other folks.
But I’m sure the new management thinks that book revenue is chump change, especially with the increasing costs of printing and logistics. They will likely make a big push into digital with 6e.
That’s the stated goal. If they can move players off physical books and onto digital, they’ll gain a lot more revenue and control.
I, however, did not! There’s way more than you’re recalling.
So, yeah, of course you’ve got the 3 core – PHP + DMG + MM.
Then there’s been 6 major rules supplements (190+ pages, some close to 300) thus far – Volo’s Guide to Monsters, Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, and Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything you mention, plus Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes, Fizban’s Treasure of Dragons, and Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse. Two more are scheduled for this year – Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants and The Book of Many things. So, up to 9 released so far.
There’s also 8 major setting guides (150+ pages each, most are closer to 250+) – Sword Coast, Ravnica, Acquisitions Inc. (Penny Arcade setting), Eberron, Wildemount (Critical Role setting), Theros, Ravenloft, and Strixhaven. There’s also the forthcoming Planescape setting book. 17 major books released. . .
There’s the big campaigns (250+ pages), of course, 13 of them no less – Tyranny of Dragons (combines the older Hoard of the Dragon Queen + Rise of Tiamat), Princes of the Apocalypse, Out of the Abyss, Curse of Strahd, Storm King’s Thunder, Tomb of Annihilation, Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage, Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus, Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden, Wild Beyond the Witchlight, Critical Role: Call of the Netherdeep, and Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen. With the Phandelver continuation campaign coming this year. But still, up to 30 released.
Then you get the weirder multi-products. Tales from the Yawning Portal, Ghosts of Saltmarsh, Candlekeep Mysteries, Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel, and Keys from the Golden Vault are all 200+ page adventure collections with 7-17 smaller adventures in each. The Spelljammer: Adventures in Space combo pack (Spelljammer player guide, Astral Sea monster compendium, plus a short campaign). The three Starter Sets (original, Essentials Kit, and the new Stormwreck Isle Starter Set) that combine basic rules + a very small adventure. Not even counting the starter sets, though, you’ve got 6 released multi-products, with a Planescape one coming out. Still, 36 major books out now.
Obvs, not everyone is interested in all of these. I never run published adventure modules, so the giant 250-page super campaigns are wildly not up my alley. Someone with zero interest in making cool dragon PCs who isn’t GMing has little need for the Fizban dragon book. Etc.
But, I think it’s pretty off-base to say they haven’t released a lot of major product over the years of 5E. They don’t have the endless sprawl of 32-page adventure modules and 64-page player supplements of the olden times, but then again, 3rd party publishers have mostly filled that much-less-profitable niche. Which might be why they got so testy over the OGL stuff, but, still – WotC has put out an absolute shitload of large, expensive volumes for people to buy with their moneydollars. By the end of 2023, we should be right at 40 major product releases in the 5E ecosystem.
Ironically I own this book and can see it from where I’m sitting and… didn’t recall it even existing at all.
I don’t know about game stores, but most bookstores get to return unsold copies of books to the publisher. So if you’re a bookstore and have a few X1 I Love Dread modules that are selling well, great! If you have a bunch of lame modules that aren’t selling, especially if plenty are coming out every month, that’s choking your bookshelves. If you can return them back to the publisher, great, you cleared off some dross and can display the next batch of modules. But then they get shipped back to the publisher, who had to pay a percentage if not the whole amount of the cost of the product back to the store as a refund. Then the publisher gets to either warehouse the unsold copies (maybe they’ll be valuable someday and we can make our money back!) or burninate the product and any profits they didn’t wind up making.
It’s my understanding that this sort of this-deal-is-getting-worse-all-the-time is what led to TSR asphyxiating, though the underwritten Gygaxian quests to snort hills of powder off heaving bosoms didn’t help. (I really ought to finish reading Jon Peterson’s Game Wizards, which went into a lot of fascinating secret histories.)
So when it came into selling old-school modules, not to mention mass market paperbacks like all those Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms books you see in used book stores, Wizards decided to play conservatively. Keeping in mind that
- readers who play as PCs exclusively tend not to buy adventures. It would spoil the fun of actually playing it!
- DMs do tend to buy adventures, but not, like, all of them. Maybe the ones that sound really cool or have something they can steal for their own games, or maybe even play as is
- they don’t want to deal with a glut of returned unsold product as mentioned above
they decided to bundle adventures in relatively expensive compilations equivalent to the other rulebooks. That way they figured that a DM who wanted an “official” adventure would buy in because
- hopefully the adventures would be up to some higher standard of quality than some third party publisher. There would be good colorful art and it would feature a professional layout (important for pricing a book like a hardcover textbook!), the sentences would be grammatically sound, the monsters and other challenges and loot would be relatively balanced, and it would have been playtested at least once. Hopefully.
- odds were pretty good that even if an adventure couldn’t be reflavored to suit their table, or if the quests were pretty dumb, the DM could find something to take away from it, and there were probably other adventures in the book that would suit their table with only a little reflavoring.
- and again from Wizards’ side, the books would be bigger and more expensive, but better to have one spendy product that would sell pretty well than have one product that sold really well and six that bombed.
I do miss the small modules. I’ve picked up other adventures from other third party publishers for 5e. Some are okay at best. And I had a lot of fun digging through Half-Price Books and finding old Against The Cult Of The Reptile Goddess and Isle of Dread and The Sunless Citadel, which were pretty easy to convert to 5e. (They were cheap too, until 5e really started to take off in popularity.) But I get why Wizards didn’t embrace selling adventures a la carte. Hell, they brought Weis and Hickman and an expensive lawsuit back with new Dragonlance material, but they didn’t print it themselves like TSR used to do. They had Random House assume that risk.
I guess Kyle Brink is just doing a full apology tour with various YT folks.
Cocks did address the OGL controversy in the initial overview of the meeting, saying “ we misfired on updating our open game license.” He added some platitudes and said, “our best practice is to work collaboratively with our community, gather feedback, and build experiences that inspire players and creators alike.” Lastly, he mentioned that there had been changes, but again, no indication of how those changes affected the community: “We have since course, corrected and are delivering a strong outcome for the community in-game.”
Later on in the call, when one of the investors asked if the OGL would affect Q1 returns, Cocks mentioned that cancelled D&D Beyond subscriptions were “relatively minor” for both the profit and loss predictions for Wizards and D&D. (We’ll have to wait to see the Q1 earnings before drawing our own conclusions about whether this is true or not.) He went on to say that Wizards is “in conversation” with the folks that left, and many are “very open to restarting their subscriptions.” There was little mention of the community’s reaction to the controversy.
The call did confirm that DDB has been a great investment for the company, citing a 20% user growth—the original estimates for the DDB userbase were around 10 million when Hasbro took over, which means that there could be as many as 12 million users on DDB now.