Is D&D under-monetized?
Hell yes.
Listen, D&D has insane levels of brand recognition. Everyone knows what it is (or thinks they do)
and it defines its niche the way Kleenex and Coke define theirs. This should be a huge cash cow.
And nobody has figured out how to monetize it.
During the TSR years, all sorts of crazy schemes were tried,
and one of them, pushing out lots of product, was a big part of what killed
TSR. (Here’s a dirty little
not-so-secret of the RPG business: the more you publish for your RPG, the worse
it gets. Every book makes it that much
harder to get into and that much harder to run as a GM. That’s why in early 5e under Mearles & Co
they had a PHB+1 book rule and they dripped out new official material slowly. If you really needed new stuff,
there was Unearthed Arcana, but that wasn’t official, and if you were not feverishly
mainlining D&D, you probably didn’t even know it existed.)
This weekend, my wife and I played B/X D&D, using some
house rules and the same blue-and-red books I got for Christmas back in the
early ‘80s. Thanks to the OSR, there is
now so much material for that edition of the game that I doubt anyone could
possibly play all of it. I don’t have to
ever buy another D&D book ever again, and I can have untold hours of fun
playing the game.
Is D&D undermonetized?
Hell, yes, and the disconnect between playing the game and WotC cashing
in is a big reason for it.
Publishing new books is bad for an RPG, but publishing books is about the only way anyone knows to monetize an RPG. This is why WotC is casting about for some other way, any other way, to monetize D&D. If past performance is any guide, when 6e comes out, roughly half the current player base will adopt it, and the other half will stick with 5e. Because the 3e OGL exists, someone will likely create a 5e emulator and suck up all those “abandoned” players and do to 6e what Pathfinder did to 4e.
You can’t grow your income via printing new books, and you
can’t really grow it by not printing new books.
So how to monetize D&D? You
can try to sell the IP, but what is the D&D IP? It’s mostly the beholder. Sure, it’s also the mindflayer and some named
gods and Elminster, but the mindflayer looks like a sci-fi refugee, nobody
cares about gods who isn’t playing a cleric, and Elminster is Gandalf but randy
(and he’s not all that randy since Greenwood stopped writing him).
So what does that leave?
Squeezing some pennies out from licensing? Been there, done that.
The current crew running D&D has a lot of background in
Microsoft, I think? Doesn’t exactly bode
well for innovation. And now people are
paying attention to D&D, which makes real innovation even scarier. Maybe they can make the digital push work
this time?
I absolutely see them pushing the “lifestyle brand” thing. There’s no reason for them not to, and if it
takes off, they’ll be able to move a lot of merch. But I don’t see that having any effect on the
game itself; I doubt there will be a drinking-shots mechanic added to the game
in order to sell official D&D bar accessories.
That being said, I certainly did not expect the debacles leadingup to the release of 4e, so I could be completely wrong here. However, I’m not overly concerned. Turns out, my 40+ year-old B/X books still
play just fine, and signs are promising for a whole lot of new content over thecourse of ’23.
3 comments:
They should have a few good movies under their belt before talking about monetization.
My money is on the digital tools being monthly subscription based, like Netflix, rather than full of micro-transactions. There will probably be some micro-transactions as well for the VTT, but I think they're hoping to rake in the most cash from small monthly subscriptions to get the rules in digital form, plus basic access to their VTT system.
Dennis Laffey: total agreement. If they're really worried about encouraging DMs, they could offer freebies based on the amount of time you spend DMing folks (which wouldn't be that hard to judge on their VTT). However, I suspect there will be microtransactions for individualized minis (maybe via HeroForge or through their own system) and when you buy an adventure, you'll get not only the fully made maps, but also the bits those maps were made from. So if you want to run jungle adventures but are not really interested in running Tomb of Annihilation, you'll still buy the adventure to get the jungle terrain bits.
Hmmm, now that I think about it, they could really go wild with encouraging DMs. I was thinking you'd get credits to buy individualized digital bits to add to your adventures, but they could offer things like exclusive adventures, merch like patches and t-shirts, and access to chat groups that allow you to get sneak-peeks at upcoming content and a chance to influence the direction of future content.
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