Re: WOTC pulls plug on Dragon & Dungeon mag

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Adam Miller" <night_druid3000@?????.com>
Sent: Friday, April 20, 2007 2:40 PM
Subject: Re: [SPELLJAMMER] WOTC pulls plug on Dragon & Dungeon mag


> --- Loki <george.williams.iv@?????.com> wrote:
>
>> I've gotten Dragon since issue 40, I will miss it
>> terribly. As an outspoken proponenet of technology I
>> beleve that this comes from a combination f short
>> sightedness and a lack of understanding of the
>> medium.
>
> I work for a company with a very similar business
> model, so I consider myself fairly to very experienced
> in what WotC is trying do.  I have to say, I don't
> think its going to work.  D&D as a pay site appeals to
> a very niche subset of a very niche market; they'll be
> lucky to break even with their operating costs.  That
> assumes they'll be able to piggyback on Hasbro's
> servers & support personelle.  Even then, I
> guesstimate a good $500k to $1 million annual
> operating expenses, easy.

I think that WotC also don't appreciate the needs of their non-American 
customers. They often shut down their forums at times when Americans are 
asleep, but British people are awake. I'm sure that if they have a 
subscription D&D website, they will have exactly the same sort of 
maintenance policy and shut the servers down at times that are most 
convenient for Americans. So there will be a country somewhere (I don't know 
exactly where) that is unlucky enough to be in the wrong timezone. People in 
that country will probably have to stay up late or download things during 
work hours.

The beauty with Dragon and Dungeon magazines, is that they sold by 
distributors that are based in the country where the readers live. You don't 
have to get up at 2am to read Dragon or Dungeon. And if you buy the magazine 
outside the USA you can pay for it in your own currency.

WotC are either going to have to go to a lot of effort to allow people to 
pay in any currency or they are going to force everyone to pay in US 
dollars. So they are either going to have to spend a lot of effort getting 
the international aspect working or they will put off a lot of non-American 
customers who have been happily feeding money into WotC for years (via 
Dragon and Dungeon licence fees).

To be honest, I can't see the appeal of an online D&D pay-site. I can't 
imagine any sort of service that would make me want to subscribe. I'm either 
going to have to print everything out (in which case I wouldn't be prepared 
to pay much) or they are going to have to provide a print on demand (PoD) 
service.

I don't think that you can run a magazine (like Dragon or Dungeon) with this 
sort of model, but I think that WotC could have done other things that 
*would* make cash. There are a lot of 0e, 1e and 2e adventures, campaign 
settings and supplements out there and they do continue to sell via Paizo's 
website. WotC could get a team of writers to convert the most popular TSR 
products to 3e and integrate the conversion (crunch) and the original 
material (fluff) into a single PDF. These conversions could be sold as a 
pay-per-download service. On top of that the writers doing conversions could 
be paid on a commission basis, so there would be no cost to WotC apart from 
the general running costs.

(In fact if I was in charge of WotC, I think I'd get Paizo to sell converted 
PDFs, a PoD publisher to sell hardcopy versions, get all the writers to 
agree to be paid on commission and set up all the financial deals so that 
WotC got its percentage of the cash without paying any of the operating 
costs.)

The same sort of idea could be used for new material. If designers got paid 
on a percentage basis, there would also be no need to run competitions like 
the one where Ebberon was chosen as a new campaign setting. Authors who 
believed in their own products, would fund the R&D costs themselves - the 
most successful authors would make a lot of profit and the least successful 
authors would have to wait a long time to recover their production costs.

David "Big Mac" Shepheard
Virtual Eclipse Role Playing Club
http://uk.groups.yahoo.com/group/virtualeclipselrp/links/d20_system_001071937434/Spelljammer_001071430476
http://www32.brinkster.com/virtualeclipse/