Re: WOTC pulls plug on Dragon & Dungeon mag

--- David Shepheard <david_shepheard@???????.com>
wrote:
> 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).

International currency is a HUGE project.  Its not
simply just taking money in Yen or Euros, its having
to write an inteface that updates constantly (because
currencies fluxuate constantly).  If they're lucky,
and I doubt it, Hasbro has done the work for them and
they can just piggyback on that.


> 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.

<shrug> Other than a character generator, the only
other things I can come up with would be a "virtual
gametable" (chat/video with dice roller?), maybe
access to various PDFs (which will have to be more
than the 10-page promos they put out now), and
maps/art galleries.


> 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.

On-commission sales like that are actually more a pain
than simply paying on a per-word basis, both in coding
& man-hours.  How it would be done would depend
entirely, however, how it looks on the books.


Adam

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