The recent announcements by Wizards of the Coast have shed some light on what will be coming in 2011. It gives us a strong indication as to what Wizards new strategy will be for D&D, as well as giving us a clue of how well supplemental books have been selling.

My analysis of the new way of selling D&D involves a lot of guesswork. Perhaps informed guesswork, but you should still take it with a large pinch of salt. I’m looking forward to further clarification from the upcoming D&D Experience convention.

I’ve written in the past about “tiers” of potential books. The underlying tier is those books everyone needs: the core books for playing the game. In the past, you’d say the Player’s Handbook and (to a slightly lesser extent) the DMG and Monster Manual. These days, you can also add three or four Essentials products to the list.

These books are the evergreen products of the D&D range. They support the sales of the other “tiers” of books. The power books would be on the second tier, being quite popular with players, and likely supplemental Monster Manuals as well. After that, products become more and more specialised in appeal. Campaign settings and Adventures. Even more specialised, adventures for campaigns settings. And books devoted to a single race. (Very specialised).

I believe that the overall sales of D&D are down, affecting all the tiers of products. A book like the Dragonborn book was never successful enough to succeed. However, books that once made enough of a profit are now selling much less, putting them in the “very risky” basket. 

Why is this? Well, just apart from declining numbers of players playing 4E (not actually known, just suspected), a lot of players have wandered onto D&D Insider. There are a lot of players out there who are only interested in the mechanical side of what Wizards produce for D&D. These players aren’t just power gamers: they also include roleplayers and storytellers who are themselves or with their DM are creating the world they play in: D&D’s default world is meaningless to them. With this significant portion of the player base only interested in the mechanical elements, it’s no surprise that D&D Insider is more attractive than a physical book, especially once you add the fact that it’s a lot easier to find the power you want in it rather than flipping through several books… and magazines.

So, you have D&D book sales – especially with the supplements – declining. What do you do then? Wizards isn’t yet ready to call it a day with D&D, so they do something different.

Innovation: A Sidebar

There seems to be a belief amongst some people that innovation is only actually innovation when it’s something they like…

In a perfect world, Wizards would have all the sales they like of their printed books, and they could keep producing them. This is a far cry from what is actually occurring, however. Is there a way that they can still produce D&D supplemental material and sell it for a profit? Certainly there is, and it looks like we’ll see it this year. 2011: the year of D&D, the Digital Experience.

Printed books have quite a number of cost factors associated with them. They embody risk at a number of steps. They have to be printed, bought by distributors, shipped to distributors, sold to retailers, shipped to retailers, stored and displayed by retailers and – hopefully – at the end of all of that, sold to us, the customers.

Digital material doesn’t have all those steps. It does have a somewhat smaller market, but you’re not left with a bunch of unsold books at one step of the process (making the person holding the unsold material unhappy… and, if there’s too much of it, possibly going out of business).

In previous years, Wizards could have happily produced material in both digital and printed forms and made a profit from both. Unhappily, the profits from printed material have dropped, making it infeasible for most books. So, in 2011, they’re moving material that would have once been printed into a digital form. It’s the end of one way of producing the material, but it doesn’t mean the content is going away altogether.

It’s not much of a consolation to those of us who prefer the weight of a printed book, but it doesn’t mean that D&D is dead; it’s just changing its selling pattern.

Will all of it be covered by a D&D Insider subscription? This is unknown as yet. Issues such as DRM, purchase plans and individual e-books will raise their head in the coming months. The D&D Experience convention should be most enlightening on that front.

Despite the shifting of many of their products to a digital form, D&D isn’t going completely digital. Actually having books for sale in stores is essential for the game being able to pick up new players. Thus, D&D Essentials.

The acquisition products, products that you need to actually play the game, aren’t going to disappear in a hurry. (If they do, then D&D – and the roleplaying hobby as a whole – is in incredible trouble). Potential new players are going to be able to wander into a store and find the basic set and the core rules waiting for them there. There are ten Essential products – let’s see how they sell in the year ahead.

The question that still needs to be answered is how many other products see printed form. From what I can see, Wizards aren’t abandoning printed supplemental material altogether – at least not until they see the sales figures of the newest batch – but they’ll mostly confine it to products that (a) can’t be done any other way or (b) that will make an acceptable profit.

Thus, Heroes of Shadow will be produced. A new monster boxed set with tokens? Quite likely. Beyond that, the future is misty. I’ll let you know in a fortnight after Wizards tell us their plans.

I’ve written slightly more about this elsewhere, but D&D Minis have had a very good run of over seven years. At this point, the market is saturated with a lot of very cheap minis for play in D&D thanks to the secondary market. In the past, you bought the boosters to use the commons and hoped that the rare would be good. Now you have enough of the commons (or can get them very cheaply), and the rares aren’t enough of a draw.

Add to that the much, much greater cost of producing and shipping the miniatures, and its no surprise they’re disappearing. Forever? I wouldn’t want to make that call. For at least a couple of years, certainly. They were great whilst they lasted… and I still have two or three thousand of the things to us in my games.

If there’s one element that I bet Wizards wished they still had control over it is this: the right to make D&D Computer Games. The lack of such recently is a great flaw in their acquisition strategy. I’ve played with several players that were introduced to D&D through Baldur’s Gate… oh, for another breakout D&D computer game like that one!

However, there is another way to introduce people to the concepts of D&D: Boardgames. And Wizards managed to produce a very good game that did just that: Castle Ravenloft. Yes, it’s not perfect, but it is a very, very good introduction to the play of D&D. It’s been good enough to sell out its initial production run; let’s see how its follow-up, the Wrath of Ashardalon game goes. (It will be previewed in a couple of days, if it doesn’t get pushed back).

So, D&D boardgames and D&D Essentials – they way forward for new player acquisition.

D&D is changing to meet the needs of the current age. Whether these changes will be sufficient is not yet known, but at least something is being attempted, rather than letting the game (and the RPG hobby) slide into the abyss. 

There is no doubt that these changes are distressing to those of us who are attached to the old model of publishing actual books, but I doubt this decision was taken lightly.

The trouble that faces Wizards going forward is not just selling the idea to us that digital content is in fact real content, but in improving the quality and reliability of that content. Nowhere is this more exemplified by their tremendously flawed release of the new online character builder. I fully appreciate why they had to change the model for the character builder, but the initial rollout contained so many flaws, it soured their relationship with the customers they most need to embrace their new digital strategy.

D&D can survive and flourish in this new digital age, but it is by no means assured. Let us see what this new year of 2011 will bring.