Shardstone
Hero
Honestly, I would have no problem with micro content from WotC. Individual classes and subclasses, spells, magic items, monster packs -- these things are the easiest way to monetize the game. I think keeping everything to hardback books is a death sentence for D&D, not because they'll stop selling, but because it just won't bring in the numbers investors want to see. Likewise, most people who buy the books are DMs. If they want to monetize players, they have to sell player content, or sell content to DMs that they think the players under those DMs want.
However, a lot of DMs don't really like adding in new content to their games. On this forum alone are there countless DMs who really don't want to use new materials outside the PHB, or outside of a PHB + 1 context. THis is because the 3E era seems to have forever scarred an entire generation of players and those scars have been inherited by the next generation of players. Now people are afraid of homebrew and third party because it isn't official, or because they think the game is fragile and easy to break.
It won't be until the playerbase of D&D takes on the same attitudes as the playerbase of the OSR, NuSR, and other hack-friendly games that WotC will be able to really monetize D&D to its fullest. And they do a really, really bad job of trying to change the current culture to a culture that would be more profitable.
However, a lot of DMs don't really like adding in new content to their games. On this forum alone are there countless DMs who really don't want to use new materials outside the PHB, or outside of a PHB + 1 context. THis is because the 3E era seems to have forever scarred an entire generation of players and those scars have been inherited by the next generation of players. Now people are afraid of homebrew and third party because it isn't official, or because they think the game is fragile and easy to break.
It won't be until the playerbase of D&D takes on the same attitudes as the playerbase of the OSR, NuSR, and other hack-friendly games that WotC will be able to really monetize D&D to its fullest. And they do a really, really bad job of trying to change the current culture to a culture that would be more profitable.