The Long Term Plan: Parse out the Desirable Content Over Many Books?

 In an interview with Jeremy Crawford it was revealed that evil drow in the classic Forgotten Realms style will be statted out and represented in the upcoming Forgotten Realms books this year. I realize now that one should never attribute to malice, politics, or corporatism what can be best attributed to simple greed: and parsing out desirable content over many books is a tried and true method for WotC to motivate players to buy more books, especially someone like me who might not have been that inclined to buy in to Forgotten Realms, a setting I generally have nothing to do with. In fairness, I sometimes buy these books for fun reading and to mine for ideas, but I always run my own settings. At least one of my worlds has classic evil drow in a conventional AD&D sense, so a book with thematic content like that later this year would be a nice grab, potentially. 

Either way, its making me reconsider what they are up to with the new edition and its selective absences. Will the upcoming starter set adapting from Keep on the Borderlands include orc stat blocks as foes? I bet it will now. Will the next Eberron book lean hard into Zendrik drow? It must! So maybe WotC hasn't overlooked just how integral some of these themes are to their own IP. 

I don't know that it will derail me from enjoying some alternatives to D&D right now, and I still think they made a serious mistake not including any rules on customizing humanoid NPC statblocks by species (something that the 2014 rules absolutely provided for). For me as an older D&D fan its rough when you have played a game which made the nature of beings such as drow and orcs important enough that I have worked to add depth and meaning to each version of them in my multiple game worlds, such that its noteworthy if I choose to exclude their inclusion (such as how Realms of Chirak has no drow at all). To then have a core ruleset which provides essentially no real support for such iconic monsters/species is just...weird. But if they plan on making them a focus in the upcoming FR books, then it does suggest that the real goal here for WotC is to make as much money on book sales as they can by parsing out the content across titles, counting on the hardcore to buy it all. Alas, they know me too well.