Second Edition?

[Trenloe]

I believe if there was more product this game would sell better so its the proverbial chicken & the egg situation.

Maybe, but that's also debatable, especially when you look across all products - more products might mean more sales overall, but those sales could be split over all the products and so the revenue per developer hour is still relatively low. Anyway, that's all hypothetical. The products would have to sell a lot better than they do now to make it cost effective for SmiteWorks to do the development in-house. They did the development for the first three releases (ruleset plus two DLC products) and probably decided that the sales weren't enough for them to continue development, and/or had other developer priorities, and moved to the community developer model. SmiteWorks is a small company and they can't do everything in-house (even if the work did get a relatively good revenue return) and need to lean on community developers so that they can work on other projects.

[Voxpopuli]

I see your point thanks for sharing.

[SylvanSnake]

While it is a bit disappointing to not have more content available for certain game systems, I can definitely see issues with "return on investment" as it is. The Star Trek RPG is kind of an oddball system in the sense that the bulk of the game doesn't focus on any kind of direct combat the way D&D does. Because of this, it likely won't gain a huge following in a VTT setting, where a lot of players are more interested in the quicker payoff of being able to hit stuff with swords and clubs.

Typically, TTRPG players are divided into maybe 4 groups.
1) The GMs who buy large collections of books for their players to enjoy.
2) The dedicated players, who buy all the core books and most of the player character supplements.
3) The semi-casual players, who buy the PHB and maybe one or two other books that interest them.
4) The super-casual players, who don't buy anything. They mostly join the came for the social experience with their friends.

So, the first 3 groups will usually buy the PHB or Core book. Group 1 and 2 will buy a lot of stuff, but the way Fantasy Grounds works, the number will be lower because Players can't technically use their own purchased content in a game; only modules the GM owns can be loaded.

One suggestion to increase sales of modules would be to add the ability in the client for players to load their own purchased content (subject to GM approval).