D&D 5E Dungeon Master's Guild: The Long Term

Olaf the Stout said:

And people are still free to share the ideas for nothing if they wish to do so. Personally I'm not seeing the issue.

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Exactly.

I'm not a fan. It is a money grab that may have long term negative impacts for the RPG community. There are a lot of people out there that will refuse to look at a site that has a paywall involved, even if there are products on the site that are free. Others will only go after free stuff. That reduces the free exchange of ideas.

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Selling game content for money is how Wizards and other RPG companies make a living. No profit, far fewer RPGs.

Profit motive tends to bring a lot of stuff into existence that would otherwise never be bothered with. Improves the quality dramatically.

Sacrosanct said:

Exactly my thoughts as well. I do a lot of PWYW and free stuff, but it's for this very reason why in the future I will not be putting it on DMs Guild any longer, but at DTRPG instead and just use the SRD.

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Thanks for the heads-up. I'll know now to keep an eye on DTRPG looking for good 5E products.

Doubt Wizards knows what this will look like in one year, let alone five.

It replaces the old magazines as a venue for new material, and fives the community access to IP; God knows where it will go.

Gnarl45 said:

Internet marketing is fairly basic. You give a small product for free in exchange for the user's subscription on your newsletter. You then send an email to the people that grabbed your freebees every time you have a new product. That's what RPGNow/DriveThruRPG does. In the DM's Guild, all your products seem to be labelled DM's Guild.

I personally have a hard time figuring out how to use the DM's Guild as part of a long-term business development strategy. It might be interesting now that the DM's Guild and the Adventurer's League are married. It's going to depend on how much extra traffic this generates. And even then, the professional quality products would only be there to redirect traffic to your website (like Gauntlet of Spiragos).

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What about putting your freebies in the standard places and use them to promote your products for sale on the DMGuild? Maybe you can't expect to do business exclusively on DMGuild, but if you can use the Forgotten Realms to add value to some of your products they might sell better on the Guild than if you make them setting neutral.

Hemlock said:

Thanks for the heads-up. I'll know now to keep an eye on DTRPG looking for good 5E products.

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I should clarify. I won't be putting any free/PWYW on DMs Guild any longer unless it's something that I really want to do and isn't covered by the SRD. Putting those on DTRPG, and then using the mailing list is too strong of a marketing tool to do otherwise. That doesn't mean I won't ever use DMs Guild again. Sometimes what I want to do will only work by using it. And as spectacle mentions, I can use my DTRPG free stuff to help promote what I have on the DMs Guild. I think most publishers will do something similar.

The problem with DM's Guild that will hinder it in the long run (and possibly stagnate the creation of homebrew entirely) is their lack of consideration for the writers. They don't care for due process and hat makes it far too easily for random people to simply remove content on DM's Guild on a whim.

I had one of the top selling products on there and someone trolled me, reporting that it was plagiarized. They obviously had no evidence to support their claim because it was completely fabricated, yet the product was removed from the site just the same. DM's Guild did not bother contacting me to ask for any form of evidence in my defense, or even bother notifying me that it was removed.
Eventually I did notice that it was missing and took the initiative myself by contacting them. Once they informed me what happened, I sent them copies of all of the raw data, including early concept theorycrafting and early iterations of every version of the product I conceptualized until its eventual release. They weren't at all concerned with evidence and the product was not going to be reinstated.

The experience soured me from homebrewing entirely. I removed the rest of my content from the site as it seemed pointless to use them as a host if my work could be removed so easily without any thought put into the process at all.

As more people get trolled in the same manner, the site will most likely crumble.

Although, this feature could also be one that proves to be a great asset for the site. Currently, filtering out the crap from the good products is far more trouble than its worth, but if this feature is regularly used to remove products that people don't like, then eventually all of the crap will be cut from the system with only the best of the best remaining.

Oh dear that is bad. One would have to be stupid to invest a lot into making a polished quality product for the DMGuild if you know it can be taken down just like that.

Hopefully Wizards will revise their handling of such complaints or the guild will never be more than a collection of quickly made amateur stuff.

It wasn't so bad for me really. My first product I made purely because my gaming group wanted it. Once I was done I was fairly proud of it so I thought others might want to take a look and I uploaded it as pay what you want.
I didn't expect anything for it but it actually made me quite a bit of money (kudos to the DnD community for being so awesome).

After that I did see a little bit of green though and published a few more homebrews that I otherwise probably wouldn't have went to the effort of making, those were the only ones that really turned out to be wastes of my time.

The experience could very well be a positive one for me too (and any others that end up sharing the same experiences). It showed me that homebrewing actually has value, and if I can find somewhere more stable to upload it to, I might make a whole lot more that I wouldn't have otherwise considered.

Giant2005 said:

As more people get trolled in the same manner, the site will most likely crumble.

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More likely, the systems will improve.