WotC Hasbro Bets Big on D&D

During today's 'Hasbro Fireside Chat', Hasbro's Chris Cocks, chief executive officer, and Cynthia Williams, president of Wizards of the Coast and Digital Gaming mentioned D&D, and about betting big on its name. This was in addition to the Magic: The Gathering discussion they held on the same call.

The following are rough notes on what they said.

D&D Beyond

• Leaning heavily on D&D Beyond
• 13 million registered users
• Give them more ways to express their fandom
• Hired 350 people last year
• Low attrition

What’s next for D&D

• Never been more popular
• Brand under-monetized
• Excited about D&D Beyond possibilities
• Empower accessibility and development of the user base.
• Data driven insight
• Window into how players are playing
• Companion app on their phone
• Start future monetization starting with D&D Beyond
• DMs are 20% of the audience but lions share of purchases
• Digital game recurrent spending for post sale revenue.
• Speed of digital can expand, yearly book model to include current digital style models.
• Reach highly engaged multigenerational fans.
• Dungeons and Dragons has recognition, 10 out of 10
• Cultural phenomenon right now.
• DND strategy is a broad four quadrant strategy
• Like Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings or Marvel
• New books and accessories, licensed game stuff, and D&D Beyond
• Huge hopes for D&D

What is success for the D&D Movie

• First big light up oppourtunity for 4th quadrant
• Significant marketing
• They think it’ll have significant box office
• It has second most viewed trailer at Paramount, only eclipsed by Transformers
• Will be licensed video games, some on movies
• Then follow up other media, TV, other movies, etc.
• Bullish on D&D.

 

[Umbran]

Indeed, it will require devotion of time, money, and bug-testing to create this middleware that they don't need at all to create or sell their service. Even if they wanted to do it, that tells you it will be the LAST THING they will work on.

They will need it to sell their service.

Aside from how many folks will choose to not buy in if they can't do their own thing, the library of models needed to support this will be massive. I daresay the middleware will likely be cheaper than the content creation effort to stock the library required to satisfy users.

 

[Frozen_Heart]

Never seen anyone use the cursed method I use for a 'virtual tabletop'...

• Copy and past a battlemap into diagrams.net.
• Tweak it until the map grid matches the size of the website grid.
• Add coloured and labelled shapes to depict the party and and other NPCs/Bad guys.
• Cover the map in black squares, which are removed according to PC line of sight.

 

[darjr]

Never seen anyone use the cursed method I use for a 'virtual tabletop'...

• Copy and past a battlemap into diagrams.net.
• Tweak it until the map grid matches the size of the website grid.
• Add coloured and labelled shapes to depict the party and and other NPCs/Bad guys.
• Cover the map in black squares, which are removed according to PC line of sight.

I just used google draw and sized tokens appropriately and just fudged the distances if there were no lines on the “map”.

Easy peasy really.

What’s more is I took running notes in my google doc that the drawing was embedded in. The players only saw the drawing.

It was nice, it was like my dm notes but the players updated it too.

And I’d snap copies of the map in progress right in the doc.

 

[tetrasodium]

Never seen anyone use the cursed method I use for a 'virtual tabletop'...

• Copy and past a battlemap into diagrams.net.
• Tweak it until the map grid matches the size of the website grid.
• Add coloured and labelled shapes to depict the party and and other NPCs/Bad guys.
• Cover the map in black squares, which are removed according to PC line of sight.

That does sound cursed... maybe cast remove curse?

 

[GDGD]

Never seen anyone use the cursed method I use for a 'virtual tabletop'...

• Copy and past a battlemap into diagrams.net.
• Tweak it until the map grid matches the size of the website grid.
• Add coloured and labelled shapes to depict the party and and other NPCs/Bad guys.
• Cover the map in black squares, which are removed according to PC line of sight.

Please tell us your players appreciate your work ethic.

 

[mamba]

Unreal 5 is a game engine - it is not a 3d file format. Those are two different things.

I am aware, are you trying to tell me that engine does not support any 3d formats out of the box? And that most 3d modeling software out there cannot produce a format supported by UE?

This is not pure speculation. I ran the main mod team for Neverwinter Nights 1 (DLA) and my team ultimately made the assets for BioWare's DLC for that game. We made the final expansion for that game (Wyvern Crown of Cormyr) under license from Atari and WotC. By that time, we had incorporated as roXidy Games Inc. and went on to work for CD Projekt on the Witcher Games.

How does that relate to what features WotC's VTT will offer? Unless you are involved in the project that still is speculation.

So no, this is not the rampant speculation of a unknowledgeable fan.

yes, instead it is rampant speculation from a former game developer

Be dismissive about this if you like; however, my post, unlike your response, is based on knowledge and experience in doing exactly what is being discussed here.

Call it an educated guess if you will, but the emphasis here is still on guess

 

[dragoner]

Never seen anyone use the cursed method I use for a 'virtual tabletop'...

• Copy and past a battlemap into diagrams.net.
• Tweak it until the map grid matches the size of the website grid.
• Add coloured and labelled shapes to depict the party and and other NPCs/Bad guys.
• Cover the map in black squares, which are removed according to PC line of sight.

I did similar to this in play by post, only using photoshop and layers.

 

[tetrasodium]

I am aware, are you trying to tell me that engine does not support any 3d formats out of the box?

How does that relate to what features WotC's VTT will offer? Unless you are involved in the project that still is speculation.

yes, instead it is rampant speculation from a former game developer

Call it an educated guess if you will, but the emphasis here is still on guess

Yes it does and no it does not. There are lots of 3d file formats with some closed & some some open. You can't just drop anything in using the same code. Even if you can drop something in that doesn't mean that you get a useful result. Imagine a player showing up with a mini that looks like it's pulled from a game of katamari damaci consisting of a halfling wearing wall for armor wielding a beholder in one hand a mountain in the offhand topped with an entire geographic surveymap for a helmet & so on slotted into the various equipment slots. That's a best case, worst case it could be like trying to import a PSD pdf or even multipetabyte FITS file into a 3d VTT as an image token or something & expecting desirable results rather than a crash or an error.

The way around that is to define a particular standard like "the 3d model needs to be in this format with these constraints. The texture(s) need to meet these constraints, there needs to be an xml file named suchandsuch & it needs to define these things for the object/mini using this format" All of that might get wrapped up in a container of some form that may or may not include compression (ie zip tar gzip rar etc) then be given a new file extension with possible digital signing.

 

[mamba]

Yes it does and no it does not. There are lots of 3d file formats with some closed & some some open. You can't just drop anything in using the same code.

I never claimed you can. I am saying the format used by UE is widely supported in 3d modeling software, so unless WotC specifically does not allow an upload of custom assets, those custom assets could be created in existing modeling tools and imported into the VTT without much of a problem

Even if you can drop something in that doesn't mean that you get a useful result. Imagine a player showing up with a mini that looks like it's pulled from a game of katamari damaci consisting of a halfling wearing wall for armor wielding a beholder in one hand a mountain in the offhand topped with an entire geographic surveymap for a helmet & so on slotted into the various equipment slots. That's a best case, worst case it could be like trying to import a PSD pdf or even multipetabyte FITS file into a 3d VTT as an image token or something & expecting desirable results rather than a crash or an error.

There is never a guarantee that everything will work and make sense, again, no one claimed that.

I don't see why third party models that are properly rigged etc. cannot possibly work however. Same for adding custom textures, which is even easier to support

The way around that is to define a particular standard like "the 3d model needs to be in this format with these constraints. The texture(s) need to meet these constraints, there needs to be an xml file named suchandsuch & it needs to define these things for the object/mini using this format" All of that might get wrapped up in a container of some form that may or may not include compression (ie zip tar gzip rar etc) then be given a new file extension with possible digital signing.

no disagreement there, of course whatever you try to import needs to follow the constraints. I am not sure there needs to be much more than what UE already supports however, plus some guidelines, like what bones must be present for the animations / what animations you need to provide for character models, what should be present to attach FX to in the char model (e.g. when casting), etc.

If WotC wants to go further and specify an xml for their VTT to parse / understand your model better (e.g. what animation to use when via xml rather than via a naming convention) that is fine too.

Overall this is not that different from how you add custom meshes, animations, textures and fx to mods.

 

[Malmuria]

I wonder why no one seems to complain that your D&D Beyond stuff is entirely unusable on Fantasy Grounds or Roll 20? In either of those VTT's you must buy the books IN those VTT's in order to use them. I'm pretty sure that that patreon mentioned earlier that supplies access to DDB in another program is very likely illegal and will be coming to a very abrupt halt in the fairly near future.

I mean, if it was as simple as just linking the VTT to DDB, why don't ANY VTT's do this?

This itself is kind of crazy to me. So if you buy all those books on fantasy grounds you're sort of stuck on that platform? And what if wotc says they only want to sell through dnd beyond?