Third, if you really want examples of WOTC's tract record, the entire digital line of WOTC since 4 edition was lackluster at best.
Mistwell has been hanging around ENWorld since 2002. I guarantee he knows this stuff as well as you.
The failed attempt at creating the project that was supposed to be known as Dungeonscape (codnamed Project Morningstar:
Wizards of the Coast fumbles the digital ball. Again.) was a complete and utter disaster; since you seem to be unable to infer the basic implications of how businesses work together and coordinate projects, I shall illuminate it: while the project was outsourced to Trapdoor studios, WOTC were the ones who okay'd the project, paid for it, gave them extra time (multiple years) despite no signs of progress AND chose a studio with ZERO history at developing software in the first place. It cost Hasbro a lot of money with nothing to show for it.
Funny thing... right after that Trapdoor went and partnered with Paizo.
This really implies the guys at Trapdoor
really know how to make a pitch and sell people. Conmen who over-promise and sound really good but fail to deliver.
Yeah, it's annoying that WotC partnered with an unknown. But this would have been 2013 when gaming was dying and D&D was on life support. No established and well known gaming company would touch them. They had to go for start-ups and hope the ambition and drive of the people they work with pays off. It's a gamble. Sometimes, like Dungeonscape, it doesn't. In other cases (DnD Beyond, Beadle & Grimm) it very much does.
Before THAT was a failed social media project called Gleemax where Wizards was trying for nearly 18 months to create a one-stop MTG related site that also failed due to more management of the project and lack of clear goals or guidelines. It also did not help that it after launch did not gain much traction with the fans due to not living up to the expectations Wizards promised. (
Gleemax, and
Wizards of the Coast Declares Gleemax Site a Critical Failure - Slashdot).
Yeah, which is why they partnered with other companies, like Trapdoor, rather than trying to make it in-house. You know, that company you lambasted them for working with a couple paragraphs ago.
Because, unsurprisingly, a company staffed entirely by people who know how to make, design, and publish card, board, and roleplaying games isn't that good at coding a digital product.
You can't always hire a bunch of coders, throw money at a department, and make a good digital product.
Are you seeing the pattern here? WOTC has a history of announcing or mismanaging numerous products, or at best a record of poor decision making on whom to outsource their products to.
Yes.
And?
Are you implying this means DnD Beyond is automatically bad? Patterns like the above can be broken. There's no associated link. (Correlation doesn't equal something something...)
Okay, this would be a reason to be worried about the health and final product of DnDbeyond... when it launched in March 2017. And there were concerns then...
But it's been three years and is mostly feature complete, and they're continuing to improve and all even more functionality and features. At this point DnD Beyond is a pretty amazing tool.
And this isn't even touching on their history of actively engaging in numerous cease and desist orders towards quite a few different websites over the past few decades. Are they legally entitled to do so? Yes. Is it good PR to be so zealousness about it? Unclear. Contrast that with other companies like Paizo or Chaosium whom not only provide fully fleshed out digital options (i.e. pdfs) with the latter half literally giving their full ruleset away FOR FREE, but whom also encourage their content being handled digitally.
Jesus wept. Is it 2008 again?
I can't recall the last time I head the "WotC is bad because it C&Ds people."
Guess what: Paizo sends out C&Ds as well. They send out DMCA takedown requests. They email and tell the owners of websites to pull content being hosted illegally. Paizo is also VERY aggressive at perusing and preventing illegal sharing of PDFs imbedding tracking javascripts and all kinds of code and hidden watermarks into their PDFs which can potentially compromise your system and provide a back door into your computer. Where's your outrage in that?
Getting to your other point, does Paizo sell PDFs? Yes. But you still had to pay for them.
And when you looked at the digital character manager (HeroLabs) you had to pay again, at a much, much higher price than the PDFs.
And you had to buy the entire content of a book even if you wanted a single class or feat. And there was no ability to share content with other people. Even installing HeroLabs on a second computer wasn't possible. Unlike DnDBeyond where the DM can buy individual spells and share content with their players.
Look, if you hate corporations and corporate products than you're hanging around the WRONG subforum. This one is dedicated solely to the corporate created and published RPG Dungeons & Dragons, which has been wholly owned by Hasbro—the world's biggest toy company—for twenty years.
I'm sure you'll be happier hanging around one of ENWorld's other fine forums that discuss smaller RPGs made by non-corporate bodies. There's many, many excellent games by smaller publishers that you can talk about.
