I seem to be one of the few who doesn't view D&D Beyond expanding out to other publishers as necessarily a good thing for the hobby. Instead, it adds further power to a single company and a single tool that already dominates 5e play online (Roll20 being the only strong competitor).
In particular WOTC has several big advantages over third party publishers publishing on D&D Beyond.
- WOTC would have a much more favorable revenue split than third party publishers on D&D Beyond since WOTC doesn't have to pay a % fee to publish on the platform.
- WOTC is able to advertise on D&D Beyond for free and choose the ranking of any advertisements including their own in relation to third party advertisements.
- WOTC would have access to all sales metrics and customer data for all products on the site – both theirs and third party products. Other publishers on the same platform have no such metrics.
- WOTC products are already much more popular than third party products.
For me, if WOTC wants to build themselves back up as good stewards of D&D and good partners in the 5e RPG hobby, here's what I'd like to see them do with regards to opening D&D Beyond to other publishers:
- Products published on the store must not require an exclusive license. Publishers should be able to publish these products on other platforms as well.
- Publishers should receive an industry competitive revenue split.
- The storefront must have an open and transparent process for choosing which products can be published there and which products can not. WOTC should offer clear standards and guidelines for publication.
- The store should have no “DM Guild Adept”-like inner ring of publishers. Such systems can become corrupt and unfair – putting more importance on “who you know” than the quality of your work.
- WOTC should continue to publish D&D products on other storefronts such as DriveThruRPG, Roll20, and Fantasy Grounds. WOTC should begin selling D&D products on additional platforms such as Foundry, Shard Tabletop, and Demiplane.
- The storefront should let third party publishers email customers with offers on other products, sales, and promotions when customers opt-in to such marketing.
- The D&D Beyond storefront should let publishers include outbound links to their own homepages on storefront pages and emails.
- Publishers should be able to use crowdfunding (like Kickstarter) for products intended to be published and fulfilled on the D&D Beyond storefront.
- Publishers should have options for regional pricing to sell products at reasonable prices in countries with a significant income disparity from North American and European countries.
- The D&D Beyond storefront should offer some way for customers to download their digital products – ideally PDFs – of both third party and WOTC-published products.
- Players and DMs should be able to filter options in the D&D Beyond character builder so they can select which sources can be used in the character builder for a campaign. For example, a DM should be able to limit characters to only using options from the Player’s Handbook and Xanathar’s Guide but not other sources, even if players own other books online. The existing filter on sources doesn’t limit what options a player can choose when building a character from the sources they’ve purchased.
- D&D Beyond should offer an authenticated application program interface (API) so DMs and players can use material they purchased on D&D Beyond in external tools or services. The Avrae Discord bot is an existing example of such a third-party integration.
Time will tell, but I think the idea that D&D Beyond opens its doors to other publishers isn't universally a good step forward for the strength of this hobby overall. Instead, the strength of this hobby comes from fair competition and numerous companies providing several different solutions for us to play and enjoy 5e material from many different publishers.
www.dndbeyond.com
