D&D Beyond Launches on August 15th for $3-6/m

Waterbizkit · Jul 20, 2017

So with regards to people taking issue with having to purchase content they "already own" I'd like to use a bit of an analogy, yeah... hold onto your butts... because analogies are always glorious.

Do you folks game? I don't mean tabletop gaming, that's a given, I mean video games. I do, been an avid PC games for a long, long time. Now if I buy a title through my Steam account, and oh boy do I ever buy a lot on Steam, I get that title available to me on my computer. Straight forward so far. Now, say that same title is available on the Xbox One. I don't get to turn around, fire up my son's Xbone, and suddenly get to fire up the same game. I can't contact the developer and ask them for a free copy for the Xbox because "Hey, I already bought this on my PC." That's not how it works. If I want the same game on multiple platforms, I've got to buy it for each platform individually.

So, look at DDB as a different platform for the game you already bought. See? Analogies are awful.

Seriously though, I think the general premise is the same. Sort of. Can you do everything DDB does for you on your own with a pen, some paper and your books? Of course you can! It'll be time consuming, potentially tedious, but you can do it. All the information is the same. But DDB will probably do it all faster and better, but that's what you're paying for. Same way if I want to play Shadow of Mordor by turning on an Xbone instead of my beastly desktop... I'll need to pay for that convenience.

I'm not necessarily advocating the service by the way. I'm just saying I don't see a problem with the business model because I've been living with it forever with video games. As for myself and my group, I'm going to wait and see how things look after it's seen full release for a while and the dust has settled. If it looks good, sure, why not? If it doesn't tingle my giblets I can ignore it, no skin off my nose.

thom_likes_gaming · Jul 20, 2017

All in all, some will like it, some won't. Some will use it in various ways, others won't. Can't make everyone happy.
That said, I fall into the "cheaper than I thought, but still nowhere near worth the money for me". Then again, I'm not playing that much 5e these days, so...

DEFCON 1 · Jul 20, 2017

At the end of the day, it's all going to come down to whether or not a person wants what DDB can do. If they want it, they'll pay for it.

People can claim WotC is stupid or is once again "screwing up" their online offerings all they want... but we'll find out whether that's the case soon enough. My guess is that enough people will subscribe and use the service that WotC and Curse will be happy with the results. Especially considering if the length of 5Es lifespan goes on long enough over many years to allow Curse to continually upgrade the system.

The irony of this whole thing of course being that while on the one hand we have people here complaining about having to spend money on DDB... while at the same time we have people still complaining that WotC isn't releasing product fast enough and that they "want to give them my money!" I'd be curious to see the Venn diagram of those two groups.

Ristamar · Jul 20, 2017

fantasmamore said:
Everybody does. But you have to understand that it's not about the content. If you buy a DVD and then want to watch the film on your tablet you must buy / rent it again from a service like Google Play or manually convert it by using specific software. No matter what you do, you pay again for the same content - but with a different way to consume it.

The digital movie market is so different than a niche software market that any analogies or direct comparisons are probably worthless. That being said:

1) When you buy a new physical copy of the product, you often receive a free digital copy on the platform of your choice. And as someone pointed out earlier, many gaming publishers offer free PDF versions when you purchase from select vendors.

2) With Disney releases (Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, etc), Disney Movies Anywhere gives you access across multiple digital platforms. Granted, most companies don't have that kind of leverage.

bmfrosty · Jul 20, 2017

I've been playing with it a bit here and there since the character builder came out. I'm excited. I'm going to be able to leave my books at home.

I'll probably stop buying physical books with the preference towards buying them on this platform.

JRedmond · Jul 20, 2017

Who would have thought that D&D Beyond would create a bigger argument than 4E being a bad edition of D&D? Honestly I think we need to wait until August 15th, if only a small percentage actually buys the product than they would have to rethink the pricing scheme. Can't we all just get along and roll for initiative?

Guest 6801328 · Jul 20, 2017

Waterbizkit said:
So with regards to people taking issue with having to purchase content they "already own" I'd like to use a bit of an analogy, yeah... hold onto your butts... because analogies are always glorious.

Do you folks game? I don't mean tabletop gaming, that's a given, I mean video games. I do, been an avid PC games for a long, long time. Now if I buy a title through my Steam account, and oh boy do I ever buy a lot on Steam, I get that title available to me on my computer. Straight forward so far. Now, say that same title is available on the Xbox One. I don't get to turn around, fire up my son's Xbone, and suddenly get to fire up the same game. I can't contact the developer and ask them for a free copy for the Xbox because "Hey, I already bought this on my PC." That's not how it works. If I want the same game on multiple platforms, I've got to buy it for each platform individually.

So, look at DDB as a different platform for the game you already bought. See? Analogies are awful. Seriously though, I think the general premise is the same. Sort of. Can you do everything DDB does for you on your own with a pen, some paper and your books? Of course you can! It'll be time consuming, potentially tedious, but you can do it. All the information is the same. But DDB will probably do it all faster and better, but that's what you're paying for. Same way if I want to play Shadow of Mordor by turning on an Xbone instead of my beastly desktop... I'll need to pay for that convenience.

I'm not necessarily advocating the service by the way. I'm just saying I don't see a problem with the business model because I've been living with it forever with video games. As for myself and my group, I'm going to wait and see how things look after it's seen full release for a while and the dust has settled. If it looks good, sure, why not? If it doesn't tingle my giblets I can ignore it, no skin off my nose.

I would say your analogy is more applicable to buying content on roll20: you pay once for the book to play at the table, and once for the roll20 content to play online. (Which I have to admit I'm not a fan of...)

Since I would be using D&D Beyond to enhance a tabletop game (or possibly a roll20 game) it's not really "playing the game in a different context." So it would be like buying a strategy guide to a video game and being forced to buy the entire game a 2nd time.

Oh, yeah, and....if you spend money on Blizzard games (WoW, Hearthstone, etc.) you can run them on any platform. They don't charge you multiple times.

(I will say that what irks me about WoW is that you have to pay for expansions. Or even that you have to pay for the initial game. If you're forking over $15 a month that should cover everything.)

darjr · Jul 20, 2017

Remathilis said:
So, how exactly do you propose WotC verify you own a PHB? Take a selfie and mail it in? Honor system? Send them your PHB with a sase and they'll mail it back to you with a code? I'm genuinely curious, since you have extensive education, how you plan on proving I actually bought the PHB?

WotC learned in 4e that having all-access to all books in the DB for a monthly fee meant a lot of people didn't buy supplement books, they waited for the stuff made it into the DDi. Further, a one time fee to get what it's currently available and have WotC and Curse break even would be in the hundreds of dollars range.

So I'll wait to see what system you come up with that isn't rife with fraud that gets me my free access to the PHB.

? They verify folks as owners of books all the time. It's how they decide to replace a book that's falling apart. Usually it's just a photo.

kenmarable · Jul 20, 2017

MechaPilot said:
People don't have a problem with paying to use a digital product (the product was made, and there are costs to be covered, we all understand that); they have a problem with having to purchase digital access to content they already bought in a physical media. That's a fairly straightforward concept.

But it is NOT just purchasing digital access to the same content.

Your book is a bunch of prose text. D&D Beyond takes that text and turns it into DATA.

It is parsing the information IN the text into something much more useful. It is not seeing a class chart on my computer screen rather than in a book. It is turning every single one of those class abilities into something a computer can understand so that I can create characters, and monster stat blocks into encounters, and so on. Turning prose text into data is a massive effort and so much more than just a digital copy. (Just consider entering all 400+ stat blocks from the Monster Manual into DDB compared to paying someone $20 to do it all for you, and it is suddenly looking like a great deal!)

If you don't want the parsed data and just want prose text, that's a very different issue than saying you shouldn't have to pay for the parsed data because you already own a copy of the prose text.

I see a lot of analogies being thrown around, and each one of course misses something. But in it's own weird way, the best I can think of at the moment to get my point across is that it's like buying a raw steak at the grocery store and then wondering why you have to pay a world class chef to prepare it. It's the same content, right?

If you want to cook it yourself, go right ahead. If you can't afford to eat at a fancy restaurant and pay the chef, that's unfortunate, but not unfair. But thinking that having to pay the chef for the steak is "borderline offensive" (to quote someone earlier in this thread) is simply absurd.

THAT is the "fairly straightforward concept" many people are missing.

Demetrios1453 · Jul 20, 2017

bmfrosty said:
I've been playing with it a bit here and there since the character builder came out. I'm excited. I'm going to be able to leave my books at home.

I'll probably stop buying physical books with the preference towards buying them on this platform.

I was just on there last night playing around with the monster builder, and even in its unfinished state, I like it already. I can easily recreate my Giant Elites posted elsewhere on this forum as it allows you to start with the base monster and just edit in your changes, which is a big time saver. And when they actually get the ability to just adjust monster CRs on the fly as they are saying they plan on adding, it will be even better!

Sent from my VS987 using EN World mobile app

D&D Beyond Launches on August 15th for $3-6/m

Waterbizkit

Explorer

thom_likes_gaming

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DEFCON 1

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Ristamar

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bmfrosty

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JRedmond

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Guest 6801328

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darjr

I crit!

kenmarable

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Demetrios1453

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