D&D 5E Why is WOTC so awful at providing digital content?

[Dire Bare]

3.) WotC has had a history of partnering up with some bad designers. 3e's E-Tools was salvaged from the smoldering mess its original designer left it in, 4e's the less said the better, and 5e's debacle with Trapdoor shows again WotC has had no luck in picking digital dance partners.

WotC certainly has not had a good track record of choosing successful digital partners. But 4E "less said the better"? We got a very good, very useable 4E digital tool package that you can still subscribe to, if you are still playing the game.

4.) They promise too much. E-Tools/Mastertools promised us online virtual tabletop, including sound effects and animated monster tokens when all people wanted was a char-gen and monster builder. 4e's VTT and character visualizer again emphasized bells and whistles over a functional toolset, and Dungeonscape was spinning its wheels on multi-platform support and e-commerce content sales rather than fixing the damn "not-really-beta-beta" character generator.

All people want is a simple chargen and monster builder, huh? You got some market research to back that assertion up? I certainly don't speak for all "people", but I totally WANTED what WotC was trying to originally deliver with the 3E tools. And they were close to delivering it when it finally fell through, sadly.

5.) Contrary to popular belief, D&D is not an easy thing to code. Sure, it looks simple on paper, but having a character generator that can effectively allow anything (in terms of either future content or worse, user-created content) yet remain stable, auto calculating, and functional is a tall order. 2e's Core Rule's 2.0 + Expansion is perhaps the best D&D software ever made, and even with the expansion allowing custom classes, lots of workarounds, limitations, and "note this on your sheet" stuff.

Totally agree here!

6.) We forget this is not limited to D&D; Magic the Gathering has a long, horrid history of electronic issues as well.

It does? I certainly remember some less than stellar Magic games, but both the current Magic Online and the Duels of the Planeswalker series of games seem to be doing very well.

I would hazard to say that ANY licensed property has a mixed record of good digital offerings.

7.) In short, WotC has been been lettting perfect be the enemy of the good. Even when things have gone good, they've had more setbacks and roadblocks than any company should rightly deserve.

Nah.

 

[Blackbrrd]

WOTC is not equipped with someone with the knowhow to hire a firm to properly produce a digital product?

No they aren't. Just look at what happened to their first attempt at this for 5e. It got cancelled.

 

[Umbran]

There are?

The reviews of WotC I've seen don't differentiate between the sides of the house. However, I have seen things like: "Wages are some of the worst in the industry. ... The individual hired often works for 35-40% below the Seattle market..." Mind you, these are alongside reviews that find the place stellar, so one is left wondering.

Overall, WotC has a rating of 2.4 out of 5 on Glassdoor.com, which is not very impressive at all. The biggest areas of issue seem to be Senior Management and advancement opportunities. And, since October 2013 it has been on a downward trend (it was at a more respectable 3.4 at that time). 28% of reviewers there would recommend the place to others. But, oddly, just about half of folks approve of the CEO.

 

[transtemporal]

I'm ok with WOTC just coming out and saying that they don't have the resources to do a good set of digital tools. While doing that though, they should let fans who want to make & share their own do so. It's the whole "we aren't doing it and no one else can either" that is so lame. I wish D&D was owned by a company that didn't have a legal department 10 times the size of the game development team.

I can understand Hasbro wanting to protect their IP and possible revenue streams, I wish they were organised enough that they understood their overall proposition better and cater their offering to that, rather than dragging their feet on a particular part (software) and then stomping around serving C&Ds. And by all accounts, their C&Ds were quite civil as far as C&Ds go, but still, they're serving them because they haven't got their act together around software.

And just to be clear, their proposition is books but its also tools that enable people, both vets and newcomers, to use their system and play their game.

Damned if I know what the hard bit is here. Its not the software itself surely. The object model has been substantially the same since 1979, UI is time-consuming but solvable, functionality-wise you could replicate their silverlight thing/VT and call it a day (I realise the choice of Silverlight sucked and the VT was cumbersome intially but I actually really liked the functionality). Is it the choice of technologies? The architecture? Is it the monetizing? Is it the licensing? Have they got crazy-whack right of veto/first right of refusal or something?

 

[Jester David]

It's just so.... strange that in 2015 a huge player in the industry simply doesn't or cant offer digital content that should at this point be almost mandatory given the wide increase in smartphones, tablets, PC usage, and console usage. Surely I can't be the only person who has noticed this.

WotC is a big traditional game company and a small publisher. None of that translates into being good at apps or websites or technology. I don't recall many other book publishers or game companies having a fantastic digital presence managed in-house. There's no Tor books or Random House app. The Catan and Ticket to Ride iOS adaptations were not done in house and were licensed to 3rd parties that released the adaptations some time after the game's release. And no other RPG industry player has noteworthy in-house apps or e-tools. Most don't even have licenced tools.

Why is WotC being held to a different standard than other publishers, game companies, or RPG companies? Why do they need fantastic digital support at day one?

 

[Jester David]

-There was that character builder that came with the 3e books that was buggy as all heck.

Licenced product out of WotC's control.

-Gleemax failed and failed hard.

Yeah, that would have been embarrassing had anyone really cared about Gleemax.

-They promised the world with 4e tools and we saw a decent character creator, but then they went with the silverlight thing and completely alienated mac users and tablet users.

This was initially a licenced product that went sideways when the person in charge was in the middle of a murder/suicide resulting in WotC having to start again from scratch at the last minute.
Then the downloadable builder proved incredibly problematic as everyone was paying $7 every six months and getting hundreds of dollars of content forever. So they dropped all the progress they were making on other tools and started again (again) with the online tools, picking Silverlight because it apparently allowed them to salvage some of their already written code.

-That virtual tabletop and DM content manager for 4e seems to have been vaporware.

See above.
The VTT wasn't vapourware and was available for many months on the WotC site. No one cared though, since it turned out VTTs are not as popular as expected.

-They pulled the PDFs and have no way to provide us with digital content.

Yeah, that was/is frustrating and entirely on WotC.

-The 4e pc/console Neverwinter game was abysmal at launch (don't know if it was ever fixed)

Not WotC. Licenced game.

-They started to break up the Dungeon and Dragon magazines providing no cohesive issues and as it stands right now the magazine is completely gone.

Magazines were dying ten years ago. I'm sure WotC would love to licence those out again, but no one is stupid enough to try.

-Recently the morningstar debacle.

Again, not WotC, but their licence partner.

What all this shows is not that WotC is bad with digital initiatives, but poor at picking good licence partners.

 

[transtemporal]

Why is WotC being held to a different standard than other publishers, game companies, or RPG companies? Why do they need fantastic digital support at day one?

It's 2015! We gots expectations and a well-honed sense of entitlement yo! ;-)

 

[Umbran]

What all this shows is not that WotC is bad with digital initiatives, but poor at picking good licence partners.

Actually, the laundry list you just gave raises a major thought: What if it isn't that WotC is poor at picking good license partners. What if good license partners for what the community wants don't exist or are extremely rare?

 

[transtemporal]

The VTT wasn't vapourware and was available for many months on the WotC site. No one cared though, since it turned out VTTs are not as popular as expected.

I don't think that was the reason it failed though. A significant portion of their market is now older, moved away from their hometowns or meet completely online having never met in person. The proposition still holds up, now more than ever. Apart from the obvious tragedy which was a huge factor, I think there were a number of other factors that did it in. 1) There was already significant competition in that space; 2) It required the subscription; 3) It was technically cumbersome (required Java and needed to be launched from the website, yuk). And it wasn't a factor at the time, but would be now 4) It required a desktop or laptop device. I never accessed it from an Apple but should've theoretically been possible.

Functionality wise, I really liked it as a DM once I got into it. It was superior to some of the other offerings out there.

 

[Remathilis]

WotC certainly has not had a good track record of choosing successful digital partners. But 4E "less said the better"? We got a very good, very useable 4E digital tool package that you can still subscribe to, if you are still playing the game.

I was referring to the unfortunate murder/suicide that derailed the original 4e tools. The later tools did get better, but that's a different tale (like how Code Monkey made E-Tools usable)

All people want is a simple chargen and monster builder, huh? You got some market research to back that assertion up? I certainly don't speak for all "people", but I totally WANTED what WotC was trying to originally deliver with the 3E tools. And they were close to delivering it when it finally fell through, sadly.

With respect, I don't believe this is accurate, and it speaks to the requirements gathering issue rollingForInit mentioned. It is not at all clear to me that what people want is well-known.

In regards to E-tools, I remember when Fluid was posting regular updates on the software on WotC's site. There was an article which talked about how "the monsters in the map-make would have sound! Here are some samples!" (Its lost to the memory hole, however). I remember being on WotC's boards at the time discussing with people why "a map maker needed sounds". We'd learn later it was because the map-making tool was working towards a VTT style system, but it was too complicated and ended up crashing the project, and a barely-functional product was shipped with the "promised we'd fix it".

Most people wanted (and again, anecdotal reminiscing of message boards long since lost) a char-gen program, DM tool, and maybe a mapmaker program on the par with Evermore 88's Core Rules 2.0. People were confused at the project grew and morphed, with 3d maps and monster sounds eating up precious resources that could have gone to making the bare necessities (char-gen, monster gen, map making) usable. Instead, we got crippleware, nearly 2 years after 3e's release. By then, the Mastertool's demo was forgotten and people had either moved on or given up.

So I don't have any sources to cite, but I do know that WotC has been long on promises and short on delivering for three editions now.

They always seem to want to "revolutionize" and "reinvent" on a grand scale. They promise the world while struggling to basics...like how to organize content. The article archive for 5e on the WotC site looks like it will eventually be a nightmare to browse. I'm really enjoying the monthly content push (Eberron test mats, EE players Guide), but down the road that content could be hard to locate if I lost my downloaded copies.

Moral of the story: start small and build up, something WotC hasn't learned yet. They tried to give us too much with E-tools rather than build up, they promised four separate programs for 4e and we got 2 1/2, and 5e tried once again to give us everything (content delivery! linked PDF char-sheets!) and every time, we wait years to get a "oh, here's the char-gen program. Will get more stuff later."