My friends who have done VTT are surprised by what I've shown them the past year. They never delved into the deeper aspects of Roll20 and only used the free front. They've used Roll20 7 or 8 years now and I have shown them many things they have never used.
Now add to that spiffy animated spell effects, animated tokens, and the amazing Multilevel Token system in Foundry combined with Paralaxxia in Foundry VTT? And you think there's not a group of players who are going to look at some figs, a Chessex battlemat and an overhead pen and say "nope: I'm out". Yes there is.
The Multilevel token stuff in Foundry is
amazing. Its technical, but essentially how it works is that the software takes whatever map images you designate and automatically teleports you to another map on an "event" - whether just clicking a region of space, or just entering a region of space. It can also project a region of space from another map as well as the tokens within it -- into another map regions and make that be something that can be both seen on another map and targeted from another map, too.
And it's not that hard to do. Anybody posting here can figure out how to make their maps do this within their game sessions.
Most of you who are still reading are in the "yeah, get to it" point. So I will. You put 4 or 5 different maps on a sailing ship together and this thing allows people to move seamlessly from a main deck into the Captain's cabin, down a ladder - through the galley hall, up another ladder to emerge on the main deck, looking
down into the hold, where there are a bunch of other crew (on the hold level of the ship, not the same map you are on!) and you can see
and target them in the hold below with a spell, arrow, or pistol originating at them from the main deck, too.
And it is ALL seamless. The player never ever notices that something
spiffy has happened. It's
that slick. And this is all while the sound effects of wind are playing, fog and clouds are moving, seagulls are whirling in the air above it and the sea is frothing by the sides of the hull' all to provide the illusion of movement to players. Check it out: The Movie Magic is demonstrated at the 7:47 mark.
To a small group of players in any game genre, graphics and eye candy do not move them. They would rather play a text based MUD, an 8 bit platformer over Fallout 4, Cyberpunk or World of Warcraft. They
just don't care about eye candy. That is true in the TTRPG world as well. Some of them have posted in this thread already. They are real. They exist. Their opinions really don't get moved by these things. All true.
But they are a minority viewpoint in any gaming genre, be it computer, console, boardgame, or TTRPG. To the majority of players, eye candy counts &
sizzle matters.