On the other hand, with DDB being done through licensing, WOTC doesn't have to worry about the logistics and infrastructure. They tried to roll their own with 4e and couldn't get it to work. It's just not in their wheelhouse.
This is misleading and is confusing the state of WotC in 2000-2015 with the more recent WotC.
From about 2000-2015 or so, WotC were "digitally incompetent". In pretty much all ways. I don't know what was going on there, but anything digital they touched kind of turned to excrement (albeit slightly less so with MtG), with the only real exceptions I can immediately think of being NWN1/2, and that was because the company had been working on D&D games since before WotC acquired D&D, so wasn't chosen by WotC. They sold rights to the wrong people, then got into massive legal battles that went on for years to get them back. They chose the wrong third-party companies to use, and so on.
The DDI in-house version was ruined by an actual murder, that's a whole other story not for these boards imho. WotC then desperately grabbed a third-party to make a stop-gap version, whilst seemingly trying to reform an in-house team to make a successor with a VTT. Had 4E lasted longer, that might have worked - probably not though due to the "anti-Midas" WotC was with digital products.
5E started off the same way. Bad decisions. Bad, bad, bad decisions that lead to Sword Coast Legends existing, and IIRC first (first two?) attempt at the DDB (not in-house) flaming out, before finally WotC made the right decision and got some competent people to make it (not people who'd ever done anything like it before, note - people who were used to working with/creating custom databases).
Since then, WotC's digital strategy has improved and the whole "anti-Midas" thing has gone away. They've got Larian working on BG3, DDB is going great, huge even, they've bought one AAA studio and created another (largely from ex-Bioware employees), and other digital products seem to be much more successful (like the more recent MtG products, though they always had some success there).
When you say that putting out a VTT isn't all that hard because it's just a fancy website, it's kind of like saying that putting a man on the moon isn't that hard because all you have to do is stick a guy in a rocket and aim it at the moon. The trick is building a fancy website that actually works. Like I said, WOTC is in the licensing business, not the website business.
No. This "out of our wheelhouse so licence it out!" is an outdated and ridiculous idea, frankly. I mean, I work at a major international law firm. We're not "in digital product business", but the idea that we can just
not have self-owned digital law products is beyond ridiculous and deeply stuck in the '00s, intellectually. We may use third-party technologies, or even pay third parties to maintain certain stuff, but we're not going to outsource stuff wholesale and only take a percentage or something. Having our own products is demonstrably significantly more profitable and helps the brand more (I'm directly involved with this kind of thing).
I'm absolutely familiar with people who think they like you're suggesting WotC must here. They're wrong, and we're seeing that in various sectors (obviously I'm most familiar with legal, but similar stuff is happening in finance and other sectors).
Also, the "moonshot" comparison is utterly ridiculous. It's like building a shopping mall, or modern office building or a stadium. This isn't some risky, difficult thing that might suddenly blow up. This is pretty standard operation. It's fancy because it's expensive and requires more investment of time/effort than a normal website, not because it's tricky/unreliable - it might go somewhat over-budget, but it'll get finished, unlike a moonshot which could just fail indefinitely. At my law firm we've implemented stuff considerably more technologically and conceptually complex than what is a glorified database + mouse-driven GUI for moving simple objects around. Your moonshot comparison is like saying building a house is a "moonshot" because you personally don't know how to do it.
I guess you could do a "moonshot" VTT, like, if you wanted it to seriously 3D, with great graphics, detailed character models, VR integration, and other ridiculous Nice-To-Haves
right from day 1. That is kind of what 4E tried, sorta. But why...? Why not just do something that works, is heavily-branded, and has a simple-but-slick/branded look? You're aiming at the broad audience now, not just rich nerds.
Sure. WOTC could develop their own platform. But they don't even know where to begin. Roll20 is the 800 lb gorilla in the VTT market and does a decent enough job. But it's far from perfect. And it's the dominant player. The other leading contender - the Mac to Roll20's PC - is FG and it too has trouble rolling out basic features.
/facepalm
I think this shows the problem in your thinking. You think Roll20 is an "800lb gorilla". It's a freaking spider monkey next to DDB. It's also the product of zero investment, and little apparent effort to keep the design and functionality modern, probably as the result of a legacy codebase and attempting to support dozens of games and custom stuff.
To be clear, the VTT part is perhaps the least important thing here. The fully-integrated digital character sheets and rulebooks are. The VTT wouldn't even be worth mentioning if it wasn't for the pandemic and generally changing attitudes about playing digitally (i.e. it is way more acceptable/attractive now). Also, WotC wouldn't be trying to supplant Roll20 generally - just for D&D. By focusing on one game, one ruleset, and not on custom stuff, it's vastly more straightforward.
If WOTC put out its own VTT tomorrow, would you sign up? Would you abandon your current campaign, your current content, your current knowledge of the platform, and then actively convince your players to go along too? Because that's the hurdle. That's why people dig in with their VTT of choice. Because they're invested in it.
Again, It's not primarily about the VTT, it's about the DDB functionality. Roll20 and FG are niche because they're painful to use. You're not going directly after that audience. You want the people who use DDB. You also want to pick up the increasing audience who play via Zoom etc. and either would like to use a VTT but find Roll20/FG too difficult, or half-arsedly use a VTT via stuff like Beyond 20. By focusing on a single game, a single ruleset, you can make your product slick and easy to use in a way that's literally not possible with something like Roll20. The main goal of your VTT has to be accessibility/usability. You put that ahead of functionality, especially custom functionality. That's the opposite of the Roll20/FG approach.
If your product works well enough, yes, some Roll20/FG experts/grogs will also move to it, but as you, they're niche. What isn't niche is DDB, and a D&D-specific slick VTT doesn't need to be niche.
And you're completely missing that this is a 5E to 6E thing. Yeah it would be dumb to try and compete with DDB after it's been running for 3+ years. However, when a 6E comes out, and you are offering "early access" and so on, and old characters aren't compatible, so need to be re-created etc. anyway, then you have a point where you can take over. So tomorrow is missing the point - this thread is about 6E and what happens with that.
