D&D 5E D&D Beyond Cancels Competition

D&D Beyond has been running an art contest which asked creators to enter D&D-themed portrait frame. DDB got to use any or all of the entries, while the winner and some runners up received some digital content as a prize.

There was a backlash -- and DDB has cancelled the contest.

Thank you to all of our community for sharing your comments and concerns regarding our anniversary Frame Design Contest.

While we wanted to celebrate fan art as a part of our upcoming anniversary, it's clear that our community disagrees with the way we approached it. We've heard your feedback, and will be pulling the contest.

We will also strive to do better as we continue to look for ways to showcase the passion and creativity of our fellow D&D players and fans in the future. Our team will be taking this as a learning moment, and as encouragement to further educate ourselves in this pursuit.

Your feedback is absolutely instrumental to us, and we are always happy to listen and grow in response to our community's needs and concerns. Thank you all again for giving us the opportunity to review this event, and take the appropriate action.

The company went on to say:

Members of our community raised concerns about the contest’s impact on artists and designers, and the implications of running a contest to create art where only some entrants would receive a prize, and that the prize was exclusively digital material on D&D Beyond. Issues were similarly raised with regards to the contest terms and conditions. Though the entrants would all retain ownership of their design to use in any way they saw fit, including selling, printing, or reproducing, it also granted D&D Beyond rights to use submitted designs in the future. We have listened to these concerns, and in response closed the competition. We’ll be looking at ways we can better uplift our community, while also doing fun community events, in the future.

Competitions where the company in question acquires rights to all entries are generally frowned upon (unless you're WotC).

 

[BookTenTiger]

Better than "no one is paying me for what I love to do, so this guys over there should not be allowed to be doing it just for fun".

How about the argument, "this kind of contest is unethical, so I'm going to raise concerns about it."

Look Mirtek, where's your evidence that this is what happened? There are many articles about the unethical nature of art contests. I'm going to quote myself here and list a few articles, but it's really easy to Google more of them:

Some useful links if you want more perspectives:

ArtistryFound.com

MakingArtMakingMoney.com

Portland.AIGI.org

 

[LongTimeLurker]

This is about people ruining something for others. If you don't like the contest, the solution was not to enter it. Those that were entering it were fine with the prizes or else they wouldn't have entered. Not all contests are for all people.

Whoa, whoa, whoa! Expecting the internet outrage mob to not raise a fuss about something PROBLEMATIC? How very 90's of you. It's [CURRENT YEAR] bro!

 

[Mirtek]

Crab mentality - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

You mean the complaining artist right?

 

[Mirtek]

There are many articles about the unethical nature of art contests. I'm going to quote myself here and list a few articles, but it's really easy to Google more of them:

And these are all aimed at artists. It's like a semi-professional baseball player trying to convice me it's unethical for me to throw some balls at cans at a fair.

 

[Lanefan]

Something up front and out in the open cannot be predatory. Lending with lots of fees and costs out in the open is not predatory.

BS.

A predator that shows you its teeth and fangs before it shreds and eats you is still veruy much a predator. It's just more obvious about it.

Lending with hidden fees and costs, designed to cause someone to pay a lot more than they thought, is predatory.

Stealth vs openness doesn't define what's predatory. Predation defines whats predatory, no matter how it's done.

Probably a lot. Many new artists want to get their works out there and used for their portfolio. To them such a contest is not at all predatory and very worth it.

The value of the contest, to the winners, largely lies in the later ability to put that win in their artistic CV.

 

[BookTenTiger]

And these are all aimed at artists. It's like a semi-professional baseball player trying to convice me it's unethical for me to throw some balls at cans at a fair.

So where's your counter evidence? Please link me to an article that has another perspective, I will gladly read it!

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

But if I were to make it related, I would say from my point of view that it's better to not have a competition that has the potential to well, hover up the artists art and prevent them using it for their own purposes (as I understand the rules to mean) and then use it for the companyy's purpose, with no chance of compensation, then to have the competition.

So, in the 1990s, I spent a fair amount of time, as a sideline, submitting short fiction to the then-thriving short fiction market in magazines. (It's mostly dried up as part of the changes to the larger media ecosystem.)

Every magazine picked one of several types of rights they would acquire, if they chose to use your work. The best, from the standpoint of the writer, were non-exclusive one-time publication rights. If they used your work, it could come out any time, but they'd only use it once. But that was exceptionally rare, because The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, for instance, didn't want to open up a copy of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine and see the same story they were running next month appear in this month's issue.

So most publishers would ask for exclusive rights. Sometimes they were one-time rights, sometimes they were for a given period of years, some times they were for multiple years with reprints or ancillary publications.

The answer, for me at least, was not to submit my works to folks whose rights agreements I wasn't comfortable with. At the time, there were enough outlets that writers had those sorts of choices and the outlets that had the worst rights presumably felt pressure to change things, because they wouldn't even see a lot of the good stuff that was published elsewhere.

The answer for artists isn't to eliminate outlets in which their works might be seen. It's to create more outlets. That's where everyone's energy should be going. Make the folks you see as predatory irrelevant and create market pressure for them to do better.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

You mean the complaining artist right?

There can be more than one crab, Mr. My Job Sucks, So Yours Should Too.

 

[Mirtek]

So where's your counter evidence?

Evidence for what? That someone who is not an artist and has no intention to ever become an artist may think that throwing away the rights for this once-in-a-lifetime drawing he made for the contest in exchance for the change to win some price is a fair deal to him?

There can be more than one crab, Mr. My Job Sucks, So Yours Should Too.

My job doesn't suck. I enjoy sitting in a climatized office and not having to lift or move anything happy. Just typing some figures into excel and SAP and listening to some conferences here and there and for all this being paid a buttload of money.

 

[Greg Benage]

Why they have to use the contest material? They could simply do a contest without this... This is beyond me (no pun intended).

They wouldn't have to use the material, and they may never have actually used it, but they reserved the right to use it to protect themselves from the inevitable "you stole my design!" claims. Without such protection, it's way less of a hassle and much less risky to simply cancel the contest.