D&D General Interview with D&D VP Jess Lanzillo on Comicbook.com

[mamba]

Selling products that are a totally optional hobby luxury item that only adds visual effects is in no way the same as loot boxes.

I did not say they are, I said the objections you might have against them are not that different from the ones I have against MTs, so you might understand where I coming from even if you have a different opinion

 

[Oofta]

I did not say they are, I said the objections you might have against them are not that different from the ones I have against MTs, so you might understand where I coming from even if you have a different opinion

Whereas I say they are completely unrelated issues.

 

[Oofta]

You do know WotC popularized the concept of TCGs and have made insane bank from basically this mechanism, right? I'd be interested to know how the digital card-packet-opening in the online version of MtG works, because unless you can trade cards you don't need to other players, that is, functionally, a loot box - only worse because it's part of gameplay! If you can trade excess cards it's rather less bad.

As I said, I think it's unlikely there will be lootboxes or similar, but that's solely due to changes in the legislative environment in Europe and parts of Asia. If this were 10 years ago, I have zero doubt WotC would absolutely have been selling loot boxes or similar.


That confirms what I was saying, yes. Because you're wealthy enough, you don't have to care about what might happen. You don't even have to think about it. I'm not suggesting you do spend hundreds of dollars on DDB, but you could, and if you lost that, to you that's a major issue or regret.

I'm unsure though if you're missing the point, or intentionally refusing to acknowledge it. That point, to be clear, is that whilst you and other (the people spending thousands on MtG, for example) are largely consequence-free here, that's not really the norm. Especially as most D&D players are in their 20s and 30s, and comparatively vastly worse off than your generation (given I know you're at least 40-something).

So you're good - but others are not so safe, and you seem to dismissing the idea that anyone could be put in a bad position by enshittification here.

Basically your position seems to be, if I understand correctly "I've got mine, so if bad things happen because of enshittification in the future, I'm still fine, and who care about anyone else?". Is that wrong?

I don't care about what could happen because it hasn't happened, isn't likely to happen and if it did happen I don't have to support it. I don't subscribe to Disney+/Hulu any more because it wasn't worth my money. I never subscribed to Max because as much as people rave about shows like GoT, it's just not worth my money. Same with any subscription to DDB or hypothetical VTT.

If at any point I don't find the online tools worth my money I'll drop my subscription and go back to pen and paper like I did for decades. Assuming that the nebulous something bad occurs that you can never quantify. I'm no more concerned about losing access to online books than I am about losing physical copy of books. I'm no more worried about being lulled into complacency as WotC attaches a vacuum cleaner to my wallet than I am about them sending Pinkertons to repossess my books.

By the way I spent $60 for my DDB subscription last year. If I shared costs with my players that would be less than $5 per year each (I run multiple groups). While I did preorder the new books, my only other expense for the year was the Tome of Beasts 1 from Kobold press. In 2022 I spent $40 for things other than my subscription. I do not spend "hundreds of dollars" on DDB every year.

 

[mamba]

Whereas I say they are completely unrelated issues.

you do, and I disagree

 

[Azzy]

Maybe because people kept accusing them, in a negative tone, of pushing microtransactions.

Doubtful.

I believe that the reason they quit a la carte purchasing is because they have opened Beyond up to 3PP and there may be complications in how that would work with paying 3PP. Either that or corpo thought that the a la carte purchasing was eating into complete package purchasing.

 

[Nikosandros]

Doubtful.

I believe that the reason they quit a la carte purchasing is because they have opened Beyond up to 3PP and there may be complications in how that would work with paying 3PP.

That's a possibility, but no one was forcing them to sell every single product a la carte.

Either that or corpo thought that the a la carte purchasing was eating into complete package purchasing.

I find this more likely, along with the likely fact that it probably cost them resources to implement and maintain and, according to some, it was not used by enough customers.

 

[Oofta]

Doubtful.

I believe that the reason they quit a la carte purchasing is because they have opened Beyond up to 3PP and there may be complications in how that would work with paying 3PP. Either that or corpo thought that the a la carte purchasing was eating into complete package purchasing.

Another possibility is because of switching things to legacy. I was able to buy a la carte with the Wildermount supplement.

We won't know until we start getting splat books.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I'm no more concerned about losing access to online books than I am about losing physical copy of books.

This is an interesting take, because for me, the former, for proprietary-format/online-only/app-only books, which I thus can't back up, is obviously vastly more likely to become a real issue than the latter or with digital PDFs or similar. But we all assess risk differently.

And sometimes positive things happen too - if WotC are doing well when 6E rolls around, and want to transition people away from 5E, I'd be unsurprised if they sunsetted 5E support on Beyond, but provided all the books we'd bought to us as PDFs!

Personally, I'm a bit vexed because if I blew what, like £140 on the three new rulebooks in digital and then say, Sigil goes live and rapidly starts showing enshittification (which I think is actually more quantifiable than you're allowing, it's not all airy-fairy stuff - specific examples have been provided - it's fine for those to not matter to you, but that's different from them being not quantifiable), because that'd be a huge proportion of TT RPG entertainment budget (and very noticeable portion of my entertainment budget) gone for that year. Like I actually would regret it kind of money. Hopefully friends will buy them and the relatively generous design of the DDB will let me piggyback off them until Sigil releases and we get a better picture of how much Sigil and DDB will actually interact, and just how shark-like the monetization on Sigil is.

 

[Nikosandros]

Another possibility is because of switching things to legacy. I was able to buy a la carte with the Wildermount supplement.

How long ago was that? It doesn't seem to be currently possible.

 

[Oofta]

How long ago was that? It doesn't seem to be currently possible.

Not long after it came out. I bought a handful of monsters and items. Not possible any longer of course. Hope springs eternal that it will return, if not I won't be spending as much money on DDB. Of course I'm not a big DDB spender anyway, and it may just be that the juice just wasn't worth the squeeze for them.

My hypothesis that it was because of labeling things as legacy is based on timing. We'll see what happens.