Well that wasn't entirely unexpected, just so much sooner then I thought...
But, on the other hand, VTT's like Talespire are doing quite well. So, it's not impossible to do. Just seems that WotC hasn't figured out how to do it.
Ehh... Talespire looks great and all (I also own it), but what are you basing this off? After almost 4 years in Early Access, they have ~3,800 reviews, something like Tabletop Simulator has almost 42,000 reviews after almost 10 years. In the space I wouldn't call that a huge success. It did a $300k KS in June 2019. And what might be 'quite well' for Talespire, might not be even close to what Sigil was supposed to do.
The problem is that WotC/Hasbro is an Enterprise/Multinational, large, slow, not agile. That means overly inflated teams, a LOT of overhead, and slow going. I'm not sure when Sigil started, but they were already late to the party. Other, smaller developers were already working on related/similar projects, working faster, with far less people, thus a LOT cheaper.
Bouncyrock, the developer of Talespire, has currently 19 people working on it, 16 two years ago. Unknown if these are all fulltime employees or not.
bouncyrock.com
web.archive.org
The Foundry VTT core team is even smaller. And the even smaller 'The Ripper 93' has developed a 3D module for Foundry VTT.
Or look what Dungeon Alchemist has done/achieved in the last 4 years ($2.5 million KS) with a team of currently 16 (including a community manager):
Dungeon Alchemist credits and an overview of important contributors.
www.dungeonalchemist.com
I was never expecting that WotC/Hasbro would even touch the top solutions in this field. But we need to realize that people will want to compare Sigil to these top solutions, instead of the massive failures that are far more common.
My gaming rig can run smoothly with newly released games but it stuggled with Project Sigil. It has some serious optimization problem that kill my urge to use it after tried for 10 min.
I don't know, I tried running it on a Mac via Crossover (compatibility layer) and got overwhelmed by the mountains of dependencies Sigil required. I tried a bit ago, after some attempts to make everything work I threw up my hands and decided to wait for Crossover 25, which released last week. I hope I get to it again before Sigil shuts down completely.
The problem in the current PC market is that higher end GPUs are scarce, so the people that are hardcore PC gamers are willing to spend the big bucks on it while the more casual players that also want to play pnp D&D online via VTT in a 3D environment, aren't already using Talespire or Tabletop Simulator AND are willing to play a monthly fee for that privilage are kinda rare...
Most of us 'casuals' go for far lighter solutions, that won't also function as a space heater. Relying on either a port to MacOS, it working via Crossover or Proton (Steam Deck), or it running it via Geforce Now. No thought was put into that at all with the release, add to that crappy optimization and you have a product that very few people would touch.
Just as a side note, Remedy is finally making a profit from Alan Wake 2.
You do know that Remedy is Finnish and not American...
Edit: Fixed finish error.
I'd say WotC doesn't know how to handle software development,
While that's also my first response, I'm told that the tools for 4e where excellent, I just never played 4e. And my experience with Magic Arena is also excellent. It's just everything else WotC sucks at software development, but they are also not unique in that. The amount of (KS) projects in this space that started during the pandemic (and some even before that) is surprisingly large, most never get anywhere close to their promises. There are just some successful examples that stand out.
Or... in the case of Mac users, like me, you can't download it and use it even if you want to.
Oh, you can download it and install it (via Crossover), I just wasn't able to run it... Might not work at all, but maybe we just have to suffer through the dependency hell that is Sigil.
I'm not going to be interested in changing VTT platforms.
And that's where a LOT of people are that are
currently using a VTT, but the rest either aren't as attached to their platform as you or me, or haven't even decided on one yet (either because they're trying things out or are new to VTT). I expect that the VTT space will grow faster then the physical games in the next decade, that means a LOT of potential customers to pick up. Especially when it's the official, approved version...
Obviously this decision is a cost cutting measure by reducing a very costly component, personell, and probably office space. If Sigil was a massive success, then maybe it wouldn't have been sacrificed. And that's also where I expect that the folks running the project saw what was happening and pushed for a release when it wasn't ready yet (after how many years?)... If they hadn't it would have been probably cut without a release.
I also wonder if the people behind it went: Not a massive success, and we've got licensing fees coming in from all kinds of VTT solutions for zero work on our part, why try to reinvent the wheel when what we released isn't round in the first place...
Still not sure it is something people want though.
It's something that some people want and probably quite a few people that don't know yet that they want. If you asked me 20 years ago if I ever was going to be playing D&D online, outside of a computer game or MMO, I would have laughed at you. And I'm one of the computer savvy people... There are always people, but are they enough and is WotC/Hasbro willing to wait years or possibly decades until it catches on? Obviously not!
I'm not someone that's waiting on 3D in their games. It requires quite a bit of computer power on all the clients, often requires a client that does not always work on the OS the player is running, and from the DM perspective it costs a LOT of time to setup! 3rd party 3d maps/assets would cost significantly more then the pletora of 2d assets we can currently choose from. And from a personal perspective, maybe it will feel too much like a computer game. I do want to mess around a bit with 3d in VTTs (primarily FVTT, but also in Talespire and Dungeon Alchemist), something like a 3d Heroquest or the Lego D&D adventure in 3d...
