Wizards of the Coast Is Sunsetting Sigil's Active Development

EN World has received confirmation that Wizards of the Coast is planning to transition Sigil, its just-released VTT, to a D&D Beyond feature with no large future development planned. Earlier this week, Wizards of the Coast laid off approximately 30 staff members tied to the development of Sigil, a new D&D-focused VTT system. Ahead of the layoff, Dan Rawson, senior vice president of Dungeons & Dragons, sent out an internal email confirming that the project was essentially being shuttered. Rascal was the first to report the news and EN World was able to independently confirm the accuracy of their report.

The email can be read below:

Dear Team, I want to share an important update regarding Sigil. After several months of alpha testing, we’ve concluded that our aspirations for Sigil as a larger, standalone game with a distinct monetization path will not be realized. As such, we cannot maintain a large development effort and most of the Sigil team will be separated from the company this week. We are, however, proud of what the Sigil team has developed and want to make sure that fans and players on DDB can use it. To that end, we will transition Sigil to a DDB feature. We will maintain a small team to sustain Sigil and release products already developed at no additional cost to users. To those moving on as a result of this decision, we will provide robust support, including severance packages, 2024 bonus, career placement services, and internal opportunities where possible.

I want to take a moment to praise the entire Sigil team for their incredible work to deliver this product to our community. One of the things I’m most proud of here at D&D is our strong sense of purpose. We aim to honor our current players while ensuring D&D continues to build connections and bring joy to future generations. And that’s what the Sigil team was doing. Although we haven’t fully realized our vision for Sigil to scale, the team should be proud of their achievements.”

A full breakdown of Sigil's tumultous development can be found here. Rascal has several additional details about recent events that led to Sigil's early demise.

 

[Clint_L]

The big benefit is they could switch from a model where customers buy the books once and never need to buy anything from WotC again to an ongoing subscription model. A lack of guaranteed ongoing revenue has been an issue with RPGs since the TSR days.

I agree, but It's hard to square this fear with the incredibly cost effective DDB subscriber model. My $7/month gives not only me but all of my players access to all of my books, and those books are WAY cheaper. On a yearly basis, DDB saves me money against having to buy actual books, and when I factor in time and storage, it saves me a fortune.

If that means WotC still comes out ahead (which they may, because they aren't splitting that money with a bunch of second and third parties) then I say it's a win-win. But all I really care about here is whether or not it works for me and my players, and that $7/month is by far the best bang for buck in my entertainment budget.

 

[kayakingpoodle]

Okay, I've been using since long before WotC bought it, every single person in my games still uses it while playing, and it has millions of users. I've found that it is better than ever - Maps is an incredible new tool.

I've never felt like a new book was crammed down my throat, so I'm not sure how to interpret this. They offer to sell them to me, often at a steep discount. There are no penalties if I decline, which I often do. I have not found that usability has declined; it still saves me hours of work each week.

It is great it works for you, however my groups do not use the new rules, and most games are with players that have never played D&D before.

For us, trying to get the new players onboard and playing we have found that starting a a new player on DDB may save a a few minutes over manually generating a PC on paper, but the benefits reaped from taking that time in a session 0 completely overshadow the insights gained during play. This also pays dividends if they continue to play past a session or 3.

We found this to be true before the 24 rules we out, and we do continue to use DDB mostly due to sunk costs, since the new rules have been added on DDB it has only gotten worse at our tables. There was a time especially for one shots DDB was king, but as the site ages the usefulness has diminished to the point it is not a time-saving tool, but a time wasting tool in our games compared to spending a little more time with a new user at session 0 than spending almost the same time teaching them how DDB works at character generation. That little bit translates to players learning how to play their character better, which leads to an overall better experience at the table than DDB is able to give . By that I mean telling someone to swipe look and click or long press never seems to go away for most new players, while helping them generate a character on paper seems (at our tables) seem to get a lot of the basics of playing the same character across in a session or 2.

For experienced players especially those that have been using DDB for a few years this is not the case, but many of those experienced players have said they enjoy a game without DDB better than with. That is not to say we don't use it for things like character level planning and double checking our manually generated characters, but when playing at the table DDB has been shown to detract more than it adds to our games.

TLDR: DDB for our groups is a crutch that causes more issues than it saves us time when getting new players into the game.

 

[Clint_L]

You're not playing with whole batches of new players who don't even own dice, let alone books.

And as a DM, the encounter builder alone is worth the price of my subscription.

 

[kayakingpoodle]

You're not playing with whole batches of new players who don't even own dice, let alone books.

And as a DM, the encounter builder alone is worth the price of my subscription.

It is poor form to ask a question and then call the answer a lie.

Yes we are often playing with 3-4 players that don't not even own dice. It is a nice draw for new players when they don't have to bring anything at all to play. I usually tell someone that is intrested in playing to get 3-5 other people together and I will to their place and we play.

I have never used the encounter tool on DDB.
I have used maps, but before there was an encounter tool in it.

 

[smiteworks]

I had been considering leaving Foundry for this also......because we only play DnD and use Beyond for all your PCs....but now we likely stay on Foundry. I like the fancy stuff, but my players don't feel the same need.

What I really want is 2.5d, with minis and flat maps (maybe a door here and there) with fog of war. Everything else is more than I need.

This is what we have been trying to do at Fantasy Grounds as an iterative step towards full 3D that is fully integrated. Our system allows you to easily swap between top-down 2D and 3D token view or free-camera views. We started with NPC and PC tokens/avatars first and recently added objects for decorations. We have some more work to do for walls, but the LOS and lighting works across the 2D and 3D spaces.

 

[Zaukrie]

This is what we have been trying to do at Fantasy Grounds as an iterative step towards full 3D that is fully integrated. Our system allows you to easily swap between top-down 2D and 3D token view or free-camera views. We started with NPC and PC tokens/avatars first and recently added objects for decorations. We have some more work to do for walls, but the LOS and lighting works across the 2D and 3D spaces.

Awesome! Way back in the day I had a license. Maybe I'll check you out again. But I'm not into buying the rules again.....

 

[smiteworks]

If you had an old license (pre-2018) then that would be FG Classic. There is a new version of the software now that you would need, but anything you bought for FG Classic would get loaded into the new version. No need to rebuy modules if you had the older D&D modules or other stuff. Many of those have been updated.

 

[Dire Bare]

Awesome! Way back in the day I had a license. Maybe I'll check you out again. But I'm not into buying the rules again.....

It's understandable if SmiteWorks needs to charge for access to the D&D PHB on their platform . . . it's also reasonable for customers to be less-than-excited about paying for access to the book again.

I've always wondered how possible it would be for WotC to start a program similar to Movies Anywhere the movie studios use to address this problem. With Movies Anywhere, if you link your accounts, a movie (from a participating studio) that you purchase on Amazon will also show up in your Fandango library, and so on. I wonder if the money would work out allowing something similar for TTRPG digital books . . . if you purchase the D&D PHB on D&D Beyond, it would also unlock on SmiteWorks or vice versa, perhaps for a small "upgrade" fee. That'd be nice, and would certainly encourage me to check out other platforms then the ones I'm already invested in.

 

[SteveC]

The 3D aspect is really challenging there's no denying that. I'd love to see how all of the different VTTs handle it. I know that Foundry has a third-party module for this but when I investigated it, it was far too complicated for casual use. Nice to see what Fantasy Grounds is doing!

 

[smiteworks]

It's understandable if SmiteWorks needs to charge for access to the D&D PHB on their platform . . . it's also reasonable for customers to be less-than-excited about paying for access to the book again.

Paizo set up a program that sort of does that. If you own the PDF at Paizo.com, you can sync your account and get a fairly significant discount on the FG version of that same product. It is normally around the price of the PDF, so $15 or $20 off for core books. For adventures, that means you can normally get the FG version for like $6 or $7. We track these purchases differently, so we don't have to pay as much of a royalty to Paizo for those either since they've already gotten paid for selling you the content when you bought the PDF.

Where that gets really cheap is if they run a Humble Bundle on PDFs and then you can benefit from discounts on all the products in the HB.