D&D General Is D&D Beyond Exclusivity Bad for D&D?

[AlViking]

I think he means this in terms of archiving for academic use and study, not in the sense of people actively playing it.

Many of those articles are still available, just not on a WOTC server. But why would a company be responsible for archives? Should they still be selling old copies of Dungeon and Dragon magazines because someone somewhere wants to reread an article from 1987?

 

[bedir than]

Death spirals can take a very long time, so I dunno why it would have happened already, but my point is that 5.5E does not seem (and we can only go with "seems", sadly, we just don't have figures, but this is a discussion of opinion, not hard facts, so I think that's okay, right?) to be attracting new players nor particularly bringing back a lot of lapsed players (not zero but not significant numbers), and in fact D&D seems to be slowly losing players at this point and to have been doing so for a while.

But there are figures hidden within the current quarterly earnings reports, plus what Ben Riggs has from 2019.

The evidence is that a single quarter of D&D now is earning more than all of 2019.

A supposedly shrinking game doesn't do that without massive price increases (didn't happen) or a glut of product (they released fewer products in 2025 than 2019).

The biggest evidence that D&D is shrinking is the expansion of creators to other games, some because they are bored with a system they feel they've mastered. Others shifted away due to distrust. A few signed contracts with massive IP while others took their IP internally due to the OGL.

But the revenue is still there. Players are still with 5e. Even the reclassified Amazon rankings are now showing D&D dominant, by far, again.

 

[Umbran]

Many of those articles are still available, just not on a WOTC server. But why would a company be responsible for archives? Should they still be selling old copies of Dungeon and Dragon magazines because someone somewhere wants to reread an article from 1987?

What? Archiving has squat-all to do with continuing sales.

This is an area in which the digital world has failed to keep up with the implications of its own development.

With print works, archival libraries could purchase or receive donation of a copy of a work, and preserve it for future cultural reference, without the publisher's involvement.

When you don't sell physical media, the archivists of the world need your cooperation to save your cultural legacy.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I think he means this in terms of archiving for academic use and study, not in the sense of people actively playing it.

Well, if academics want to archive and study a couple of random exclusive 5E24 features that got posted only to D&D Beyond, they can go through the effort of re-printing and cataloguing it. That's up to them. WotC's under no obligation to make it easier for them by making sure these exclusives get posted elsewhere so that these academics don't have to spend a few moments doing it.

 

[DEFCON 1]

So, argumentum ad populem?

A logical fallacy? What's the fallacy? That these DDB exclusives should be made available elsewhere because a few people might actually want keep all of their 5E24 material for the remainder of their lives (while not being able to just do the work themselves to subscribe/download/copy/rewrite all this stuff themselves for they can have it?) Are you suggesting that the entire world is under an obligation to make things easier for hoarders to keep hoarding stuff? That's an interesting take. Can't say I agree.

 

[kayakingpoodle]

DDB is not only bad for D&D, but bad for the Internet as a whole. It is a horribly run site with zero care for the users and how the site actually is used. I have quit play D&D because of DDB it takes far more from the game than it adds and every one wants to use it but it just stalls the game. I want to play D&D, not DDB.

 

[DEFCON 1]

by that logic we might as well toss all of 5e right now, 99% of humans do not care, so why bother with it

No... not right now. Once 6E gets released. At that point... a huge number of people are going to stop using most of (if not all) of their 5E stuff because they will switch over to 6E and be playing that. Just like most of the world's population are not going back to watch old movies from the 1920s because there's more than enough other movies/television/internet for them to watch instead.

Do you disagree with that? What makes you think most people are feeling any sense of loss that there were any number of black and white silent films lost to the sands of time?

 

[DEFCON 1]

DDB is not only bad for D&D, but bad for the Internet as a whole. It is a horribly run site with zero care for the users and how the site actually is used. I have quit play D&D because of DDB it takes far more from the game than it adds and every one wants to use it but it just stalls the game. I want to play D&D, not DDB.

I suspect the Internet will somehow survive getting suck into this black hole of the D&D Beyond website and program.

 

[Umbran]

A logical fallacy? What's the fallacy?

The fallacy lies in the implicit assumption that what the majority cares about decides what is important. The logical fallacy is well described elsewhere, and I don't think it pays us to go over it in detail here.

That these DDB exclusives should be made available elsewhere ...

You seem to be clinging to the idea that this is about individual users. I think the point was more about archiving for scholarship and history.

You will be talking past me until you recognize the difference.

Are you suggesting that the entire world is under an obligation to make things easier for hoarders to keep hoarding stuff?

No. I have said otherwise a couple of times already. You seem to be arguing against an imagined position, not one I am actually taking.

That's an interesting take. Can't say I agree.

Your failure to agree with your own strawman isn't my problem.

 

[bsss]

Well, if academics want to archive and study a couple of random exclusive 5E24 features that got posted only to D&D Beyond, they can go through the effort of re-printing and cataloguing it. That's up to them. WotC's under no obligation to make it easier for them by making sure these exclusives get posted elsewhere so that these academics don't have to spend a few moments doing it.

This isn't about WotC's obligations, it's about the net effect of their choices. Those items would be easier to archive, etc. if the content wasn't DDB-exclusive and locked behind the terms of service.

Or is this another attempt to assert that no one should care to do that archival effort because you don't? Because, again, preservationists care about it all. Everything they can get their hands on. They're the ones that care about Licensed Sports Shovelware Jank '98 ROMs, or scanning every newspaper clipping from the 1900s to create a historical record of the residents of a town of 1,000 people. To suggest something that reads like "well I think the content is worthless to history, everyone should just accept that" is to shut your opinion out of the discussion.