D&D General Adam Bradford, Lauren Urban, Todd Kenrick Leave D&D Beyond

They join lead writer James Haeck, who left a couple of weeks ago. Adam Bradford is the D&D Beyond co-founder, and VP of Tabletop Gaming at its owner, Fandom. Lauren Urban is DDB's Community Manager. Todd Kenrick is the company's Creative Manager.

D&D Beyond, launched in 2017, is currently owned by Fandom (previously known as Wikia), after it acquired the company in 2018 from previous owner Curse, a Twitch subsidiary.

According to Cam Banks, creator of DDB owner Fandom's Cortex, all three received offers elsewhere which they could not turn down.

 

[Aldarc]

I... this almost laughable.
It’s pile of gold bricks compared to a pocket of steel pennies.

even if it’s 80-90 percent it’s still 10-20 percent of a pile of gold bricks compared to a few steel pennies.
And I respect Cortex. Even kind of like it.

To be fair, considering the various things that Fandom has under their umbrella (e.g., Screen Junkies, Curse, online wiki advertising, etc.), D&D Beyond itself may be but a few steel pennies in Fandom's revenue stream.

 

[Michael Linke]

TBH i don't even know how DDB is monetized. Is there a subscription fee? I see you can buy rules, but Fandom probably only sees a very small percentage of that. If you look at Fandom's portfolio before D&D Beyond, i think it's unlikely they wanted to "own" D&D Beyond, and more likely they wanted to own the source code that made it possible.

As a fan of cortex, i would love my theory to be true. I think the system has a lot of potential for spreading the RPG hobby, especially to people who don't automatically equate cool stories with killing monsters (weird, but there are a lot of people out there like that). It would be great for that system if some company was going to throw money into VTT resources for it.

 

[Backcountry164]

You're asking me to speculate? We're seeing things that could be symptoms. That doesn't mean we can pull an exact diagnosis out of thin air.

??Ummm??? Suddenly speculation is an issue for you?? That's pretty much all you've been doing here...

 

[Backcountry164]

double

 

[darjr]

Instead of dire theories spend some energy on lifting some folks up.

 

[Morrus]

TBH i don't even know how DDB is monetized. Is there a subscription fee? I see you can buy rules, but Fandom probably only sees a very small percentage of that.

If it's the same as most other tabletop game licensing agreements, that's not how things usually work.

 

[SehanineMoonbow]

The DNDBeyond forums aren't the friendliest place, but I don't think that has much bearing on the company itself. I saw Todd's farewell video on YouTube a few days ago. It's probably an internal (within the company) thing. There have been a lot of upheavals in the gaming community lately.

 

[darjr]

The DNDBeyond forums aren't the friendliest place, but I don't think that has much bearing on the company itself. I saw Todd's farewell video on YouTube a few days ago. It's probably an internal (within the company) thing. There have been a lot of upheavals in the gaming community lately.

Really? That’s too bad.

I will admit I haven’t been there much. Only for questions about DDB.

 

[Waller]

The DNDBeyond forums aren't the friendliest place,

There's something to be said for the iron hand we have around here. Strong moderation FTW!

 

[SehanineMoonbow]

Really? That’s too bad.

I will admit I haven’t been there much. Only for questions about DDB.

I only go on sporadically, myself, but in my experience, the community isn't the nicest.