Chris Cocks says it makes sense to move D&D to a "live service" model, but Hasbro will always make physical books

Chris Cocks isn't shy about plans to move Dungeons & Dragons to a more live service model of gaming. In a recent interview with GamesRadar, Cocks explicitly said that "it makes sense" for players to shift their mindset towards a live service due to the high amount of players using digital services, but assured the interviewer that books will still be produced by Hasbro. When asked if Wizards was moving away from books in favor of a more piecemeal release schedule, following the announcement of D&D Beyond's new Drops service. "Books will always be an important part of D&D," Cocks said. "It will always be kind of like a special totem that you can collect. I have a big bookshelf of D&D books myself."

"But we see what's happening – almost everyone who plays D&D uses D&D Beyond, like a super high percentage uses it," Cocks continued. "A very high percentage use Foundry VTT or Roll20, and so it just makes sense that you should start to migrate your thinking about the way you play to more of a live service where you don't have to wait 18 months for us to build a book. We can start to release components or aspects of that book over time, and you don't have to buy everything all at once. You can buy chapters or segments of it over time. That makes a ton of sense to me. That said we will still have big moments. We will still have like, 'hey, ta da, here's a huge campaign.' You can expect there'll be more around that, both from us and from all the creators in the world that can leverage a platform like D&D Beyond to share their content as well."

Broadly speaking, Dungeons & Dragons has always been a "live service" game, as the game's core business model involves continuously releasing new content in the form of new rulebooks or campaigns. However, it seems that Cocks is principally interested in shifting this model around more frequent releases. We'll note that the business model suggested by Cocks was already rolled out in a manner of speaking. The Dhampir species rules were released as a "digital DLC" for D&D Beyond subscribers who digitally ordered a Forgotten Realms book bundle, but a physical version of the rules are being released via the upcoming Ravenloft: The Horrors Within book. However, a la carte purchases were removed from D&D Beyond several years ago in order to force users to purchase entire books instead.

 

[mamba]

No you're assuming being (rightly?) compensated for something being done corresponds to not liking something being done.

sharing my printed book is free, they are not being cheated out of a compensation for that.

As I said, your whole ‘but they are ok with you sharing the DDB stuff so why would they care about you sharing books’ argument falls apart once you consider that one of the two requires a subscription while the other does not. Your argument only works if both were free.

 

[mamba]

You'd be surprised to learn, then, that the law doesn't really care how computers work.

no, law and lawmakers are generally way behind the times, no surprise there

Case law on the subject seems to have centered on the "fixed"ness of a copy, and loading something into RAM could be considered permanent enough, because you can analyze and save the contents of RAM, to count as a copy. Then duplicating those contents into some other RAM all but certainly counts as a copy.

RAM is not permanent, that you maybe can analyze it and create a copy of the part of the RAM the file was loaded into on your HD would make that act the piracy. If someone hosts a file on the internet you are also not pirating it if you could download it but aren’t.

So the answer seems to be closer to ‘who knows, this hasn’t been decided by a court yet’ rather than a clear black or white case

 

[AlViking]

This discussion is underlining why WotC might be unwilling to support PDFs: an awful lot of folks are inclined to believe that copyright protections don’t extend to digital content. Or just don’t care.

Good point. There's enough piracy without giving piracy the appearance of legality.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

We know to produce an animated show needs money, a team and time, but we can watch in youtube "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic" and other shows of Hasbro franchises. YouTube is funded by advertising.

Some famous animes started as self-publish web-fiction, later they became webnovels and webcomics, and after published as printed manga.

To produce TTRPG content you also need a team, money and time but in a smaller scale. Can't be incomes by means of advertising a way to fund "free" online D&D-content?

 

[Imaro]

sharing my printed book is free, they are not being cheated out of a compensation for that.

I didnt dispute whether it was free or not. I didnt state they were being cheated out of compensation for a book since you, assumedly, paid for the book...they were compensated for it and all the rights you gain in purchasing it.

As I said, your whole ‘but they are ok with you sharing the DDB stuff so why would they care about you sharing books’ argument falls apart once you consider that one of the two requires a subscription while the other does not. Your argument only works if both were free.

I still dont understand your logic/argument???...they are ok with sharing because they've enabled at least two ways of doing it legally... what dont you understand about the discussion?

 

[bsss]

no, law and lawmakers are generally way behind the times, no surprise there


RAM is not permanent, that you maybe can analyze it and create a copy of the RAM the file was loaded into on your HD would make that act the piracy. If someone hosts a file on the internet you are also not pirating it if you could download it but aren’t.

So the answer seems to be closer to ‘who knows, this hasn’t been decided by a court yet’ rather than a clear black or white case

Well, you are conflating many things. RAM isn't permanent, but hard drives aren't permanent either. A work loaded into either is "fixed" when it is coherent enough --- think stable, or discrete --- to be a reproduction of the work --- a copy. So, it doesn't matter what medium the copy is in, what matters is that it's a copy.

"Piracy" (copyright infringement) is about what you do with that copy. Of course, making a copy for yourself and immediately destroying it (say, because it's a copy from disk into RAM that you loaded to read, and then you turned your computer off), or making a copy and giving it to no one (say, an archival copy) probably don't count as "piracy" specifically, but that's largely because the copy you made didn't get distributed in any meaningful sense. But that "it's just RAM!" argument gets you nowhere if you do distribute a copy, where we're talking about copyright infringement, not what a copy is. If you copied a file into RAM and magically gave that RAM to another person, it's copyright infringement.

The courts have decided this, almost completely unambiguously (the only quibble I can find is if the work in RAM is explicitly and concretely a copy, but it's almost always irrelevant respective to the other acts being disputed). The part of your post I bolded is incorrect; for a simple refutation, see the streaming example above. Copyright infringement has occurred in some set of places between the computer on the internet and the arrival on your computer --- the other party transmitted, and you received, a copy, without the rights to do so.

EDIT: I cleaned up some language in my post and realized a sticky point in your wording: are you concerned about who is doing the infringing, the sender or the receiver? Specifically, who is liable for copyright infringement? The sender, for sure, but the receiver I'm not so sure. It's still "piracy" in any general sense of the word, I think.

 

[abazaba]

If I were to host a read-only, no downloads PDF and gave access to a few friends, there is no copying of the file. Still piracy?

'piracy': you keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.

 

[mamba]

The part of your post I bolded is incorrect; for a simple refutation, see the streaming example above

that bolded part can’t possibly be wrong. Maybe it is piracy to host it in the first place, even if no one downloads it (debatable imo, but maybe close enough to an attempt to count), but not downloading it is definitely not piracy…

EDIT: I cleaned up some language in my post and realized a sticky point in your wording: are you concerned about who is doing the infringing, the sender or the receiver? Specifically, who is liable for copyright infringement? The sender, for sure, but the receiver I'm not so sure. It's still "piracy" in any general sense of the word, I think.

yes, it is about the two. Is the act of hosting a file for a select group of people (so not for the public at large) already piracy, and if you circumvent whatever protections are in place so you can create a permanent copy, is’n’t then the receiver the pirate rather than the ‘sender’ who tried to prevent this from happening

 

[mamba]

'piracy': you keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.

I am not talking about eye patches and sailing boats, but maybe you are?

 

[bsss]

that bolded part can’t possibly be wrong. Maybe it is piracy to host it in the first place, even if no one downloads it (debatable imo, but maybe close enough to an attempt to count), but not downloading it is definitely not piracy…

This statement makes no sense and you should really read more before asserting something like this. To have "downloaded" "it", somewhere a copy is made. If the host doesn't have the right to make copies of "it", copyright infringement has occurred. The law doesn't care if "downloading" is to RAM, a hard drive, straight to a printer, into a void, or otherwise, or if it's 1, 2, or 100 infringing copies.