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.

 

[jolt]

IANAL, but I worked at a patent law form for six years. It's a bad idea to assume you ever have the rights to redistribute a product that you yourself did not create. What you might think of as trivial or "doesn't make sense" has no legal weight. If you don't have specifically granted rights to distribute something, then you generally can't. Yes, fair use is a thing, but you can't just say 'fair use' and expect it to apply. There are specific parameters that you have to adhere to.

 

[mamba]

A license is just a way to govern how something can be redistributed. The lack of a license term, or the lack of a license entirely, isn't the same as allowing redistribution

agreed, at that time the law kicks in, which is what I wrote

The law says you can't make copies unless you are the copyright holder, period. What's a copy (is it "fixed", etc.)? That's for lawyers and courts to argue about.

and the question revolves around what constitutes a copy. Is me indirectly creating a copy of the PDF in RAM, because the program I use to read it does that, a copy under the terms of the law.

If it is that means I cannot read the PDF book I bought without violating the law (low risk, but still in violation).
If it isn’t, then why not / what more does it take to make it a copy that the law would recognize as one.

I don’t think / am not aware that this has ever been settled in this detail. Most cases are simple, you either uploaded to or downloaded from a file sharing site. Open and shut.

Torrents might make it a little harder because you are downloading bits and pieces of one file from multiple hosts, so no one shared the work with you, but you still end up with a full copy of it, which is enough for you to have violated copyright as the downloader.

Contrast that to hosting the .torrent file, which is a file containing the information where the PDF can be downloaded from but no data from the PDF itself. That is legal.

I don’t think this has been settled, as I wrote earlier, so it might not be as straightforwardly allowed as I initially thought (changed that to a gray area before), but I don’t think it has been ruled illegal either