D&D Beyond Cancellations Changed WotCs Plans

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Gizmodo has revealed that the partial OGL v1.1 walkback yesterday was in response to the fan campaign to cancel D&D Beyond subscriptions, with "five digits" worth of cancellations. However, the site also reveals that management at the company believed that fans were overreating and that it would all be forgotten in a few months.

In order to delete a D&D Beyond account entirely, users are funneled into a support system that asks them to submit tickets to be handled by customer service: Sources from inside Wizards of the Coast confirm that earlier this week there were “five digits” worth of complaining tickets in the system. Both moderation and internal management of the issues have been “a mess,” they said, partially due to the fact that WotC has recently downsized the D&D Beyond support team.

Yesterday's walkback removed the royalties from the license, but still 'de-authorized' the OGL v1.0a, something which may or may not be legally possible, depending on who you ask.

 
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Voadam

Legend
The unreleased FAQ position on de-authorization is interesting. Sticking to that position is big. 5e or other WotC SRD based OGC support will not have a safe harbor that is considered safe until that gets resolved. I hope the cancellations continue so WotC drops that aspect. WotC issuing a revision of the OGL that is like the 1.0 OGL but makes explicit that WotC cannot deauthorize or terminate the OGL would make the OGL safe from the WotC deauthorization attempt threat.
 

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Hurin88

Adventurer
However, the site also reveals that management at the company believed that fans were overreating and that it would all be forgotten in a few months.

As a wise man once said, '...it is the doom of men that they forget.'

Never forget that WotC has revealed its true alignment. They're not primarily interested in fostering a creative community. They are a business seeking to maximize profit for shareholders. That's fine, but when they do it in a Chaotic Evil way, we should remember.
 



Anybody have numbers on roughly how many DnDBeyond subscriptions there are?
We don't.

Beyond was quoted as having 10m registered users a year or two ago, and more recently by WotC as having 13m registered users.

But there's never been anything said about how many subscriptions, or whether they're normal or master tier.

You might can make an educated guess based off the number of "survey submissions" they claimed a couple months back. I can't recall the number off the top of my head. Guess that could get us close.
They only got 40k submissions, with 13m registered users. That means 0.28% of registered users did the survey.

I suspect they have a lot more than 40k subscribers.
 





Voadam

Legend
Beyond was quoted as having 10m registered users a year or two ago, and more recently by WotC as having 13m registered users.
Yeah I am one of those. Accounts are free and I got the spelljammer bestiary thing.
But there's never been anything said about how many subscriptions, or whether they're normal or master tier.
Yeah, how many are paying anything and how many of those are canceling would be the bottom line numbers of biggest impact I would expect.
 

overgeeked

B/X Known World
Can someone confirm, I thought those numbers became like at least $1 million in subs lost in a week.
It'll be hard to gauge as we don't have precise numbers on the lost subs nor their value. There are multiple tiers of subscription, so that's one variable. There were "5 figures" of cancelled subscriptions, which translates to between 10,000 and 99,999 cancellations, so that's the second variable. If it's 10,000 subs lost and $5 a sub, you're looking at $50,000 lost. If it's 99,999 subs lost and $20 a sub, you're looking at almost $2 million. So it's really up in the air.

ETA: Looking at the actual sub models from DNDBeyond. They're $3 and $6/month. Average that to $4.5. The "5 figures" averages out to 54,999.5. The math on the averages equates to $247,497.75. Even if it's 99,999 and they're all top tier subs, it's only $599,994.
 
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