D&D 5E D&D Beyond Cancels Competition

D&D Beyond has been running an art contest which asked creators to enter D&D-themed portrait frame. DDB got to use any or all of the entries, while the winner and some runners up received some digital content as a prize.

There was a backlash -- and DDB has cancelled the contest.

Thank you to all of our community for sharing your comments and concerns regarding our anniversary Frame Design Contest.

While we wanted to celebrate fan art as a part of our upcoming anniversary, it's clear that our community disagrees with the way we approached it. We've heard your feedback, and will be pulling the contest.

We will also strive to do better as we continue to look for ways to showcase the passion and creativity of our fellow D&D players and fans in the future. Our team will be taking this as a learning moment, and as encouragement to further educate ourselves in this pursuit.

Your feedback is absolutely instrumental to us, and we are always happy to listen and grow in response to our community's needs and concerns. Thank you all again for giving us the opportunity to review this event, and take the appropriate action.

The company went on to say:

Members of our community raised concerns about the contest’s impact on artists and designers, and the implications of running a contest to create art where only some entrants would receive a prize, and that the prize was exclusively digital material on D&D Beyond. Issues were similarly raised with regards to the contest terms and conditions. Though the entrants would all retain ownership of their design to use in any way they saw fit, including selling, printing, or reproducing, it also granted D&D Beyond rights to use submitted designs in the future. We have listened to these concerns, and in response closed the competition. We’ll be looking at ways we can better uplift our community, while also doing fun community events, in the future.

Competitions where the company in question acquires rights to all entries are generally frowned upon (unless you're WotC).

 

[Bill Zebub]

No. That's not it at all. I'm trying very, very hard to be nice here.

Discrimination against POC and the LGBTQA+ community ... it kills people. It's not something to be taken lightly. You understand that, right? We aren't talking about far away things like the lynching of Michael McDonald in ... 1981 ... or the murder of Matthew Shepard in ... 1998, I am saying that people are getting hurt and killed today. You understand that, right?

This isn't some disconnect. This isn't some small thing that you should be sealioning about. This isn't "I think that I have a legitimate problem, therefore it is just like the legitimate problems of racism and homophobia." Because what a person does when they are doing that is coming from a position of such privilege that it is unbelievable that I should have to say this, but I will make this explicit-

Whether you view this discussion as "artists whining about capitalism and competition," or whether you view this as "exploited labor standing up for their rights and using social media and labor power to attempt to get the fair labor value of their work," or whether you view this as something completely different (as I do) it doesn't change the fact that economic bargaining in our society, whether by fast food workers, or artists, or people in the service industry, doesn't exactly compare to centuries of state-sponsored violence against people solely because of the color of their skin or the people that they love, does it? And to glom on to that pain and moral authority for your own arguments ... can be offensive to people.

I've explained. I'm done. I don't much enjoy what was said, and I really, really don't enjoy people that keep trying to justify the casual deployment. If you feel the need to keep sealioning about how this is just like the discrimination faced by POC and the LGBTQA+ community, maybe take it up with someone else who is ready to appreciate your new comparisons to misogyny.

Well, I truly am sorry you find it so upsetting. But I also think your outrage is the result of falsely conflating two different things. I know you said you're done talking, but you are making some pretty hard accusations (against me) so I feel the need to respond.

Pointing out that two people use the exact same strategy, with the exact same words, to deflect criticism and shift blame is not the same as a claim of moral equivalence between the actions of those two people.

However, I will say this: since you do find this so upsetting, which I suspect makes it impossible to see or acknowledge the point being made, what I (we) probably should have said is something more neutral, such as:

The excuse that 'you are making the world a little less fun' is a common defense use to deflect criticism and shift blame when somebody doesn't want to acknowledge, or doesn't believe, that their fun is causing harm to somebody who deserves protection.

So, in the spirit of avoiding any whiff of moral equivalence, I'll further point out that the insistence that two actions must be morally equivalent in order to for a comparison to be valid is yet another age-old strategy used to deflect criticism and shift blame. It's a red herring because it shifts the debate away from the actions in question, and toward the question of which actions are worse than others, and to what degree. Which just isn't relevant.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Anyway, to recap the substantive points that were already made a while back:

1. Creatives in the TTRPG industry need to get paid more. I started a thread about it here. Eventually, it got sidetracked by some people coming in trying to say that they shouldn't have to tip service industry people more than 10%. Because we can't have nice things on the internet.

2. The specific issues involved with contests and sweepstakes (which are terms of art) are very well-known, and are separate and distinct from "on spec" work. This was discussed earlier in this thread. These problems are exacerbated by older laws in the US that vary state-to-state and the rise of the internet, which is both national and international.

3. A quick perusal of the T&C used by D&D Beyond shows that rather than this being an exploitative contest, the issue was caused by using the auto-generated language by software from an Australian company. A deep dive, with all the source documents, is here. Comment #10 has the full description if you don't understand the first post. The main takeaway is that the contest used the exact same language as the prior sweepstakes- not because this was an attempt to get art, but just because this was using off-the-shelf sweepstakes software that was not specific to America. But given the source documents are posted, you can form your own opinions.

4. A final complication is the concomitant issues of liability (something all business in the United States are terrified of) and intellectual property- an area which is a hotbed of confusion and litigation. But these issues are what drive the T&C and TOS of almost everything you use; if you look at almost any website, from facebook to instagram that has "lawyered up" language, you will see that by posting your work, you have granted a license to the company to use it. If you look at any contest that has submissions, such as the Apple iPhone contests, you will also see that language.

5. Finally, facts do matter (IMO). If, for example, a high school is running a contest for student art, that is clearly different than a place that is running an art contest and requiring submissions to be "paid" and does not disclose the rules or judges.

EDIT- To be clear, and as I have repeatedly stated, it is possible that there is an argument that all art competitions run by for-profit businesses are exploitative and should not be allowed. But that absolute stance can be incorrect; I think that (for example) there are cases where companies run contests that are generally not seen as exploitative (such as the iPhone photography contest by Apple)- but maybe I'm incorrect.

 

[lkj]

While this conversation has obviously evolved into something well beyond just what happened with DDB, I thought it might be interesting to post what route the DDB folks have taken this week for their 'birthday celebrations' in terms of 'winning something':

D&D Beyond Anniversary Sweepstakes

We're excited to celebrate our fourth anniversary with you! Each day, visit one of our community hot-spots to participate in a daily challenge for a chance to win a special bundle AND to be entered to win a Legendary Bundle at the end of the week!

gleam.io

Sweepstakes instead of contest. It's possible they were going to do this anyway, in addition to the contest. But it's probably no accident that the 'arts and crafts' part of the sweepstakes says "YOUR art, cosplay, or craft . . ."

AD

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

While this conversation has obviously evolved into something well beyond just what happened with DDB, I thought it might be interesting to post what route the DDB folks have taken this week for their 'birthday celebrations' in terms of 'winning something':

D&D Beyond Anniversary Sweepstakes

We're excited to celebrate our fourth anniversary with you! Each day, visit one of our community hot-spots to participate in a daily challenge for a chance to win a special bundle AND to be entered to win a Legendary Bundle at the end of the week!

gleam.io

Sweepstakes instead of contest. It's possible they were going to do this anyway, in addition to the contest. But it's probably no accident that the 'arts and crafts' part of the sweepstakes says "YOUR art, cosplay, or craft . . ."

AD

It's not surprising that they moved to a sweepstakes model.

But ... I couldn't help myself. I looked at the T&C they are using now. They decided to put in ... Canadian jurisdiction and Canadian law? For sweepstakes? I haven't looked at that in a long time, but by recollection was that Canada was even weirder when it came to sweepstakes. I know that (for example) a lot of US Companies have to explicitly exclude Canada generally or Quebec specifically.

shrug It's the wild west on the internet, I guess?