What would you want to bet, though
@darjr?
I mean, I think we all suspect they're doing some kind of major work here, but do you actually think it's likely that they'll come out with the features you're listing? I mean, personally, I'd say:
1) Third party support/marketplace - I think there is absolutely no chance of this whatsoever.
I mean I hope I'm wrong, but WotC has been standoffish about 3PP for a while now. Not opposed, but not doing much to support it, either. That's a perfectly fair position for them to take, but it's extremely far from actively supporting 3PP material.
There are a number of reasons I think this unlikely, and I think they're pretty valid reasons:
A) The amount of work to even create training materials for 3PPs so they could use presumably the internal/power-user tools Beyond has for creating products would likely be extremely significant. They'd also have to create and maintain some sort of system for external users to log on and create products whilst maintaining separation from internal users, which may well not yet exist.
B) Then they'd have to check on the results. If they're letting 3PPs put stuff up that doesn't work, or worse somehow crashes or clogs up characters etc. that use the 3PP materials, that'd be very bad. And it's likely a huge number of 3PPs would want to get on Beyond, and even if they limit it to specific partners (like, say, Critical Role), that's still a lot of work for a company that seems to be struggling with its current burdens.
C) They'd also have to content-check everything to ensure that it was "okay" in other ways. Right now, barring a tiny amount of ancient Critical Role content, everything on Beyond has the "Nintendo Seal of Quality", as it were, by being WotC-made. That ensures a certain level of child-friendliness and lack of risque content or risky content in other ways. The reality is, if they mess up, WotC will get blamed, not the 3PPs, by customers (of which they apparently have in excess of 10m!).
D) They'd have to let 3PPs upload a ton of art and so on so it could be hosted on Beyond. This is a more minor thing, but I suspect it's still likely to cause issues. If they did it "manually", i.e. the 3PP sends them the art, tells them to upload it and so on, that'd be a huge burden on Beyond, because there's likely to be a fair bit of back-and-forth. But I'm skeptical they already have an externally-accessible way to upload art or similar content.
E) 3PPs are likely to have a ton of requests/demands, especially for unique new rules formulations and the like, that, if Beyond met them, would represent a pretty huge burden on them. If they didn't, it'd mess with a ton of 3PP products, and prevent many of the more exciting/interesting ones from working, which might create more discontent than simply not having 3PP products.
I suspect that even at say, a 50% cut to WotC, this would make the effort not worth it for them. Just too much cost in order to essentially help your competitors (however minor). With OneBookShelf, WotC presumably did just about nothing apart from clarify what was acceptable to upload, and still wanted a big cut. Here WotC, through Beyond, would be looking at far more work for certainly not much short or mid-term gain and only arguable long-term gain.
If you think these points are invalid, I'd be interested to know why.
2) An API - Beyond said they were doing this in 2019, but have been silent about it since.
The question with any API is
cui bono?
Who actually benefits from it. Most APIs benefit the company providing them by increasing usage of their paid (or government-backed or similar) software. Here it's not immediately obvious how WotC/Beyond would benefit from a public/semi-public API. WotC have been extremely clear on their plans - they want to create a massive high-quality VTT to go with Beyond. They're projecting it being available in 2024 (which I think is very soon, development-wise, frankly).
That means, imho, WotC's view would be that they have nothing to gain from a public API or even really a partner one.
So I think it's much more likely that we're looking at them working on two things:
3) Ensuring that Beyond is 1D&D-ready. I mean, they have to do this. This may mean a massive redoing of how Beyond works of course, especially if "Generic Feature" stuff wasn't actually as good as they were saying it was going to be.
4) Ensuring that Beyond has any changes it needs to integrate fully with the upcoming VTT project, which again, WotC have scheduled for 2024, which I think it a pretty optimistic scheduling.
