D&D Insider - Pay tomorrow for what you get today for free?

[ShinHakkaider]

It's a marketing plan and a pretty good idea. A lot of websites do this. Most businesses have a plan to make some more most of their website accessible to only paid customers within 5 to 10 years of launch. I've worked for two media companies that have done this. They create a really good and content full site and slowly scale back on it after three years. By the sixth or seventh year there are "premium" subscriptions to important content. You can look at the New York times and espn content for examples.

I'll be happy to pay for it and I'm anxious to see what the new software looks like and if it will be compatible with or better than what i already have.

I'm not gonna automatically put WOTC on blast until I see exactly what it is they have to offer. If it's not worth it to me they don't get my money or my web traffic, if it is, then they do. Either way it's not worth it (at least for me) getting angry and hostile over it. Seriously, a few people here are making sound like somebody is stealing from THEM: "Oh, no WOTC Is taking THIER free content away! THOSE BASTARDS!!!"

D00d, don't cry about it, just turn and walk away...

 

[Eridanis]

If they take the subscription fees to pay for good content - web enhancements, ERRATA, insightful stuff - then it'll be worth it to me. If they are simply tacking a monthly fee onto what they provide now - which is stunningly little - then count me out. When was the last time they posted a true web enhancement or errata for a product? A long time ago. Most of their content is recycled - Map-a-Week from the book that comes out that month, etc. Columns like Design and Development are interesting, but not worth a monthly fee by themselves, IMO. Several weekly/columns like that might be worth it to me.

I'm not blaming them for this - if they don't have money to pay for extra content, then they can't provide it. But I hope this move to a fee-based site means they'll pour the money into the site.

As for pricing: they could go several ways. They may look at the yearly subscription price for Dragon (around $45 or so?) and go that route. Or they might see that millions of people are willing to pay $12.95/month for their favorite MMORPG, and go for that price point. we'll find out soon, I guess.

 

[delericho]

My point is, the whole thing falls apart when some of your gaming buddies refuse to pay monthly to play online.

The impression I get is that this is perhaps more useful to someone who can't easily find a regular group, or who wants to play more often than the rest of his group. In which case, he would be better suited with a subscription all for himself, with no additional codes.

But then, I'm very strongly of the mind that face-to-face play will always beat online play, no matter what they do (at least, until we have full VR chatrooms ). So I don't see this as the way forward, so much as a supplement to what we already have.

I do definately think the "3 games per month" part of the subscription model needs to go. Bluntly, I won't pay a monthly subscription for a limited service. Raise the price and make it unlimited, or set it up as pay-as-you-go, and I'm interested. As it stands, I assign this a weight of 0 when deciding if I'm going to subscribe or not.

(Additionally, since I don't need character creation software, that gets a weight of 0 as well. Now, if you make a powerful and intuitive encounter/NPC statblock generator, then I'm very interested, but that's not currently on offer. Doesn't look good for my chances of subscribing...)

There're ideas to do this the right way and ideas that will get it done all wrong.

Ain't that the truth.

 

[D.Shaffer]

I'm firmly in the wait and see camp here. If it's good stuff, I'll pay for it like I do with Dragon. If not, eh.

As it is, there's barely anything on the website that I pay attention to these days, except for the occasional sneak peak at upcoming products, and I dont see them removing those to a 'pay for the priviledge' type deal anytime soon. I AM interested in see how the online utilities end up working and hope they have a demo.

 

[Kunimatyu]

Adding new content that costs $5/month to access...well, maybe.

Charging for product previews is perhaps the dumbest idea I've ever heard. I'd never pay money to watch a movie trailer, so why should I do so for a book/minis preview?

In addition, the loss of goodwill would be huge, and it would form a huge barrier to entry for younger players, which has a chance at (eventually) killing off the hobby through lack of recruitment.

I do like the gaming table, character builder, and "new classes" stuff as paid content -- at least, I'd consider paying for them. The character builder might be better as a free add-on in terms of encouraging new players, though.

In short, I think there's a workable idea here, but I'm not certain WotC has really thought it through correctly.

 

[Maggan]

Charging for product previews is perhaps the dumbest idea I've ever heard. I'd never pay money to watch a movie trailer, so why should I do so for a book/minis preview?

But we're already paying money to get previews, albeit in magazine form. Many gaming magazines have previews, often as a main feature when they've run them, and we pay money for that.

/M

 

[sjmiller]

I look at this whole situation from a slightly off kilter viewpoint. I play 3.0 and not 3.5, so a lot of the online stuff (character creation, online gaming table, etc.) would be pretty useless to me. I take the stuff I find on their site now and gleen it for ideas and concepts I can adapt. I don't use many of the gazillion prestige classes or feats, so that's no skin off my nose. I guess if they eliminated all the free stuff I would not find it a terrible loss.

Now cost-wise there's a simple breaking point for me. Pyramid magazine from Steve Jackson Games updates once a week for the ridiculously low price of $20 a year. It supplies great material for GURPS, d20, and other game systems. Most of it is system neutral, so I can adapt it to any system I want. The Wizard's/D&D Insider would have to be similarly priced for me to buy it. So, anything over about $2 a month would not be worth it to me.

I will wait until they have more to say about a roll out date and pricing structure. I am not overly confident about my participation, but we'll see.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

It's a marketing plan and a pretty good idea. A lot of websites do this. Most businesses have a plan to make some more most of their website accessible to only paid customers within 5 to 10 years of launch. I've worked for two media companies that have done this. They create a really good and content full site and slowly scale back on it after three years. By the sixth or seventh year there are "premium" subscriptions to important content. You can look at the New York times and espn content for examples.

I'll be happy to pay for it and I'm anxious to see what the new software looks like and if it will be compatible with or better than what i already have.

Care to name some sites that successfully do this? The newspaper industry, by and large, has found the model to be a complete bust, and even ones that formerly charged for all the good stuff have gone back to an advertising-supported model.

 

[Mark CMG]

"designer scoops"

Sounds like a new wonderbra.

Well played, sir.

 

[DonTadow]

Sorry, why should DMs have to pay for the priviledge of running games online? Surely, if the cost for a group of N people to play is going to be $X per month, then each person should be expected to subscribe at a cost of $X/N, rather than one person having to pay the full amount, and the others paying $0?



Very good point. If Wizards expect people to pay for online play, they'll need to offer something that other solutions don't, or at least offer the same features in a better form (such as a fully integrated package of video, chat, dice rollers, interactive battlemat, or whatever).

Thats true, then again Wotc could always just put the clamp down like Magic the gathering did. For a number of years there was lots of software you can use to play magic online, but slowly and surely most of them began to disappear as WOTC began pursuing the legal corners.