D&D General DDB/WOTC Price Increases

[Blue]

By "never" I assume you mean mess that was Gleemax? Because that's not at all comparable to DDB from a tech standpoint or the importance to the company.

No, I mean what I actually said, not the abbreviated chunk that you have assumed. Every editions change they buried it all. Sure that included forums like Gleemax and the 4e ones. They discontinued the working 4e subscriptions for books and character builders when they could have just left it up and gathered the income stream. Picture being mid-campaign and suddenly all of your digital support goes away.

Heck, when 2024 came out they even started putting 5.5e info on 2014 character sheets until there was a public outcry, and IIRC they still are showing 2024 for tooltips on 2014 material so you need to doublecheck everything. I'm not sure, after getting burned with what they did to 4e I haven't "invested" in DnDBeyond.

Every single edition change under WotC they have fully removed all support for the immediately proceeding edition. Probably to encourage people to move to their new edition, but while we can only guess at their reasoning, historically they have a 100% track record so it's not reasonable to expect anything else when eventually they switch.

 

[AlViking]

as I said, that response completely misses to address any of the points I made… I too have no expectation that prices never go up, but inflation has zero to do with this increase, it is about maximizing profits

D&D is an optional luxury product. You can play for free if you're willing to use their basic version. I don't see anything wrong with what they're doing - something I can't say for a lot of companies. Every company that wants to stay in business wants to make a profit. They produce some good or service, set a price and hope consumers find what they produce worth the money. If the product is not worth the money don't buy it.

They can set whatever price they want, make whatever level of profit they want. It's up to you me and everyone else to decide whether it's worth their money. You've decided it's not worth your money. For that matter so have I because I always do homebrew campaigns and it's not a book I would use much. I don't see a problem other than that it would be nice if every product I would like to purchase was a lower cost. Maybe we could start with that Porsche 911 at a price that I could afford.

P.S. MtG makes money hand over fist and the core 3 books have a significantly long tail. We don't know how much profit they make on new books.

 

[AlViking]

No, I mean what I actually said, not the abbreviated chunk that you have assumed. Every editions change they buried it all. Sure that included forums like Gleemax and the 4e ones. They discontinued the working 4e subscriptions for books and character builders when they could have just left it up and gathered the income stream. Picture being mid-campaign and suddenly all of your digital support goes away.

Heck, when 2024 came out they even started putting 5.5e info on 2014 character sheets until there was a public outcry, and IIRC they still are showing 2024 for tooltips on 2014 material so you need to doublecheck everything. I'm not sure, after getting burned with what they did to 4e I haven't "invested" in DnDBeyond.

Every single edition change under WotC they have fully removed all support for the immediately proceeding edition. Probably to encourage people to move to their new edition, but while we can only guess at their reasoning, historically they have a 100% track record so it's not reasonable to expect anything else when eventually they switch.

You are going from a history of their first attempt to have books online and Gleemax was inherently flawed from it's inception. I don't think that's a large enough sample size to mean anything. Meanwhile I have both digital and physical copies of the core rulebooks as but there is no guarantee either version will still be around at some hypothetical future point in time. Whether or not they are, DDB is worth it to me and the dozen players I share the books with. The physical books? They mostly gather dust on my shelf.

 

[Echohawk]

They discontinued the working 4e subscriptions for books and character builders when they could have just left it up and gathered the income stream.

From memory, the situation with DDI was slightly more complicated than you are painting it here. Yes, WotC stopped adding new content to DDI in 2014, but they kept the Character Builder running right up to the end of 2019, five years into the 5e release cycle. And they only shut it down at that point because it relied on Microsoft Silverlight which Microsoft stopped supporting at that point. There is some evidence that WotC was making a fair amount of money from DDI subscriptions for at least the first few years of 5e, so I strongly suspect that had they not made the (admittedly poor) decision to tie the fate of DDI to a proprietary Microsoft technology, they'd probably have kept it running for even longer than they did.

 

[mamba]

D&D is an optional luxury product. You can play for free if you're willing to use their basic version. I don't see anything wrong with what they're doing

just because something is not required to live does not mean they are be above criticism. You can be fine with that, that doesn’t mean that everyone else has to be as well

They can set whatever price they want, make whatever level of profit they want. It's up to you me and everyone else to decide whether it's worth their money.

agreed, and all that was said is that some people are considering whether it still is worth that