DDI Progress

[Delta]

The thing about the 3D application is ... why the heck do they have any 3D development to do at all? Aren't there enough 3D engines out there that they could take one off the shelf, and plugin in their tile and figure models, and attach the character visualizer to that?

WOTC is not a software company. It would be no great surprise if they're unaware of how to do a feasibility study, requirements gathering, system analysis, design, and/or management. In fact, they've basically demonstrated that over and over. There may not be anyone in management who knows that buying an off-the-shelf software package is an option (or incented to do so).

 

[joethelawyer]

the game battle chess from 1988 is about all you need if you want 3d figures on a screen of grids. i'm sure they could have licensed that game for $9.99.

 

[lrsach01]

I can't believe how slow they are getting this taken care of. Even if 10,000 people worldwide signed up for DDI they would be getting 100k a month revenue extra. You can't tell me that isn't an incentive to invest in some people that can actually get something done.

I'm pretty certain that it won't REALLY be $100,000 a month "extra." They will have to pay for the staff to maintain the servers and all that bandwidth. I have NO idea how much all that stuff costs, but I'm FAIRLY sure that a good porton of that $100K will be accounted for.

 

[renau1g]

I love Battle Chess.... it rocked and much better than DDI is now

 

[SavageRobby]

WotC + D&D Software = Vaporware.

 

[guivre]

What they're attempting isn't that ambitious. There's no reason for it to not have been completed in under a year. Not without something fairly catastrophic happening.. including complete mismanagement.

 

[Hawke]

I'm pretty certain that it won't REALLY be $100,000 a month "extra." They will have to pay for the staff to maintain the servers and all that bandwidth. I have NO idea how much all that stuff costs, but I'm FAIRLY sure that a good porton of that $100K will be accounted for.

I understand that, but on the flip side how much money does it cost to run the Dungeon/Dragon side of DDI that they're eating up right now? It seems to me that last year someone pitched a business model and right now they're eating some major costs for dungeon/dragon/wizards.com when some basic management would've made DDI viable.

I cannot believe even with basic management skills that it would take more than a year for the largest gaming company to produce a basic game table application with the resources WotC and Hasboro has... whether that means going out of house, doing it in house and hiring some good people, or buying up an existing application like FG and pushing it to the next level.

So despite the details of my math being pure guesswork (I don't know the real number of subscribers, I don't know the overhead for running gametable servers), I don't think anybody can say that a company with their resources and a year plus timeframe couldn't put together a working product of the limited scope of a game table even in beta form by this timeframe... and they are losing real money in overhead every month they can't charge even if you ignore the opportunity cost of running servers for games.

 

[thalmin]

Keep in mind that WotC was not only developing an online game table, but also a Character Generator, and we all know how complex that project is.
[/sarcasm]

 

[LightPhoenix]

Keep in mind that WotC was not only developing an online game table, but also a Character Generator, and we all know how complex that project is.
[/sarcasm]

Actually, designing a decent character generator with a good user interface for an exception-based system isn't actually trivial.

 

[Scott_Rouse]

there will be working versions of the applications you'll be able to try at GenCon