DDI vs WoW

[Herobizkit]

From the freakin' Blizzard Website, emphasis mine:

“In Memoriam: Gary Gygax

Blizzard Entertainment would like to dedicate the patch in memory of Gary Gygax. His work on D&D was an inspiration to us in many ways and helped spark the passion for creating games of our own. As avid D&D players and fellow game developers, we were all saddened by his passing; we feel we’ve lost a true adventuring companion. Thanks for everything and farewell, Gary. You will be missed.”

That should clear up who's "copying" who here.

 

[abeattie]

There are any number of options out there for VTT gaming. Pretty much every IM program out there supports video now. The only problem really is the game map and die rollers.

Enter any number of VTT programs, both pay and not, to fill that void.

In all fairness, I think WOTC is making a serious mistake tying the VTT to a subscription model. The whole point of a VTT is to get more people playing. Why not make it easier?

In short -- because like so many DnD *EDIT* SOFTWARE *EDIT* products before this one - it suffers from horrendous design flaws. For example -- they want you to buy minis and maps from them, so the game HAS to be hosted on their servers. That means alot of bandwidth and hardware -- which means it costs WotC money to RUN the VTT (which isn't try for say... MapTool). If they didn't host the game, you could break their software and get unlimited use of minis (which since they're all 3d models, are expensive to produce), and maps.

It's the profit model begets expenses begets subscription problem. They should view operating expenses as cost of doing buisness selling maps and what not -- or (crazy idea) support the existing virtual tabletop community to get the result they want (a market for their game) on the cheap.

Instead, they have decided to build software. They are not a software company. Godspeed, but I predict rocky shores ahead.

 

[Ximenes088]

It's the profit model begets expenses begets subscription problem. They should view operating expenses as cost of doing buisness selling maps and what not -- or (crazy idea) support the existing virtual tabletop community to get the result they want (a market for their game) on the cheap.

I'm not sure the result they want is just a market for their game. I think the result they want is lots of money, a market for their game being a plausible route for this. We can argue whether or not their current tactics are going to get them there, but it can't be forgotten that the beancounters who've greenlighted this project are doing it because they think it'll get WotC more cash.

We will not get online rules lookup without a subscriber model, let alone content more consequential than the teaser bits we've gotten thus far. It just will not happen. There is no fiscal incentive whatsoever for them to create fluff-free rules summae for all their products and 3D models/tilesets and put them online without some kind of recurring payment to finance the work and account structure necessary to verify payment and legitimate access to the content. I'm sure they could do it out of love and tenderness, but they'd do it for about six months before some exec at Hasbro noticed a huge budget overrun on the love and tenderness line of the annual report and killed the project.

However pleasant it might be to just tell WotC to give us free stuff because it's good for the game, or to cooperate with people giving us free stuff because that, too, is good for the game, WotC is a business. The designers doubtless all love their work and are devoted to the hobby, but they won't get to work in it for long if they don't sell product.

 

[Hussar]

No offense, but it sounds like you have a slightly shaky grasp of what "win/win" means (and a very shaky grasp of the business model of the D&DI VTT - given that you have said several things that are explicitly contrary to the D&DI model). Giving away the store has never been a good business model. The fact that they are implementing a system that allows people to invite other players to play for free a few times a month (while not receiving the full D&DI functionality, which encompasses more than just the virtual tabletop) indicates that they have already accepted that people will want to play with other players who do not necessarily own a D&DI subscription.

Offering a free product, however, that directly competes with your for-pay product is bad business, and always has been.

Not really. Lots of services do this - stripped down versions for free and pay services for added value.

The stripped down VTT would not have the rules look-up feature for example. No preset calculations. Heck, maybe it doesn't even track character sheets. It's simply a virtual space for gaming in, you have to do all the extra work.

There, now I have a system to get lots of people playing and interested in VTT play and now I offer them all these cool extra features - Dragon, Dungeon (both with automatic linking to the VTT - a must for Dungeon), rules look-up, character tracking and character builder.

 

[drjones]

DnD4 is less like WoW then any previous edition of DnD.

Good stuff, very well thought out.

I think DDI will stand of fall based entirely on its own merit, if it goes down in flames WoW will be the last one to blame. But from a 'ddi=wow' pov you pretty much clinched it. Not that that will stop the WoW based trash talking but oh well.

 

[Duckforceone]

i just find it hilariously funny, because since wow started, i have seen soooooo many people claiming others to steal ideas from wow...

uhm hello... wow happend to have the right setting, using mainly ideas from many other games out there, changing them and making them their own. that's it. I see nothing brand spanking new in wow at all that hasn't been done before.

So before anyone starts with the, x has stolen that from y, think a bit more about the other players around that could have invented it before.

just as when lord of the rings movies came out, i heard someone claim they stole it all from dnd... *laughs*

I miss the good old MUD days, back then noone claimed to have stolen anything but code, and that was quite easy to spot.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

The question is not who has stolen from whom, but if the good things were stolen. And if the stolen pieces were assembled in a compelling way. I guess that's definitely what D&D and WoW got right in their respective lifetimes...

 

[Xorn]

GameTable

All of us want this. (7 people)

12 months of Dragon content
12 months of Dungeon content (that's at minimum thirty six new adventures per year, all encoded and ready to go in the Game Table)

They've actually stated that adventures will NOT be ready to play in GameTable, at least initially. However, *I* think that getting these online formats is handy. My six players however, could care less. And I need ALL of them to want it.

Guest play space for eight player-days per month, which is enough to run a twice-monthly campaign with four players, or a weekly game with two (this is the part that absolutely kills me - people are griping about everybody in the group needing a subscription - only the DM needs a subscription, the players can use the DM's tokens).

I have six players. We play weekly. If you have small 4 man games and only play 2 days a month, sounds like this is designed for you! We also play SWSE, and Palladium FRPG to boot! All of which I can play on the VTT I _own_. I'm confident in assuming that MOST DMs will need more than 8 tokens for their playgroup. Make it 24 tokens--and maybe we'll talk.

I dunno about you, but that sounds like pretty decent value-for-money to me.

I don't know about you, but it sounds like you and I have vastly different ideas about "decent value-for-money".

$840 per year for 1 DM + 6 players to play every week with TOKENS... (the minis are extra)
or
$90 one-time, forever, for 1 DM + 6 players to play every week with tokens.

Now I admitted that time can be a factor--but I clarified that the cost is off the chart in comparison to any other factor.

Don't take my word for it, go see for yourself! If I can place the cost of my VTT at $90 for 7 people, then what is the other $750 paying for?

 

[Dragonblade]

Let me put this into perspective. Of the 10 people I play D&D with in 3 different monthly games, half of them once played WoW. Now NONE of them play WoW. They just aren't interested in it anymore. However, they ALL played tabletop D&D before WoW, during WoW, and they still play it after WoW.

D&D and WoW are NOT direct competitors. The experience is just too different. Now are they competitors for your entertainment dollar? Sure. But in the same way that seeing a movie, or buying a video game are.

As far as the value of DDI goes, that is purely subjective. I personally feel its a fantastic value for the money. I subscribed to Dragon and Dungeon when they were paper magazines, would you argue that those were not worth the money?

So prior to DDI, I got both Dragon and Dungeon delivered to my mailbox once a month. the cost for both mags was about $15 a month.

With DDI, I will now get:

Dragon
Dungeon
The game table
The character creation software
The character designer
and the Rules Database (which includes ALL WotC crunch!)

So sure, I feel that some value has been lost because I now have to settle for PDFs intead of printed magazines, but that loss of value is more than made up for by the Rules Database alone. Not to mention having the game table and the character creation software.

If I sign up for a year, I get all this for only $10 a month. At this point, I consider myself to be getting MORE for my money than when I had my paper subscriptions to Dragon and Dungeon. I view the value of DDI on these merits. Comparing it to WoW is meaningless as far as I am concerned because I have no interest in WoW.

WoW could cost $1 a month, and I still wouldn't pay for it, nor consider it a better value for my money than DDI.

 

[Dragonblade]

Comparing a one time $90 FG purchase to a DDI subscription just for the tabletop? Sure, FG wins.

But FG doesn't give you a rules database with ALL WotC published crunch. Nor does it give you the equivalent of two monthly magazines, nor a character generator that has all WotC crunch as well.

When FG offers all of this for a single one time cost, then we can talk about value comparison. But until then, its like comparing apples to potatoes.

(There's your food metaphor, hong!)