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Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="eamon" data-source="post: 5371054" data-attributes="member: 51942">The distinction you make between NEED vs WANT doesn't make sense to me.  People don't need PC's either - they're just very handy.  In any case, even if people merely "want" something, you can still get a huge marketshare by playing network effects - witness facebook.  And even if your market is quite a bit smaller, you can still be a great platform and gain value by permitting external improvements to your stuff (e.g. iphone).  Conversely, stuff people really do need (say, food) can be very hard to build a platform on.The point is that it's just damn handy to have a single, trustworthy source not just for financial reasons (better to give you credit card number to just one company rather than 10, say), but also due to interoperability, etc.A platform is worth a lot and WotC is well positioned to be one.  They don't need to reach 100% of the population.  And they haven't really tried, have they?  I mean are they selling third-party content digitally, yet?  It's almost free money, there - and R&D to boot.  Are they permitting third party extensions to their core apps?  Again, why not?  People still need the D&DI subscription to use the app, just that the users are more likely to get what they want (hobbyists doing it themselves, or smaller companies taking the risk) without WotC needing to try expermental changes for everyone nor pay the expenses of development.  Think of the way facebook is profiting off of farmville - and they didn't have to build it (nor any of the thousands of other games that didn't make it).Instead, they create this huge lock-in, annoying everybody who's pet feature is missing - they can't add all of them since there's just too many and some people don't want the same thing as others; they spend oodles of money developing software that's still full of bugs and fairly basic missing features (decent search, copy-paste, etc.); then they try to make D&DI a core value proposition to players - when the subscription model for their content doesn't really work well - they need to make huge amounts of content (which isn't always equally good and inevitably is a bit bland), and fail to really use the content the users are quite willing and capable of making themselves.  For example, in the transition to gleemax and then from gleemax back to wizards, they lost a bunch of excellent threads - threads which should have been turned into something more permanent and valuable rather than.  And forum threads aren't the best way of managing user-generated-content in the first place; you can't really clean it up after the fact, and that's always necessary.  It's like they've set things up so that they need to do all the heavy lifting when the best way to get loyal customers is to have the customers invested themselves - and cheaper to boot!Take, for example, wikipedia's featured page.  Wanna bet that if wizards had something like that on their site & magazines they'd get lots of excellent ideas on the forums?  Or stack-overflow's voting system (if you happen to know that)? They've got the users already! All they need to do is... use em!</blockquote>

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