It's weird that the entire industry uses such an outdated model.
Thank you for pointing this out. Hopefully the guy below reads this. To add to this there is a reason why industry standards exist, it's to promote accessibility for as many people as possible of as many socioeconomic backgrounds as possible, and it promotes competition in the market by allowing multiple applications a set standard to they have to adhere to to ensure quality of product and ideally prevent price gouging/manipulation via market monopolies. Now, granted D&D is an IP owned by wizards and they are entitled to release their products however they wish. Just as I am entitled to dislike their chosen method of distribution.
So you seem to have a bunch of misconceptions. One you don’t need a subscription. The only thing a sub does is allow you to share content and allow you to make extra characters (and some free stuff). I don’t have a sub for example.
While you don’t get PDFs what you do get still have bookmarks, and links to most things. The Twitch thing was because D&D Beyond was originally owned by Twitch’s owner. It’s not required anymore. (You do need to link an account, but I am not sure why that bothers people). The Beyond App allows you to download your purchases and read them offline.
Thank you for bringing up precisely one of my major issues with the product. As a DM I cannot make homebrew content and share it with my players without a subscription. So no. It is not "free" as you seem to claim it to be. Free to players maybe, but definitely NOT free to DMs...you know, the major people in the hobby likely to sink money into said hobby? Every dollar I have to spend on a subscription service or rebuying the books effectively a second time is money that I can't spend on miniatures, new products, or other essentials needed to run my games.
While I fundamentally disagree with not caring about other people, I agree that the free stuff is generally offered as a bribe to get more people to sign up. I'm not sure that they would never give out free stuff in the unlikely scenario that "everyone" was signed up, but this free stuff is almost certainly there to get more people to sign up.
I don't know if I made that make any more sense or not.
With respect, this is literally textbook capitalism, especially in the technology sector. If you didn't pay for it
you are the product. Them allowing limited free access to their system is precisely the same sort of thing mobile games (and dealers of certain industries we can't name here) use in order to promote a taste of their product in order to ppsychologically manipulate people into lowering their defenses to opening their wallets. Buying the books on top of the pay wall is
exactly the same as microtransactions or paid DLC in games, and people have been despising that since the day they added it to gaming. Now we can debate the exact morals of said product as much as anyone wants, but I argue that principally it's the same.
I take frustration at requiring the sign up of an account for precisely the reason I mentioned above about "free" stuff. How do I know they aren't using my data behind the scenes? Why should I trust them just because of a disclaimer on a website? How can they guarantee their servers won't be hacked and are they selling that data to any 3rd party company? This all matters.
Don't underestimate the importance of maintaining your members/subscribers with that same sort of "free" stuff.
Also this. Maintaining subscribers allows one to attract ad revenue and potential companies interested in purchasing customer data and the bigger their subscriber count the the more it is worth financially.
I agree with you. On the other hand, I find that internet arguments spend (IMO) too much time discussing how people say things, and miss what people are saying. As annoying as it can be, hyperbole is a perfectly normal way of speaking. It's just that in person, you can usually tell (by tone or body language) that both the speaker and the spoken to are supposed to know that hyperbole is being used for emphasis, and not meant to be taken as literal fact. Same goes for the understatement.
In a perfect world, we'd all learn how we need to change the way we communicate in order to do it online (a very different skill set than in person) but frankly, a lot of us (not just us here, but people in general) aren't great at in-person discussions either.
Agreed with the body language. Disagree that it's a valid way of speaking, and this is coming from someone who actively has to police himself from doing it. It's a logical fallacy that quickly leads to one's arguments being disregarded and dismissed outright (albeit often from those who aren't seeking to truly engage in good faith debate in the first place).
That's fair, and I think it would be nice. I just find it odd when PDF is treated like the ultimate in game text technology...
I mean, WotC does sell PDFs through the DMsGuild, and longterm I think we may see older 5E books go there as they become Legacy content.
It's treated that way because again, not everyone can always have access to top of the line electronics or internet 24/7. Just because
you can afford that doesn't mean everyone can. Pdf files are nearly universally accessible with any sort of device, do not require internet or a web browser, and again,
cannot be taken away from you at any point.
www.dndbeyond.com
