Hasbro makes money, everyone wins

[UngainlyTitan]

Dunno, I do not think I would buy rule content on a micro-transaction basis. The only way I see mocro-transactions working with D&D is if the play is already on virtual tables.

 

[Dice4Hire]

Wonderful. However, some of my contacts on Facebook who play Farmville have PhDs, are university professors or highly-paid professionals in other sectors. Perhaps only the people you know from hyperbole-land are generally idiots?

One, he said generally, and from personal experience I know that having a PhD or being a university professor is no protection form being an idiot. I could give you quite a list of people who are all three.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

To resort to a D&D analogy:

Intellegence, Wisdom, and Charisma are three different things. Being smart with academia, being saavy with consumer products, and having good taste in recreations are three completely different things, and having proficiency in one doesn't make you immune from being an idiot in the other two.

Look at how many people with doctorates and masters call in to tech support with the dumbest questions. No offense intended, but PhDs don't include 'Immunity to enjoying mindless cash grabs.'

lol, yeah, totally got to agree with you there. Advanced education and street smarts or social savvy don't really have much to do with each other at all.

As an example:

Look how many educated people in this and other threads actually believe the consumer base for D&D would want a complete digital package? Newsflash: Games are better touched than downloaded. D&D has miniatures and boards and physical hardware for a reason... any game which involves some form physical manipulation is more involving.

Ask many salesmen: It doesn't matter the product, you multiply the chance of selling the product if the customer can hold on to it. Books are tactile, and portable, and relatively cheap. E-readers, and computers are not relatively cheap, nor are the files tactile.

Microtransactions are convenient for music, for computer programs, for video games, sure. But these are things you can't touch, so you have to resort to other methods to increase revenue. Going to a free-to-play, microtransaction model is about reducing the barrier to entry.

However, for physical games, it is not ideal: Having the customer touch your product is far more effective in the long term.

Wizards is capable of taking tactile products into the digital realm with success. D&D (the game system itself) has proven difficult to do so, due to it's nature of not being composed of digital objects, and due to the lack of ability to play it through their digital offerings.

See, all the digital forms of the books in the world won't change the fact that you still need physical dice on a physical table with physical miniatures resting on a physical game tiles. It's a game designed around the physical presentation, losing a big part of its game mechanics if you cut those out. Physical books are the best way to integrate that into the majority of groups... the best you can get out of digital offerings is a handy way to put together characters. Without that digital game table, making the game wholy digital is only cutting off their own foot and saying it'll make them faster in a running race.

Well, let me give you a different view on that. I have a group that started with 4e right after it came out. We have never met. That is I've met SOME of the people in the group (one of them is my sister). The rest I have never met IRL and a few people have come and gone who were total strangers. Yet we play in my campaign weekly, we have fun, we buy books and DDI subscriptions, etc.

Now, I think playing at the table is great and it is a preferable way to play, at least for me. OTOH I'm an old fart in the D&D world, the younger generation that has been brought up with computers and CRPGs and MMORPGs may well feel a bit differently about that. As evidenced by MY playing using a VTT online if even old time players are at least somewhat willing to do that it seems like a viable play mechanism that WotC should do as much as they can to support. The important thing is people play their game. HOW they do that is secondary and the more ways that exist the better.

In any case lets look more closely at the WotC strategy. If you were primarily interested in moving in the direction of an online "micro-payment" or "digital goods" sort of system what would you be doing? Well, for one thing you'd reduce the cost of the physical "hardware" to play the game to the absolute minimum, and concentrate on making those products the most useful ADJUNCTS to playing the game you can. Maybe you would redesign your books to be cheaper smaller paperbacks with a tighter focus in each one. Maybe you would sell a lot of tiles and token sheets. Maybe you would really push to make sure there are FLGS with places to play in as many areas as possible. Huh, maybe you would do what WotC is doing!

Now, I don't claim they're doing all this stuff purely for the purpose of making the game more focused on the online/digital products. There are a bunch of reasons for Essentials, DDE, Encounters, etc. As with most things in this world the evolution of D&D products and business model is being driven by multiple forces. It is just interesting that (as it seems to me) the evolution of the product DOES make sense from a perspective of moving to a new model something like what the OP outlined.

Obviously this is going to be a LONG term thing though. 10 years from now I suspect you will still be able to play D&D the same as you can today and never ever touch any online anything if you don't want to. You'll just be using paper and pencil to make up characters, etc. Maybe you'll even have access to a certain amount of free basic online functionality like the OP mentions. The people that want to play 'old style' will have that option. People that want to do everything online or a mix of the two will have a bunch of other options. They'll probably be able to buy access to content packages and features that they want to use at reasonable prices. They'll probably be able to buy little add-ons or smaller chunks of the bigger packages for less reasonable prices.

I mean really, if you think about it that tempting impulse buy really is an amazing business opportunity. Sure, 50 cents for a monster is expensive when you can get a library of 250 of them for $25, but if THAT is the monster you need right now to put the sauce on your encounter and you can just click the "add it to my monthly payment" button have it RIGHT NOW, well I suspect it might not actually be too hard to make money off that.

That's too expensive. I can get 8 classes, 5 races, and a panoply of feats and other stuff for less than that in paper. A dollar for a monster block? How is that even a good deal compared to buying hundreds of monster blocks for 40 dollars?

And don't get me started on the inability to properly preview stuff in advance. That's the thing with digital offerings: I can't crack open the book at the store, see what's inside, and decide if it's worth picking up.

This is not good for any consumer.

I wouldn't be so eager to condemn the idea. Sure, you may get 350 monsters for $40, but how many of them will you actually ever use? When you look at it that way the great deal you get buying the book doesn't look quite as appealing. Beyond that what you can get online has more VALUE. It is searchable, can be used with various tools (encounter builders, campaign planners, VTTs) and it isn't limited to a specific length by virtue of being stuck in print format, nor will it become obsolete or eventually fall apart and have to be repurchased (lost, stolen, etc). Heck, all sorts of extras can be tossed in. For the nostalgic your $1 monster can have old stat blocks copied out from every version of the game where it ever appeared, and the old text too, and a slew of new text, etc.

As for the problem of review, that is mostly surmountable as well. The way you go about it is for instance by promoting certain people as especially good monster designers. "Get the new Joe Smith Kobold Sneakthief, it's the best thing ever!" With things like community ratings and just generally a really active and critical online community it should work quite well.

Really, what I would expect to see is a gradual evolution and transition. From now on all the digital content is online and part of SOME program you get with a subscription, maybe for free, or maybe as some reward program or redemption system. I'd expect to see them perhaps open up something analogous to the App Store. A place where you can go and make content and charge for it. WotC gets a cut, and you get a cut (which probably you just turn around and use to pay for your DDI stuff anyway unless you do really amazingly well with it). Heck, they could let you sell variant rules systems, settings, adventures, anything. This could be a GREAT system.

As time goes on they will probably transition to a more graduated sort of subscription service with player and DM level subscriptions, a free introductory level, etc. I sort of agree with the people that say WotC isn't the swiftest navigator of the digital world. They HAVE been successful over time, but they seem to move slowly and often misstep before recovering. M:tG online wasn't just instantly successful, it spent a lot of years getting perfected. I think 4e Online will spend a few years getting to where it is going too.

 

[OnlineDM]

See, all the digital forms of the books in the world won't change the fact that you still need physical dice on a physical table with physical miniatures resting on a physical game tiles.

I know you mentioned WotC's own lack of an online game table, but I have to say that I strongly disagree with the statement above. My whole D&D experience is built around MapTool, a lovely virtual tabletop program. My long-running online game has no physical component at all, and even my in-person games now are run with the maps and monsters using MapTool and a digital projector. My players and I are having an absolute blast in all of these games.

I agree that the tactile experience is a great thing, but it's absolutely NOT required in order to have fun with friends in a role-playing game. I for one am having much more fun as a DM without physical tiles or monster minis.

 

[Solvarn]

Response

Successful businesses understand that one of the best ways you can gain market share is by creating a new market. The virtual tabletop and electronic content is the future of D&D. People will continue to play between paper and pen and online play. With creative marketing and solid support in place, you would see online players participate in RPGA events, but the electronic offering should and will drive the business forward.

Offline electronic content won’t happen. Over the next few years you will begin to see many companies moving forward with cloud computing initiatives and a la carte transactions to access software. The advanced graphic artist uses Adobe Photoshop much differently than my wife does to crop photos; different people can purchase different access to the same program if the functions are decoupled, for different prices. This does nothing but add value for the customer, so they don’t pay for features they don’t need. People customizing the way they want their entertainment is a natural extension of what will happen in the software world. WotC has a vested interest in protecting their intellectual property and copyright; without it they have a miniatures line and some dungeon tiles.

Before I get flamed to death, as time goes on, people that don't use the internet will be in the minority as far as stakeholders are concerned. They already are, but the realities of rural America are that many households do not have access to reliable high speed internet service. It would be a major failure if WotC made concessions as a company that risked the integrity of their intellectual property to satisfy a statistical minority of stakeholders. It is a poor business decision and seriously risks the success of the brand. This would affect everything from product quality and availability to the future of the brand in general. What WotC CAN do however is ensure that print material is cheap to obtain, made of good quality material, and available for purchase. The reduced cost printing methods that they are using now fits this mold. If you pre-order on Amazon you can get an Essentials books for something like $13.00 pre-release.

I understand the need is out there for an offline product that incorporates the data. I can’t see that the risk vs. reward of doing this offline pays off or makes sense. This type of software offering would have to be generic enough that it didn’t infringe upon WotC’s intellectual property, and I don’t know that the need would justify the development cost entailed. I also don’t know how something like this wouldn’t just be copied around. The best way to get something like this going is for a community collaboration of some sort, with open source code.

If you don't have an internet connection, perhaps the electronic offering isn't for you and you should just buy the books. If you are a tabletop player that only uses a small fraction of the tools to convenience you, then the price point between the books and the electronic materials you do use should be comparable to someone that is using the virtual tabletop and taking advantage of electronic features, like miniatures, etc. There are tools that could be used by a DM then ported offline, think initiative trackers, etc but the majority of the data content should only be accessible server side. Think about how a terminal accesses a mainframe (i.e. weak computer with basic function accesses big computer with lots of power) and you begin to get the idea.

As far as the economics and price point, I'm a business analyst not an economist. They would need to consult professionals to develop a viable economic model. Any shortcuts they take here, from not doing proper analysis (not understanding the scope, clear project goals, etc.) will just increase the likelihood the project fails. I think this is why projects have failed for the company in the past. What you do with your dollar at the end of the day is up to you.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't basically disagree with you Solvarn, but there will never be any kind of OSS that does much with 4e. They closed that door when they came down on Master Plan. I mean there are plenty of us that are perfectly capable of building tools that work with dnd4e files, etc. There is simply no real point in doing so for any kind of offline purpose. It isn't even worth wasting time on. It is easy enough to see the reasoning behind that at WotC, but it doesn't make the whole thing suck less.

One can talk about playing purely with paper and pencil, but honestly 4e isn't much of a game for that. Writing up a character by hand is not exactly a fun process. You CAN do it, if you have a couple spare hours to spend, but realistically if I were stuck off in a corner of the boonies where I couldn't get access to the digital tools? Forget it, there are simpler games you can play.

I'm not sure the paranoia about piracy of DDI content (CB mostly) is really good for WotC. They'd have been smarter to have just made the stand-alone CB a free product. It would require some support still, but as a free download it wouldn't be necessary to rush out an update every month. Realistically people that play at all seriously ARE going to buy some of the books. Like most piracy calculations I really think this one grossly overestimates the impact. Few people that copy stuff would buy it if they couldn't. Sure, you lose a small amount of revenue, but as Bill Gates pointed out about software piracy in China, he'd MUCH rather you pirated HIS software than installed some free thing that works just as well. You're still a customer, albeit a less valuable one. Lots of customers is a good healthy customer base for a product. You have opportunities to monetize that at some point. People who don't use your product at all? At best you have to spend money and take risks to try to convert them.

 

[Keefe the Thief]

One, he said generally, and from personal experience I know that having a PhD or being a university professor is no protection form being an idiot. I could give you quite a list of people who are all three.

It's still a group attack and as sensible as saying "generally, most people who play D&D are idiots." I really thought these boards were better than this.

 

[Mirtek]

Oh and that Eberron video game thing that's free to play these days. I suppose that doesn't qualify as a success either, what being the most popular free to play game ever...

First of all it's not the most popular free to play game, by several orders of magnitude. Second they made it free to play to at least salvage something from it's failure as a normal MMO

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

First of all it's not the most popular free to play game, by several orders of magnitude. Second they made it free to play to at least salvage something from it's failure as a normal MMO

Well, how does that change the significance of the point? DDO went free-to-play and apparently has gone from a modestly popular MMO to vastly more popular and they're pulling in several times more income from it now selling premium content than they were charging a subscription fee. The fact that the Ebberon MMO is doing the same thing just reinforces the point.

Clearly free basic content as the draw with pay premium content as the money maker is A wave of the future. Whether or not it ends up being the future for traditional D&D is of course hard to say. Seems like they're going to at least give it a try.

 

[DracoSuave]

stuff

Ah yes, the 'I don't have a business degree or actual facts behind the impact of piracy but I got a quote from Bill Gates about Operating Systems and assume it applies equally across all products ever.'

1) Bill Gates would rather piracy than no OS in people's homes because it's market penetration for the platform, creating more demand for software that runs on said platform, encouraging more companies to create software to fill that demand. Thusly, he makes money. Market saturation of the D&D creation tools do not create demand for more D&D stuff.

2) While admitting the tools are a convenience for character creation, really, how hard is it to put down four powers, some class features, one feat, and some math which is generally the same for every power? You're overstating the difficulty involved.

3) There is no indication of a causal effect between piracy of the creation tools and acquisition of the texts those tools draw from. There IS an indication of a causal effect of having those tools available from piracy, and the not paying for those tools.

Look, I get that for some businesses, piracy can create revenue, however in this case, that can hardly be proven. Piracy causing a loss of revenue CAN be proven, but the idea that 'piracy is making more sales!' is less of a statement of fact, and more an article of faith. Moreover, it isn't just piracy that affects this; they also want to do something about the 'subscribe a month, grab everything, quit' customers--they're not using the system as intended either.

For the record, I don't like the move to web-based myself. But I'm not about to confuse that for 'It is therefore best for WoTC to do so because I have faith piracy will make money for them.'