D&D General Hey, are we all cool with having to buy the same book twice, or what?

[seebs]

I wrote a thing which parsed one of the formats from the premade rules and converted them into pretty-printed searchable HTML complete with all the images and stuff. I don't remember where, but it's still floating around somewhere.

 

[Bravesteel25]

Does the reason why the service is no longer accessible matter?

Yes, unfortunately it does. I work in IT, for a small municipality, but the concepts are the same. You can't just continue to use old software infrastructure as it not only causes security issues, but compatibility issues as well. The amount of resources needed to keep something like the Insider usable today would multiply exponentially not just year by year, but often times month by month.

 

[eyeheartawk]

Yes, unfortunately it does. I work in IT, for a small municipality, but the concepts are the same. You can't just continue to use old software infrastructure as it not only causes security issues, but compatibility issues as well. The amount of resources needed to keep something like the Insider usable today would multiply exponentially not just year by year, but often times month by month.

That's exactly my point. When it becomes not worthwhile to keep the service available, they simply won't. The technicality of why they did from the end user perspective is irrelevant.

With Insider you were just paying a subscription for tools and for access to some magazines. You didn't buy books on top of this.

Here, they're asking you to buy books that will, eventually, become unavailable, for whatever reason. That's the objectionable part.

If, Beyond was like, just a flat subscription fee that gives you access to everything, that'd be one thing. But if I'm buying books I expect to own them. Like, when 4th edition came out The WOTC RPG police didn't come and take my 3E books off my shelf, which would be the equivalent here.

 

[Jester David]

Does the reason why the service is no longer accessible matter?

Yes.
Microsoft Silverlight will no longer be supported sometime in 2020, and without that the tools can't function.

In this case people have spent hundreds of dollars on purchasing books as well, and I would imagine for a fair amount of them they would also be their sole copies.

Thankfully, when DnDBeyond does vanish into the aether of the web—assuming no one has turned a webscraper onto it and copied it's files to make an offline version—it will be many years into 6e.

At that point, anyone who only had digital copies of 5e but still wants to play should be able to find cheap, used copies of the 5e books they lack physical copies of. Probably for cheaper than you can get them now...
Plus, on the DMsGuild, WotC and One Book Shelf have slowly been adding Print on Demand copies of books from older editions. Half a decade into 6e, you can expect to be able to get physical copies of 5e books printed to order at will.

Again, assuming they're still playing 5e.

Them eventually becoming unavailable is a very valid concern. One that I think is just flippant to dismiss with "Nobody plays old games anyway, lol".

Thankfully, the D&D Beyond website is just a website and doesn't make use of Flash or Silverlight, and is relatively future proof.

Given WotC kept the digital tools for their least popular edition running for eight years after that edition ended until the technology that drove it went away, I can imagine them allowing DnDBeyond to stay up but just ending new subscriptions/ purchases for a similar length of time. At the very least.

So those digital purchases might be safe until the better part of a decade into 6th Edition. Which at the current rate of things, might well be 2030 or 2035.

So someone who buys the all-in Legendary Bundle right now will pay $663. By the time the service theoretically ends in 2035—if ever—they will have had the products for 180 months or $3 per month. It would have cost them a cup of Starbucks each month, and for that price they got fifteen years of access to D&D books. That's pretty good. They got their money's worth.
It doesn't seem entirely unfair that it eventually goes away. Nothing lasts forever.

 

[Urriak Uruk]

If, Beyond was like, just a flat subscription fee that gives you access to everything, that'd be one thing. But if I'm buying books I expect to own them. Like, when 4th edition came out The WOTC RPG police didn't come and take my 3E books off my shelf, which would be the equivalent here.

WotC would never agree to this. People could sign up for one month, copy all the material they want, cancel and never go back.

I really don't get what you're missing here. WotC is under no obligation that they must give you both a digital and hard copy; they can charge what they want, for how much they want. If it's profitable for them, they win. Clearly it is, so it's fine.

 

[Bravesteel25]

That's exactly my point. When it becomes not worthwhile to keep the service available, they simply won't. The technicality of why they did from the end user perspective is irrelevant.

With Insider you were just paying a subscription for tools and for access to some magazines. You didn't buy books on top of this.

Here, they're asking you to buy books that will, eventually, become unavailable, for whatever reason. That's the objectionable part.

If, Beyond was like, just a flat subscription fee that gives you access to everything, that'd be one thing. But if I'm buying books I expect to own them. Like, when 4th edition came out The WOTC RPG police didn't come and take my 3E books off my shelf, which would be the equivalent here.

I can understand how that would be objectionable, and I don't disagree with you. The best you can do is go in understanding that DDB really IS a service, and archive that content the best you can in preparation for the inevitable suspension of that service.

Really, you are just spreading financial expenditure of that service into book-sized payments instead of a monthly subscription. It is what it is.

 

[Jester David]

Here, they're asking you to buy books that will, eventually, become unavailable, for whatever reason. That's the objectionable part.

If, Beyond was like, just a flat subscription fee that gives you access to everything, that'd be one thing. But if I'm buying books I expect to own them. Like, when 4th edition came out The WOTC RPG police didn't come and take my 3E books off my shelf, which would be the equivalent here.

Yes. Because when you buy a physical book, everyone knows you will have it FOREVER

 

[eyeheartawk]

Yes. Because when you buy a physical book, everyone knows you will have it FOREVER

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Ah yes, I keep forgetting about the plague of Library Dinosaurs that go into most people's books collection and make them illegible and unable to be used. Even your example there is perfectly usable. But, that's not really the point.

How much you want to bet there will at least be one single intact copy of the PHB in the whole wide world by the time the service is discontinued, or ten or twenty or even fifty years after?

You know how many copies of your books you'll have the day after Beyond stops working? Zero.

 

[seebs]

Again, assuming they're still playing 5e.

Or want to look it up for any reason. I have looked things up in both 1e and 2e rules within the last week...

 

[Mistwell]

Them eventually becoming unavailable is a very valid concern. One that I think is just flippant to dismiss with "Nobody plays old games anyway, lol".

As you made a flippant mischaracterization of the position people have posited here, I guess you are fine with flippancy on this topic?