Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 7984116" data-attributes="member: 18">I mean, the first is definitely true. Up to Beyond, WotC's digital history was so astonishingly bad. They made TSR look like genuises re: games, particularly. Even in 5E they've had some shockingly bad decisions. I could write an essay on all the weird mistakes they made.And Curse weren't really a "well-established digital player" in the way you describe at the time they were picked. They'd never shown any signs of the ability or desire to make a product like this (and yeah I was extremely familiar with them because I was a WoW player, and the stuff they managed wasn't... great...). The only thing they could definitely do was scale. They also had an unfortunate habit of shutting down sites which were somewhat popular, and half-hearted attempts to copy other sites which went nowhere (like when they bought MMO-Champion and started trying to make it into like, their own WoWHead).So they rather fit the "Uh-oh" model for WotC up to that point. And early signs around Beyond were really not-great. Like they didn't have good software, the app was iOS only and kind of rubbish (and took a long time to appear), the character sheet was dreadful for like a year, and the thing they seemed to be really talking about most was the monetization, which appeared predatory and focused on trying to nickle-and-dime people.However, I do agree that it turned out to actually be a pretty great decision. Yeah it took a while, but Beyond totally got their act together. The app matured. The character sheet stopped being rubbish (and got better just recently). The predatory pricing faded into being largely meaningless (the only sore point remaining is that all the search stuff turns up things you don't own, even if you only want to work with things you do, and it really feels like advertising/trying to get your microtransactions, esp. as the devs are totally silent about it despite regular questions), especially as more and more books came out.As the same time, WotC's non-Magic (which had always been ok-ish) digital strategy started looking less shabby in other places. Larian for BG3 looks solid (yeah, sure, okay, it doesn't look it'll actually be a sequel or meaningfully set in the FR, but I expect it'll be a good game at least, just maybe not a BG game), and they're buying studios and hiring cool people (practically mini-Bioware at one of the studios!).So whatever was wrong seems to have been sorted, and hopefully stays sorted.</blockquote>

Verification