D&D General Is D&D Beyond Exclusivity Bad for D&D?

[DEFCON 1]

One clear negative impact of Insider I can recall is that it allowed WotC to engage in video game style "patching" which meant rulebooks were out of sync with the state of the actual rules well beyond what is usually the case with simple errata.

From what I remember, half the audience actually liked having the game patched in real-time. Which is why we then got whole bunches of threads in early 5E complaining that WotC wasn't "fixing" the Great Weapon Master and Sharpshooter feats like they thought they should based on what WotC did during 4E.

But beyond that... some people not liking it didn't stop them from still using the Character Builder even if it no longer "matched" the hard cover books. So there was little real impact other than annoyance. And we have seen throughout the entirety of 5E that most people will keep playing the game even though bits of it annoy them.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Yeah that's what I suspect is the case too. If they really aren't doing 6E and want to keep going with 5E genuinely forever, then we'll see problems, but mostly likely 6E is like, 1-4 years away at this point.

However, if they handle exclusivity the exact same with with 6E (or worse! ), and have 6E on Beyond from day 1 (which I think is likely), then we may see issues starting well within 6E's run.

If we're getting out crystal balls, I wouldn't be totally shocked if WotC tried something really drunk with 6E, like making entirely Beyond-exclusive for a period, with some dubious justification like "Oh we want to get full metrics from people using this stuff to balance properly!", because I feel like WotC may make some 4E-level bad decisions with 6E. I hope not but we'll see.


Quite a few things - @Reynard mentions the biggest one. They wouldn't have tried that if they hadn't gone digital first, because a lot of the changes were quite fiddly and minor.

But DDI's biggest negative impact was probably on WotC's own book sales, because the way DDI worked was you automatically got all the rules so long as you subscribed (including classes, races, feats, etc.), you just didn't get the text unless you virtually bought the books. So I'll be real - I didn't buy a lot of later 4E books because of that. I bought some, but... not all of them. Did they make more money off the sub than they would have off the books? Perhaps? But they could have potentially had both, I think.

DDI was a mess in general and put a lot of people off the game before it even really got going so it's harder to compare.

Was the book thing the problem that broke 4E though? I would argue no, personally. The game's issues went way beyond some players not buying some of the later player-facing hardcovers because they got the mechanics as part of DDI. But as you said, it's really too hard to compare, so I cannot claim any sort of correctedness with my opinion.

 

[Distracted DM]

From what I remember, half the audience actually liked having the game patched in real-time. Which is why we then got whole bunches of threads in early 5E complaining that WotC wasn't "fixing" the Great Weapon Master and Sharpshooter feats like they thought they should based on what WotC did during 4E.

But beyond that... some people not liking it didn't stop them from still using the Character Builder even if it no longer "matched" the hard cover books. So there was little real impact other than annoyance. And we have seen throughout the entirety of 5E that most people will keep playing the game even though bits of it annoy them.

The problem, at least IMO, wasn't that they were making such fixes- it was that for some time they were making them without telling anyone or posting "patch notes." There wasn't an errata list for some time, they'd just change the rules on DnDB and you'd only find out when you went to reference something and could swear that it was different the other day.

 

[DEFCON 1]

The problem, at least IMO, wasn't that they were making such fixes- it was that for some time they were making them without telling anyone. There wasn't an errata list for some time, they'd just change the rules on DnDB and you'd only find out when you went to reference something and could swear that it was different the other day.

I do not recall that personally. All I remember is approximately 2 dozen printer pages of errata people would talk about having stuck in their books because of how often WotC did make errata. So if there was indeed a gap between Character Builder fixes and it getting written down in an errata document for the first time, it wasn't much of one to be rememberable.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Was the book thing the problem that broke 4E though? I would argue no, personally.

By itself? Surely not, yeah. It just didn't help if even someone actively running and enjoying 4E wasn't even buying the books! 4E had so many things going wrong, not even from day 1, but long before launch that's honestly a minor miracle it did as well as it did.

I do not recall that personally. All I remember is approximately 2 dozen printer pages of errata people would talk about having stuck in their books because of how often WotC did make errata. So if there was indeed a gap between Character Builder fixes and it getting written down in an errata document, it wasn't much of one to be rememberable.

Yeah I don't remember there being a noticeable delay there either. If there was a delay, it was single-digit days, and so I think unless you played D&D like, most days, you probably wouldn't have noticed it. Certainly we were playing almost weekly at times in 4E and using the DDI, and I don't remember ever like, booting up the DDI and seeing a change that I didn't see in the errata document until later.

It was definitely a problem that they were updating pretty often, and making both huge changes to how abilities worked, and ton of minor fiddly changes, because it caused players to be having to double-check their abilities and so on, or I was having to pour over the errata and see if any PCs would be impacted and so on.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

It isn't that Beyond is bad, it is that exclusivity to a subscription format is bad.

Beyond does not require a subscription for access to any books. Any books you purchase or free content claimed, you always have access to. The subscriptions have a different purpose.

 

[Reynard]

Beyond does not require a subscription for access to any books. Any books you purchase or free content claimed, you always have access to. The subscriptions have a different purpose.

Always, until you don't.

 

[AlViking]

From what I remember, half the audience actually liked having the game patched in real-time. Which is why we then got whole bunches of threads in early 5E complaining that WotC wasn't "fixing" the Great Weapon Master and Sharpshooter feats like they thought they should based on what WotC did during 4E.

But beyond that... some people not liking it didn't stop them from still using the Character Builder even if it no longer "matched" the hard cover books. So there was little real impact other than annoyance. And we have seen throughout the entirety of 5E that most people will keep playing the game even though bits of it annoy them.

They also provided text that you could cut out and place over the top of the changed text in the books.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Always, until you don't.

I don't think it's likely that they'd change to requiring a subscription to access books you'd paid for, because that would likely lead to lawsuits, which they'd lose, or them having to refund everyone who ever bought a book on Beyond in Europe or the like.

Requiring a subscription is representative of gross modern rentier capitalism, but the long-term concept with their approach to books is, what happens when Beyond is done? At some point it'll stop making enough money to be worth it to WotC, just as the DDI did, and they'll shut it down.

And WotC have offered no clarity on what they'd do in that situation.

My feeling is that if it's shut down whilst WotC are still a going concern with some significant hope for the future at that time, they'll probably offer PDFs of all the books someone has bought for free.

But if WotC are being sold/have been sold or aren't doing great, or worse, are actively being shut down, I think it's quite unlikely they'll do more than say "Just download the app and download the books on to it, and I guess don't change phones ever again because it won't be on the Apple/Google store indefinitely" (indeed it'll definitely disappear from the Apple store within single-digit years because of Apple's approach to security and apps).

 

[Remathilis]

Always, until you don't.

Speculative conspiracy theories serve no value. They haven't. You can argue they might one day, but they might not and unless you access to reliable time travel or precognition, both outcomes have equal chances of happening.

If you want to argue about the value of D&D Exclusivity NOW, you should probably keep the situation as it currently is rather than speculate on worst case scenarios...