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

[saviirkad]

Has WOTC ever published things on DmsGuild other than AL stuff since they purchased DDB?

Honestly couldn't say about the timelines of releases, but while it would make sense that such a practice may change upon Wizards' purchase, it's still a change in practice. One that would worry those who would rather seek those products outside of DDB, before or after Wizards came to own it.

 

[Reynard]

Has WOTC ever published things on DmsGuild other than AL stuff since they purchased DDB?

Every PDF of everything prior to 5th edition. Plus Lost Laboratory of Kwalish and Wayfinder's Guide to Eberron are both official products.

 

[Remathilis]

There had been precedence for small digital-only releases to be put on D&D Beyond,  and other sites like DMs Guild. The recent digital-only releases are a shift away from that practice, so there is cause to be concerned from those who specifically want to buy the product from somewhere other than D&D Beyond.

I assume part of the reason things like the Tortle Package was released both on DMsGuild and Beyond was, at the time, WotC did not own Beyond lock, stock and barrel yet and it was just another distribution method. But WotC does now and ignoring the traffic exclusivity drives to their platform, I don't think WotC wants to profit share with DTRPG something they can get full benefits from themselves.

(It's also worth noting that creating a PDF would require extra work from the DDB web layout, assuming people did not not a single column of text)

So assuming WotC was even willing to do it, would people be willing to pay an upcharge for PDFs to offset the extra labor in formatting and the cut DTRPG would take? Say, $15 for Beyond but $20-25 for the same on PDF?

I have my the theory on that...

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I wanted to move this discussion out of the new AP thread out of respect for folks that want to talk about, you know, that.

So here we have a place where we can debate the question of whether WotC's apparent leaning into D&D Beyond exclusivity -- meaning not just not offering their digital books elsewhere, but actively putting otu things that will only appear on Beyond -- is bad for D&D and/or bad for customers.

I will not obscure my opinion: Beyond exclusitvity is bad, full stop. It is a crass bludgeon meant to drive people to that platform, and it stinks of the enshittification of D&D. I will not support Beyond, and am pretty sure it is time to stop supporting WotC overall.

Part and parcel with this is the debate about PDFs, which WotC is completely schizophrenic about. Old D&D stuff? Fine! Partnered content? Fine! But official 5E material -- HELL NO (except when it is not "hell no). The reason PDFs matter is PDFs are something you can own. And, IMO, no, forcing customers to make PDFs of badly formatted web pages is not a solution -- it is an insult.

SO that's my perspective, laid out. What's yours?

A note: I know many of us are going to disagree, but let's please try and not attack ONE ANOTHER even if we feel thew need to attack opinions. As @Umbran is almost certain to have to say, let's not make it personal.

In the very long term I do think releasing content exclusively on Beyond will probably bite WotC in the arse.

The trouble is it's quite a complicated equation from a business perspective. Some exclusive content can drive people to your platform, but you also risk kind of creating a walled garden to the point where people outside that garden (even if they're members but not happening to log into it) aren't aware that you're adding things, so you can end up reaching fewer and fewer people with your "exclusive content", and instead of driving traffic to the platform, it can become an opportunity cost, where, if you'd released it more generally, it would benefit your product by bringing people to or back to the product, but by making it a walled garden exclusive, it only reaches a smaller number of people who are already engaging with your product and that gives you pretty limited value.

Whether one regards it as enshittification or not is almost immaterial, because unless it's handled very well, it's not a good idea. Given that I'm a paid subscriber to Beyond (albeit I've set it to not renew) but wasn't even aware they were adding further exclusive content, I think we're probably well into the "adding stuff to the walled garden that only people already active there will even potentially notice" phase of things.

Re: PDFs, I get what they're trying to do re: avoiding piracy, but I think they're stuck in the past in the way a handful of Japanese videogame developers are - that small number of companies (sadly including Vanillaware) won't develop for PC because they're utterly paranoid about piracy on PC. But the cold reality is, they'd sell insanely more copies on PC, to the point where piracy would be a total irrelevance.

Likewise with PDFs. Would 5E be pirated more if PDFs existed? Sure. Would this decrease 5E's overall sales at all? I very much doubt it. In fact, I suggest there is a small but significant market of people who don't like to buy things on Beyond (esp. as Beyond has made no promises at all re: what will happen when it shuts down, as it inevitably will, probably surprisingly and at relatively short notice as the DDI did), but who would absolutely buy PDFs. There are also people who would simply buy all three formats, if WotC want to triple-dip! That's $$$ y'aaaaaall. Free money.

I mean it's 2026. PDFs are not like, hot and cool. A lot of people genuinely would rather use an app, especially younger people (but not exclusively them). I don't think any significant or measurable number of people who would be willing to use Beyond, who currently use Beyond, would decide "Oh, I can get a pirated PDF (which being real, are out there anyway) so I won't use Beyond!" And of people who do use Beyond, I don't think you're suddenly going to see a bunch of users go "OMG I can buy PDFs now, I'm ending my subscription!!!!!" because like, you can access your Beyond books when your sub ends right now! So they'd already have ended it! And as noted, I think a small but significant number of people will buy the PDFs, making more money for WotC.

Why are they stuck on no PDFs?

Probably because someone high up in WotC corporate, above D&D entirely quite likely, or multiple someones (echo chamber, groupthink, etc.) is stuck on the idea/meme of PDFs causing piracy or hurting subscriptions or the like, even though that's irrational or unsupported by any kind of recent market survey, so it just isn't a "politically acceptable" idea to bring up. And one day, that personally will probably leave WotC, and unless it's groupthink, then bam, a month later WotC will suddenly be selling PDFs.

(At the current rate I suspect 6E coming out and 5E getting PDFs because previous editions get PDFs is more likely though.)

 

[AlViking]

Every PDF of everything prior to 5th edition. Plus Lost Laboratory of Kwalish and Wayfinder's Guide to Eberron are both official products.

Yes things change but you see a bogeyman I don't. Life is too short to invent things to worry about.

 

[Sulicius]

My current theory on why they won’t do PDF’s is very simple: D&DBeyond requires you to go through them to access your content.

That means that every time you want to open your character sheet, look up a monster, read an adventure, you get an ad for the latest product.

This advertisement is VERY valuable!

 

[VashVet]

The trouble is it's quite a complicated equation from a business perspective. Some exclusive content can drive people to your platform, but you also risk kind of creating a walled garden to the point where people outside that garden (even if they're members but not happening to log into it) aren't aware that you're adding things, so you can end up reaching fewer and fewer people with your "exclusive content", and instead of driving traffic to the platform, it can become an opportunity cost, where, if you'd released it more generally, it would benefit your product by bringing people to or back to the product, but by making it a walled garden exclusive, it only reaches a smaller number of people who are already engaging with your product and that gives you pretty limited value.

This is a good point. At least for myself, when there’s stuff available only on D&D Beyond, I tend to think it’s secondary material that’s lower in quality than something with a broader release. That may be completely not true nor fair, but it’s just the feel I get on that stuff.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I think the D&D game will have moved on to whatever the next generation of it would be way way way before "DDB Exclusivity" has any impact on anything whatsoever.

After all... does anyone remember what 'negative impact' D&D Insider had during the 4E era? I mean, I'm sure some people thought there was, because there always is someone who thinks there is. WotC can't do anything without someone thinking it is a horrible idea and going to cause some big issue "down the road".

But do we know of anything from DDI that has impacted the last decade of 5E? None that I can think of. So I suspect we are seeing the same situation here. WotC will annoy some patrons because they can't do anything without pissing off somebody... but it won't have any lasting impact or remembrance because 99.99% of the customer base just couldn't give a hoot.

 

[Reynard]

After all... does anyone remember what 'negative impact' D&D Insider had during the 4E era? I mean, I'm sure some people thought there was, because there always is someone who thinks there is. WotC can't do anything without someone thinking it is a horrible idea and going to cause some big issue "down the road".

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.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I think the D&D game will have moved on to whatever the next generation of it would be way way way before "DDB Exclusivity" has any impact on anything whatsoever.

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.

After all... does anyone remember what 'negative impact' D&D Insider had during the 4E era?

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.