Is DDI going to be retro?
- Thread starter Emirikol
- Start date
El Mahdi
Muad'Dib of the Anauroch
(Interogative Bump)
That's a good question. I didn't think about it until you brought this up. Also, what is there to keep someone from only getting a subscription one month each year and downloading all of the past years articles and mags? Does anyone know if WoTC has said anything about this?
That's a good question. I didn't think about it until you brought this up. Also, what is there to keep someone from only getting a subscription one month each year and downloading all of the past years articles and mags? Does anyone know if WoTC has said anything about this?
Shemeska
Adventurer
If they don't give retroactive access to past stuff, it's going to be another gut-punch of bad PR. They don't need more of that right now.
Requiring a certain buy-in period before gaining access to older stuff, or making people buy "back issues" of the e-magazines is just begging for an active torrent problem.
Requiring a certain buy-in period before gaining access to older stuff, or making people buy "back issues" of the e-magazines is just begging for an active torrent problem.
A buy-in period is the best way to prevent people to buy a month and download all of the magazines from a certain period, and those will certainly fall to torrents. The best way to handle this is to give people who made the 12 or 6 months deal full back access, while demanding at least a two montly subscription before said access is granted.
doctorhook
Legend
...Which has already been and likely continues to be a serious problem for Wizards. You're right though, that's the sort of problem they need about as badly as I need my foot sawed off, which is to say, "not very".
FWIW, this is absolutely not what I imagined this topic to be about when I read the subject. (DDI in bell-bottoms occurred to me, though.)
Ruin Explorer
Legend
This is an extremely silly attitude, I'd suggest.
The only way, in this day and age, to ensure that you get custom, is to do your utmost to please your customer, not to be placing needless illogical restrictions on them.
It's perfectly likely that people will sign up specifically in order to access back-catalogue material, having heard about it - If they ever do a good AP, this would be a perfect example. Those people will not be accepting of a two month delay before they're allowed to access that material, nor of additional fees to access it. Instead they'll either seek other material, or simply access it through less ethical routes.
Essentially it's the same problem any site with a "back-catalogue" has, whether it's a porn-site, an informational site, or whatever. The only way to get people to stick around is to continually provide them with significant amounts of new material and preferably some kind of service that's simply not something you can only subscribe to occasionally.
The only possible way for the DDI to succeed is for Wizard to do their damndest to provide the absolute best service possible, and ensure that customer perceptions are that this is what's occurring. If they mess around, and perceptions don't go that way, they will lose custom, and lose it fast. Refusing to provide your back-catalogue to new customers is an absolute prime example of messing around, and there's no possibility that it would fail to seriously damage customer perceptions. It's really that simple.
I mean, it's not like you're much better off with two months than one. If you can't convince people to stay subscribed, you're SUNK already. Slightly reducing the amount of money you're losing whilst significantly irking customers is simply NOT a good trade-off.
What I would suggest is a good idea for Wizards, and what they seem to intend to do, is bundling their services, and not parcelling them out. This is more likely to encourage people into trying services they'd not considered, and more likely to ensure long-term subscription.
But has WotC *said* anything about it? I don't know if describing something as being good business practice is any guarantee that WotC will follow. They might just as easily go the AOL route and just make cancellation so complicated that anyone who subscribes for a month will just stick around to avoid the frustration.
I confess, I was planning on getting the "seasonal subscriptions" in hopes that my four-times-a-year payment plan would allow me to download all the content that I'd skipped.
For what it's worth, I'm not 100% sure how much of their DDI revenue they're planning on coming from their online magazines. It's entirely possible that they expect people to subscribe month to month so they can use the virtual table and the other tools.
I confess, I was planning on getting the "seasonal subscriptions" in hopes that my four-times-a-year payment plan would allow me to download all the content that I'd skipped.
For what it's worth, I'm not 100% sure how much of their DDI revenue they're planning on coming from their online magazines. It's entirely possible that they expect people to subscribe month to month so they can use the virtual table and the other tools.
Remathilis
Legend
Sadly, I thought the OP was going to ask about Dragon publishing articles for 1e/2e/3e/OD&D, etc...
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