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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 8908318" data-attributes="member: 71699">There are (at least) two commercial concerns at play here. The first you have touched on - other-VTT vs DnDBeyond-VTT competition. A second - that they expressly call attention to - is (attempting to draw) a line between VTT and "video game". That impacts not solely their VTT revenues, but their video game revenues.As controllers of all that which everyone agrees is their IP, Hasbro don't have to extend a license to a VTT owner who doesn't agree to stay within whatever arbitrary boundaries they set. This isn't the philosophical question of what a VTT is and what a video game is (which I think imponderable), but that if you want a license from Hasbro to IP they claim ownership of, such as Magic Missile and Owlbear, then they want to exclude some techniques that they think would blur the lines between their VTT licences and their video game licences.One might feel that it is the competition between other VTTs and DnDBeyond that is most material here. To know if that is true, I would need to know the revenue (to Hasbro) from VTT licences. However, I would guess that revenue is small enough that it is commercially feasible to just cut it completely. Additionally, things like dynamic illustration of Magic Missiles fall into a category I would call "gold-plating" which is to say that it seeks to differentiate through raising the quality bar of existing features, which historically has always favoured the company with the deepest pockets. (They can better afford to invest in gold-plating, and they earn more from doing so.)Thus, preventing competition probably isn't really their aim. I think it is genuinely to draw a line between VTT licences and video game licences. The burr is the imponderability of the ontological distinction between VTT and video game. For example, the difference between what looks like a missile streak and what looks like an owlbear token is at its most fundamental, coordinate update rate. Both may be lit. Both, perforce, can be moved over the map. Depending on the rendering tools, both could well be texture-mapped 3D models. When I look at a "video game" like Gloomhaven (on Steam) that doesn't seem so far from a VTT to me (it might be trivial, in fact, to create a VTT for a Gloomhaven RPG based on what they already have implemented.) My view would probably be that VTTs are a subset of videogame. Certainly, I do not think the crucial or most plausible differentiator is whether it has/has not animation, dynamic lighting, particle effects etc, or even physics, collision detection and such like. And as has been discussed, in future the distinction might not even be that it has a human DM, or that all players are human.Anyway, I wanted to present this food for thought and see what others might think. To me, there are two interesting questions in play: 1) what are they really trying to achieve, and 2) how foreseeably effective - and fair minded - is their approach to achieving it? Given one's answer to 1), what might be a better approach?</blockquote>

Verification