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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8898582" data-attributes="member: 18">That's absolutely WotC's goal, but there's a huge question mark over whether they can achieve it.WotC is investing extremely hard in the 3D VTT. It's never invested in any D&D project like this - 350 employees, I suspect that's far more than WotC has ever had on D&D. It's as many as an AAA videogame.But AAA projects go wrong all the time, and indie projects are often massive successes.So will WotC manage to make the 3D VTT so good that people won't even want to play other RPGs, or use other VTTs? Colour me skeptical. The problem for WotC is that there's no "standard" way of doing VTTs that they can just improve on. To make a truly accessible, mainstream VTT, they're going to have to do something new, and that's risky, and with 350 people? It's far riskier than with, say, 5.On top of them having to do something new, they have a bunch of pressures on them, including some which conflict with making the best possible VTT experience. For example, one of the main goals of the VTT is to sell microtransaction minis (literally stated in WotC's reveal of the 3D VTT concept). A lot of AAA games fall down because of that sort of monetization leading to them compromising the base experience. Especially as WotC also expressed the desire to sell dungeon tiles, which rather strongly implies a compromised base experience, one that'll be intentionally incomplete (otherwise why would you need separately-purchased tiles?). And historically, this sort of microtransaction-heavy approach hasn't played very well with also requiring a subscription and content purchases. It looks to me like WotC are envisioning quadruple dipping here, which is nearly unprecedented.I mean, what it sounds like what WotC want to do with the VTT is:1) Make the person launching the session have subscription to Beyond (probably Master tier). They might go as far as making everyone, even the players require a subscription, but that seems bold even for them. +$$2) Still charge you individually for each sourcebook, adventure, etc. (rather than including them in a sub). This is a bit like an MMO charging you both a subscription AND asking you to buy every expansion separately - a business model that basically died in the '00s because people weren't feeling the value. Still, might work. +$$3) Charge you for the minis. They definitely want to do this, and it's unclear if they'll have just crummy minis/tokens if you don't pay for them or what. You too can look forward to the day one of your players turns up with a branded and official Minsc mini, complete with automatically playing a "Go for the eyes, Boo!" sound effect every time they hit in combat. +$$4) Charge you for the dungeon tiles. Presumably you'll get a fairly limited/plain tileset to start with, with very limited decorations, and that looks kind of bleh, then WotC will be able to sell you stuff that doesn't suck. They sort of implied bundling this with the adventures - i.e. buy Strahd 2, get the "vampire castle" tileset - but I'm sure they'll sell you the vampire castle tileset at some extortionate price if you don't buy Stradh 2 as well. +$$You can see why they're so psycho about this. They think they're going to launch WoW 2, only WAY more monetized.More likely they manage to "do an Anthem", given their total and utter lack of understanding of their audience.Also, however well-designed the 3D VTT is, I guarantee you an indie/small dev makes a multi-game VTT that works better within 3 years of it releasing, and WotC won't be willing/able to capture the innovations made there.</blockquote>

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