D&D 5E (2024) Lorwyn: First Light has been released

[Remathilis]

quite different actually, servers are basically free, unlike store rent - and WotC is more than welcome to sell me PDFs, if they feel having to host files is such a burden

If you think server farms are free, I can give you the power bill of a major data center to pay. Server farms are getting hella expensive to run, with AI servers consuming the power equivalent of whole cities. One of the biggest issues we're going to have to deal with is how resource hungry the Internet is becoming in terms of power, water (servers run hot and need water to cool then) and rare earth minerals for chips.

This isn't web 1.0 where I can host a website on a spare computer in my basement. A dynamic site like D&D Beyond is fairly large and complicated. And that infrastructure and it's maintenance is costly.

I'm not justifying $15 is the best price point, but I want to dispel the idea that digital is "free" to produce and host.

 

[Remathilis]

RPG books are reference books, with functional illustrations like maps and tables. You don't want it to resize.

My 46 year old stigmatic, far-sighted eyes beg to differ!

 

[Parmandur]

RPG books are reference books, with functional illustrations like maps and tables. You don't want it to resize.

Why not...? Beyond stuff also resizes. It is one of the fundamental problems with PDF that it doesn't respond to the screen.

 

[mamba]

Uninteresting to you, sure. I'm not interested in it either. Thwt doesn't make it being ghe price of a sandwich predatory.

I did not say uninteresting, I said overpriced, and at 2 to 3 times what any other publisher charges I do consider that a verifiable fact, not an opinion.

Will some people buy them regardless, sure, but that doesn’t make them not overpriced. Pretty sure they will be a success for WotC, they probably have to only sell 1000 of them to break even, and the bundle preorders probably already exceeded that

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Will some people buy them regardless

This is the big problem really. And those who complain about the existence of products, because they haven’t understood that they don’t have to buy them.

 

[mamba]

If you think server farms are free, I can give you the power bill of a major data center to pay. Server farms are getting hella expensive to run, with AI servers consuming the power equivalent of whole cities.

no AI power consumption levels here, just dirt cheap storage. If that is an issue, WotC is more than welcome to offer PDFs instead

 

[UngainlyTitan]

RPG books are reference books, with functional illustrations like maps and tables. You don't want it to resize.

The absolute bulk of it are text, descriptions and rules and I do want it to resize if the font is so small that I cannot read it. I recently had this experience with a pdf. Cannot resize the font. I can read it on the pc with a large monitor where I can resize the image but nowhere else.
As I have said, I absolutely want it to resize, I can manage the cases where I care about the tables or the map. D&DBeyond is quite readable on their app (including tables), at least the bits where I want to read on the app.

 

[Parmandur]

I did not say uninteresting, I said overpriced, and at 2 to 3 times what any other publisher charges I do consider that a verifiable fact, not an opinion.

Will some people buy them regardless, sure, but that doesn’t make them not overpriced. Pretty sure they will be a success for WotC, they probably have to only sell 1000 of them to break even, and the bundle preorders probably already exceeded that

If enough people will buy them to be successful, then by definition they are not overpriced.

 

[Parmandur]

no AI power consumption levels here, just dirt cheap storage. If that is an issue, WotC is more than welcome to offer PDFs instead

Oh, really, how much is WotC paying...?

 

[zakael19]

Storage is cheap, compute is not.