Merric's view: Thoughts on the Digital Initiative.

[Jürgen Hubert]

Could even be more than that. It costs about -- what? 80$ a year for a combined Dragon and Dungeon subscription currently? You could see a $60 yearly fee announced, which would still be $20 a year less than the print magazines, and therefore discounted from print. So, say, $10 a month if buying by the month, and $5.50 a month if buying for the year?

That still strikes me as too high. After all, many people prefer to have a printed-out product if they have the choice, so the costs for a purely digital format must be a lot lower to be cost-effective.

If they are smart, WotC will go for a lower price - at least for the first year, when more people need to get used to the change.

 

[Arnwyn]

Odd thought of the... err... too late at night: If Wizards had announced that they were cancelling the magazines, but replacing them in an online form headed by Erik Mona (they're not, as far as I know), would you have been as unhappy?

Pretty much, yes.

See for me, my biggest problem of the DI is the format, not the loss of Dungeon and Dragon from Paizo per se. I'm just not interested in purchasing purely digital products (and leasing is right out), especially since I'm tied to a PC and printer to make any use of them (and I do have to print the stuff to get any use out of it...).

(That's why the talk of compilations are getting a heap of attention from me.)

 

[EATherrian]

Odd thought of the... err... too late at night: If Wizards had announced that they were cancelling the magazines, but replacing them in an online form headed by Erik Mona (they're not, as far as I know), would you have been as unhappy?

Cheers!

Truthfully, I don't think I would be as upset. My beef with the current situation is that I think Paizo is actually putting out much better material than WoTC. I would probably trust this more if I saw the people I know will perform were in charge. Interesting point to bring up, Merric.

 

[WayneLigon]

Another interesting idea is that it's easier to do feedback this way. Have a series of ratings on each adventure and you quickly get an idea of what people like and don't like, as long as you take care to weight it in some way.

 

[maddman75]

One of my biggest concerns, and a basic deal breaker is keeping the information that I paid for. In the interview WotC kind of danced around this issue, but for me the fact that I still have magazines from a year ago that I own and can reference anytime I want trumps most of the advantages of the DI as so far announced. Yeah it's great not having to find space for all those mags, but if the alternative is "keep paying" even if later quality drops, to keep the stuff I paid for and want...Nope, I'll pass.

Indeed. WotC should ask DTRPG how the gaming community feels about DRM. Anything beyond watermarking is going to send people into a tizzy.

 

[I'm A Banana]

You know what just occurred to me:

This would be a great time for some 3rd party d20 company to start publishing a monthly magazine including hype and excitement for 3rd party d20 products.

There is *no* competition from Dungeon or Dragon now. The field is open. Get their readership!

You wouldn't be able to focus on WotC products, but as long as you focused on "cool stuff for any campaign," I'm not sure it'd matter a whole lot...

 

[Jer]

You know what just occurred to me:

This would be a great time for some 3rd party d20 company to start publishing a monthly magazine including hype and excitement for 3rd party d20 products.

There is *no* competition from Dungeon or Dragon now. The field is open. Get their readership!

You wouldn't be able to focus on WotC products, but as long as you focused on "cool stuff for any campaign," I'm not sure it'd matter a whole lot...

That would be nice, if there was any indication that a 3rd party gaming magazine could get enough traction in the market to get enough readership to survive. Paizo is kinda-sorta doing something like this with their Pathfinder material, but even that is a book format -- no need to count on advertising or newsstand distribution, but with the higher cover-price that a book entails.

Dragon and Dungeon had the benefit of being "official" sources for D&D material. They could draw on a huge player network for subscribers. ANY third party magazine that tries to do Dragon or Dungeon as "d20 OGL" product is going to face a huge hurdle in getting subscribers as they're only going to be pulling from the ranks of folks who are willing to buy d20, non-"official" material.

As a selfish, personal aside, the main reasons I was still getting Dragon anyway were for the "D&D-isms" in the magazine -- things that you just can't get from a third-party product because, well, they aren't allowed to use the material. The Demonomicon articles, the Core Beliefs articles, the Eberron Dragonshards articles -- those are the articles that convinced me to renew my subscription. Having other quality articles in the mix convinced me it was worthwhile overall, but without those core articles I probably would have saved my pennies and bought more Green Ronin or Goodman Games material instead.

Interestingly, this isn't the case with Dungeon -- the quality of the adventures has been consistently high enough over the last few years that renewing Dungeon wasn't even a question this time around. I would still get it even without the ties to Greyhawk that show up in the Adventure Path adventures or the occasional Eberron adventure that pops up -- the quality of the adventures in general is just that good and the utility of being able to plop them down on my table is worth the cost to me. I'm hoping that Pathfinder is a decent replacement.

 

[blargney the second]

I wonder if there's been a hefty whack to goodwill.

WotC has unquestionably taken a hit to goodwill, although the size is unknown. Every customer that goes from buying a product every month to considering not buying its new replacement, means goodwill takes some damage.

-blarg

ps - If James or Erik were heading up the DI, it would at least take some of the sting out of losing Dungeon. Those guys did really good things for the mags!

 

[BiggusGeekus]

I
Just
Want
To
Be
Able
To
Read
It
At
Work

RSS feed, emails, PDFs I can download from home. Whatever. Just make it easy for me to read it at work.


Please?

 

[Glyfair]

Who will be writing for the Digital Initiative?
People. More specifically, part of the DI will be written by Wizards staff. Other parts of it - and probably the greater part - will come from outside contributions.

I'm skeptical about this. I've seen many comments from various regular contributors to Dragon and Dungeon who have stated they don't know how they will be able to publish certain things with the magazines ending. They haven't been contacted by WotC, and the creators would be the first people contacted about such a project.\

I expect this will be limited to WotC staff and perhaps a few favored freelancers (and at least one person I mentioned is a WotC freelancer).