Interesting. I look forward to seeing what comes of this - some thrilling ideas, no doubt, but I'm keeping myself reserved so as not to be let down should those thrilling ideas be brought into less-than-thrilling existence.
GTA's prices are not the best yardstick since a LOT of that goes to voice acting (and casting celebs) and licencing an eff-tonne of music.
$4 mil is pretty low for a AAA game. But it's a lot for a new studio, even one backed by WotC. Heck, D&D the RPG probably barely pulls in $4 million each year.
It took three years, a $3,900,000 on Kickstarter, and an established team of experiences game designers to make that happen.
I doubt WotC is going to throw that much money at a completely untested group of people to make a D&D game in the hopes it turns a profit...
I'm absolutely fine with them started from phone apps and moving up. The president needs to see returns to make a push, I understand, even if he has a D&D background. They'd have a hell of a kickstarter if they licensed it to Obsidian, InExile or Harebrained Schemes.
This has already been done. Go watch a video of Fantasy Grounds. I think Roll20 does it ok too.I think that one thing I'd love for D&D would be an app that is expressly designed to be a companion to the APs. So you could buy a thing on it to activate, say, Storm King's Thunder, and it will not only have all the combats pre-built as combat encounters with initiative tracking and whatnot, but will also add all of the monsters and magic items to an internal database, and even have story notes and images ready to go for the campaign, so you could use it as a crib sheet and easily show the NPC images to the players. That, I think, would genuinely be a valuable addition to the D&D experience.
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GTA's prices are not the best yardstick since a LOT of that goes to voice acting (and casting celebs) and licencing an eff-tonne of music.
$4 mil is pretty low for a AAA game. But it's a lot for a new studio, even one backed by WotC. Heck, D&D the RPG probably barely pulls in $4 million each year.
I think that one thing I'd love for D&D would be an app that is expressly designed to be a companion to the APs. So you could buy a thing on it to activate, say, Storm King's Thunder, and it will not only have all the combats pre-built as combat encounters with initiative tracking and whatnot, but will also add all of the monsters and magic items to an internal database, and even have story notes and images ready to go for the campaign, so you could use it as a crib sheet and easily show the NPC images to the players. That, I think, would genuinely be a valuable addition to the D&D experience. /QUOTE]
They could also just purchase an existing tool, like Lion's Den Game Master 5e, and build a marketplace (DM's Guild) onto it. That would cover iOS devices. Or they could do an HTML 5 solution for this like Orc's Pub.
Lots of people working on this. If this is their goal, it should be doable and affordable. Much more so than a AR game or new online RPG
This has already been done. Go watch a video of Fantasy Grounds. I think Roll20 does it ok too.