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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8305463" data-attributes="member: 18">You raise valid points, but I think both are genuinely answerable.1) Re: competence, I think there's long-term history vs. recent history, and in the long-term, WotC and Hasbro have made constant errors with software/video games and licencing all the way back to like 2000. It's a catalogue of errors. There was also, for a long time, an attitude that software/video games weren't worth investing in, neither when licencing out, nor developing in-house.However, in the last 2-3 years, even a bit longer than that, we've seen a massive change in WotC's approach, and their general success in this arena.The first positive sign was with DNDBeyond, when the abandoned working with the previous (incompetent) company trying this and move to the Beyond people, who, despite some concerns about their pricing model, have actually put out a very good product with only a couple of serious issues.And since then we've seen a lot of successes - BG3 is looking good (the script has Larian issues, but that's par for the course), Dark Alliance is looking surprisingly non-awful (and is developed by a WotC-owned studio), and even if it's a bit mediocre, it'll be a stepping stone. And there's apparently a ton of other D&D game stuff on the way. Furthermore, WotC have opened their own AAA studio, Archetype Entertainment, and whilst obviously it'll be a 2-3 years minimum before we see what they're making, the people they've hired are clearly extremely competent and well-regarded industry veterans with experience in specifically the kind of games they want to make. So the chances are as good as with any new studio.On top of that, D&D has gone from being a second-line brand for WotC/Hasbro after MtG, to the main earner, and investment has obviously become pretty important. The most recent MtG digital offering is pretty high-quality, I note, and even re-converted some long-quit MtG players I know.Nothing in the world is certain, but the whole "WotC always screws up digital", which I used to subscribe to until 2-3 years ago no longer looks to be the case.2) The product DNDBeyond is putting out is actually surprisingly close to a lot of stuff I work with, in that it's essentially a big-ass database which has to be very user-friendly and accessible, is commercial in nature, and has users viewing stuff as well as inputting different stuff, and so on.Fundamentally nothing that they're doing there is hard or complex to do, nor is it expensive to run something like that.DNDBeyond's issue appears to be that it keeps getting sold to people who just want to extract profit from it, and not to really develop it. That seems to be particularly bad now, as even stuff they'd been managing to keep up to date, and to handle well, for years, they're beginning to fail at (all of which would make a modicum of sense if there was some warning WotC were entering the sphere).The reason that they've specifically stated that they're having difficulty implementing certain things is that they have no pre-warning of, nor influence over, the decisions WotC makes re: development and new systems and so on (they do get the rulebooks early, but only, seemingly, after they've gone to print). They've been very clear on that, and it appears to be true, because everything they've not implemented, pretty much, is a system introduced in a rulebook or UA, more or less out-of-the-blue. Anything that doesn't need this, they tend to be able to implement shockingly fast.On top of that, they have to go with WotC's release dates. You seem to be thinking of this like the WotC D&D devs will just go on their merry way, like the digital offering doesn't exist, that they won't give long-range heads-ups on systems, or even change systems, to make them work in digital. I find that to be extremely unlikely. Release dates might be harder because of physical books, but even then so long as the team are internal, communication should be both better and earlier.Given the relative simplicity of what they're doing (and it really is pretty straightforward stuff), combined with internal communication, preferably with teams working together properly, there's absolutely no reason they should see issues like Beyond is. Especially if WotC invests at all in this, and given the potential $$$ to be made, I don't see why 2021 WotC wouldn't invest. They're not 2015 WotC.</blockquote>

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