NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FatPob" data-source="post: 9270944" data-attributes="member: 7044875">A really interesting read.  There does seem to be more unpleasantries in the TTRPG business than in years past.  Perhaps it was always like this, and just under-reported.There is also some poor management decisions to have 30+ staff with a $1.5m pot to play with, I mean that barely covers a reasonable annual salary for every person, never mind other basic business costs, or actually including producing a physical product.  No doubt I will be flamed for this bit, but I do understand what EGG were thinking with "using the internet" etc.  There is very much a pay-to-win mindset in online games nowadays, and after covid, TTRPGs did join the online games in quite a big way, for most of us it was the only way to get our gaming fix.  I can see that EGG wanted to be in early exploit this possible market for pure financial game.  The "franchise settings" were the way to bring people to the product, maybe even a loss leader, but perhaps with ambitions (via Rebel Moon maybe) they would have a digital platform to play the game, and GMs (and players) could pay for special one-off items to be used in their online sessions. With certain tech it could be that these items were truly unique (in online play).  As the platform grows (with bigger franchises, more unique items) the revenue stream grows, as does a secondary market via resales of unique items.  (They would need to work how that could be exploited,  but I am sure it would get figured).The rise in people playing online ttrpgs has been significant. Roll20 went from 3 mill subscriber to 8 million by 2020 (no recent figures, maybe the numbers are down). There are other Fantasy Grounds and Foundry I uses that also hinted at increased number users and hours played on their platforms, plus at least 8-10 other platfroms for playing online. Add the hype (whichever way you look at it) with D&D beyond suggests that TTRPGs are heading to a very targetable online audienceFurthermore consider Critical Roll and other youtube/discord/twitch gaming streams and the audiences they are getting, you can see people from outside the hobby seeing $$$$$.  So I can see what the plan was, I can see how they went about the execution, but this is not something "we role-players"* actually want, and many of the creatives behind the games we play are "we role-players"*.   I do genuinely seeing the P2W model coming to games, it will be part of D&D beyond, with the expectation that people will use devices for the "characters" and GMs have digital scenarios and digital items to send as rewards for players, in person (and ofc online).   If you look at the rise on "paid GMs"/"paying to play" on VTTRPG (something that has surprised and horrified people I know) and certainly with some "paid GMS" production quality is impressive**, you can see that if there is money in the churn, the venture capitalists will want to control it. * "we role-players" is rather generalised and is used as a broad brush  comment - I am certain not everyone will agree.** One "Paid GM" organisation I saw was running 1,000s of hours of games a week, for hundreds of players at $25 - probably better paid then the EGG guys tbh.</blockquote>

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