@SlyFlourish posted a comment in another thread and I think it's worth discussing in a separate thread.
Copying the message over from his post so it’s more accessible.
SlyFlourish
I have controversial thoughts on this.
Adding other 5e publishers' material to D&D Beyond increases WOTC's dominance in the overall TTRPG hobby and they've proven they cannot be trusted to act in the overall hobby's best interests.
During the last (only?) D&D Community Summit I heard community members lobbying for WOTC to include third party publishers into D&D Beyond as though it was good for the 5e TTRPG community. I don't think it is.
It's good for those publishers blessed by WOTC to be accepted into D&D Beyond. They get access to a WOTC's large D&D Beyond customer set (that they bought for $145 million) with an excellent non-exclusive license deal.
It's good for WOTC who gets a taste of products they didn't have to write. They also get to look like good guys: "Hey, we're supporting scrappy independent publishers like Darrington Press and Ghostfire Gaming".
Maybe it's good for GMs who prefer to have all their stuff under D&D Beyond and don't mind letting WOTC vet which 5e published material they can buy there.
But it certainly increases WOTCs dominance in the 5e TTRPG hobby, and we know they can't be trusted to always act in the best interests of the hobby overall.
And what about those benefits for other 5e publishers publishing on Beyond? WOTC is both the owner of the platform and a direct competitor publishing on the same platform. Consider WOTC's advantages:
- Other 5e publishers have to pay a fee to WOTC. WOTC's own products don't have to pay that fee.
- WOTC gets to see all the data for sales for all products. Publishers only likely get to see their own.
- I doubt publishers get access to direct customer data like the opportunity to subscribe them to the publisher's newsletter.
- WOTC gets to decide who to allow to publish and who not to. They probably get to choose which products are published.
- WOTC gets to advertise their own stuff for free. If they advertise products from other publishers, they're either being extraordinarily nice or charging them.
Publishing other 5e publishers' products on D&D Beyond makes D&D Beyond an even stronger gravity well for the 5e hobby overall. It hurts other publishers like EN World and Kobold Press whose variants of 5e almost certainly won't be available on D&D Beyond. The more dominant D&D Beyond becomes in the overall 5e hobby, the more we must trust one company to do what's right for the hobby. That's a dangerous place to be.
All of the control WOTC hoped to achieve by deauthorizing the OGL, they seem to be gaining with D&D Beyond.
I think realistically, DND Beyond is never going to be so popular that this is really an issue. I don't foresee Beyond growing with any rapidity for the next decade. It might slowly grow, equally it might even shrink a bit. They've already got like 1/3rd to 1/5th of D&D players registered on it, but are people who aren't already on it going to join it much?
There's no good financial pathway to do so. If you're not already on Beyond, you have to buy you material over again, and WotC has taken the rather strange decision to base the physical bundle pricing on RRPs, rather than real-world prices. If you were paying RRPs - which literally no-one, even FLGSes, can afford to follow because they're so high ($84.99 for Planescape is truly incredible in the most literal sense - Amazon agrees and is selling it for $50.99) - then the Physical/Digital bundles would be decent but not compelling deals (there's a reason that Kickstarters don't charge you extra over physical for physical + digital in
most cases), but you aren't so they aren't. You're better off sticking to staying outside of Beyond if you're currently outside, negating the entire pathway for most people.
I don't think that issue on Beyond, btw, it's notable the Physical/Digital bundles aren't on their site, but that of WotC, and I suspect WotC is 100% in charge of pricing decisions there (ultimately they control Beyond as well, but I suspect they still have some freedom).
So I don't we're ever going to see Beyond as the dominant force it could be.
It will potentially be a big boost for certain third parties, and might bias the market further towards extremely boring and safe works, but, frankly, is that changing anything? People who only buy stuff on Beyond can already only access material like that.
So I don't meant to be flippant, and you all know I'm a keen critic of WotC, Beyond, and scuzzy dealings and market manipulation, but this seems like a bit of a nothing burger to me right now. I suspect even if boring/safe works are encouraged, more money pouring into the RPG industry in general and not just WotC in particular is a good thing. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but it doesn't appear to be that these companies making money of this are forced to only ever make Beyond products, right? So they may well take this money and use it to do more interesting things, and even they do boring things, at least they're not WotC, so there's some de-monopolization.
I think the big problem with the argument is that this presumes this will make WotC/Beyond notably more successful, and I just don't think it really will. It think the main boost will be to 3PPs (it will, ironically, slightly further the ancient goal of making D&D "survivable", which the OGL once served, because some people only aware of WotC material will become aware of 3PPs).
It might also give WotC a Big Damn Problem if it does make Beyond much more successful, because from what we've heard, Beyond exists in some kind of internal competition with the the 3D VTT. For example, we've heard that the 3D VTT product owner strongly opposed purchasing Beyond, and we know the 3D VTT has a vastly larger operating budget than Beyond (they have like what, 5-10x as many employees?), and revenue of exactly zero, whereas Beyond has a revenue, and quite likely a profit even.