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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9208321" data-attributes="member: 18">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.</blockquote>

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