D&D (2024) What do you think One D&D will do to the VTT industry?

[Retreater]

Once again, I don't play D&D but to think that Hasbro worries about competitors digital store fronts seems silly to me because, from my limited understanding, Hasbro doesn't make products like the 5E Players Handbook available as a PDF. If they aren't willing to sell such an important book as a PDF via their own website, let alone DriveThru RPG, then I don't see why they would want to consider helping what will be their competition.

But they sell it now on D&D Beyond (which they now own). And unlike a PDF, you have to use their service to open the proprietary format, which they can alter or remove at their discretion.

 

[Hex08]

And dramatically reduce sales volume, and strike an incredible blow to the brand and the company’s reputation.

Cutting out the middleman and increasing profits isn't likely to do what you are suggesting but even if it does, Hasbro is, in the end, a publicly traded corporation. As long as that's the case their profit motive is really all that matters.

 

[Hex08]

But they sell it now on D&D Beyond (which they now own). And unlike a PDF, you have to use their service to open the proprietary format, which they can alter or remove at their discretion.

Cool, thanks' for pointing out my error. Like I said, I don't play the game so I'm not sure about all that is going on with 5E. However, that is kind of is my point (and I think yours in prior posts). Drive sales/subscribers to their service at the expense of other services. If that's how they sell their digital products now why should I believe it would be any different with the fully integrated One D&D service and their VTT (once again, assuming they can deliver on their promise).

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Or they can sell it themselves directly to the consumer, cut out the middleman and increase their profits.

Like I said in my initial post, I no longer play D&D so maybe I am missing something, but this One D&D initiative sounds like a fully integrated D&D experience in an era where more people are willing to play online. Since people, especially younger people, are more willing to subscribe to services rather than owning physical product and pay for content using microtransactions I find it hard to believe that if One D&D becomes a fully realized product that it won't dominate the market. Whether people slowly abandon other VTTs over time, Hasbro stops offering new content to existing ones or Hasbro pulls licenses altogether seems irrelevant, the D&D offering will win out because of its size and other VTTs will suffer and some will disappear.

A few things.

Foundry isn’t really the middleman. They’re paying wizards to make wizards money at vanishingly little overhead from wizards. Intentionally cutting them would be at least as dumb as telling Target, Amazon, and FLGSs to suck it and not letting them sell D&D books.

As far as competition goes, I think that

Does Nintendo let you play Mario Kart on Steam?
If you don't want to follow the TV/streaming media connection, then consider first party video games. You're not playing Halo on Playstation. They want to sell you an Xbox and the Game Pass service.

sure, because the console is sold at a loss, so they make their profit via individual games and subscription services.

Like…they’ve had a subscription service and been unfriendly toward third parties, and it contributed to the major deterioration of their reputation and brand. And they’re making vastly more profit now.

I guarantee that even if 5e hadn’t blown up and was just fairly successful, let’s say 3.5 level player-base, their current model would still be simply more profitable than what you are claiming they will most likely do.

I don’t think you’re taking into account that they are selling the books on a dozen platforms, and only a couple cost them literally anything to do, and all of them individually make them more money than it cost to produce the product.

They also take a sizeable chunk from DMsGuild, which exist only due to a thriving and engaged player base that mostly views the company as either neutral or as good folks doing their best. (I fall between those)

It would literally be idiotic to hard-line centralize all of that into one singular source that will have just, from the player base perspective, blatantly betrayed the players at large in a short-sighted and aggressive money-grab.

Again, not letting roll20 sell people new PHBs would be like killing their relationship with Target or with all FLGSs. Just to what, get a portion of the users from each third party to switch over to their platform, shrinking the overall digital user base, and losing money? And then you suggest they’re going to voluntarily lose even more players by requiring a subscription and micro transactions to play D&D digitally?

And all of that is before considering all the people who own multiple digital copies on different platforms, in addition to physical.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Cutting out the middleman and increasing profits isn't likely to do what you are suggesting but even if it does, Hasbro is, in the end, a publicly traded corporation. As long as that's the case their profit motive is really all that matters.

It’s guaranteed to do exactly that. It is rarely more profitable to become the only storefront for a product that already sells like crazy on a dozen platforms, because you lose customers, and no one is buying the same product 3 times via the same platform.

Right now, every vtt on the internet that sells content access (so every legal vtt that wants to let you easily make a PHB+ D&D character) is a storefront selling the product, and by doing so contributing to the growth of the industry as a whole, which directly leads to more PHB sales both physical and digital.

Having the easiest, shiniest, most convenient, and official, vtt will make them gobs of money, but it isn’t likely to make them more money than they are currently making from all of the licensed sales that cost wizards effectively nothing to facilitate. (Every book for 5e makes its money back just on physical copy)

Clearly the better strategy is to do both. To keep making that licensed profit, and make the new direct relationship profit from what is basically a luxury version of what other vtts offer.

And then we get to the second part. 5e fixed their broken reputation. There are holdouts who still dislike them for old sins, but they are overwhelmingly outnumbered just by the people who don’t even know about those past missteps.

Part of why is that they invited everyone into the tent, with the OGL, DMsGuild, and friendly 3rd party licensing relationships, and a general ethos of “a rising tide raises all ships”, ie that the growth of the 3pp market, the indie market, etc, leads to the further growth of D&D .

Doing a 180 on that, effectively invalidating hundreds of dollars of purchases on average (per user), and basically telling people, “if you want D&D, you can only get it through us now.” would unquestionably sink their rep lower than it was in 2012.

 

[BigZebra]

I am looking forward to this VTT actually. I can't see them pulling support for other VTTs - not in a long long time any way. I don't think they are that stupid. It will result in less sales, bad goodwill etc.
What I do hope happens is that they will open up the older versions to the other VTTs. Currently only Fantasy Grounds has a license for 1e/2e. I would love to be able to play 4e and 3.5e on Roll20 etc.
Also I think this propels the other VTTs to focus on the long tail end of RPGs and not only 5e. There are so many great games I'd like to play on Roll20 (WFRP, Shadowrun, Star Wars, etc.) that have either none or minor support. Now that WotC will undoubtedly pull many users to their platform, I hope Roll20 will step up a bit (thye have been a bit lazy IMO).

Also all the glib about WotC and digital tools hidr hidr is just ridiculous outdated nonsense. It is not 2008 anymore.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

You've gotta be extremly pessimistic with an anxiety disorder. I guess that's my superpower.

I have agreed with you that what you say is possible but I still find it unlikely. However, if they pull the licences from Roll20 or from FantasyGrounds that does not prevent us from continuing to play on those platforms. It makes it harder sure, but no more difficult than playing at the table.
They would have to stop printing books also. They could do that also but at that point they would have generated enough ill will that people would be heading over to Pathfinder.
In some ways the biggest danger would be that they do not do any of these bad things but the new VTT is so sweet, and supports other games so well that it becomes dominant in the market and in 10/20 years they become dominant in VTT play as Google or Microsoft in their areas.
And I think it will take at least 20 years. 10 to get the VTT into a state where it is good enough to become the goto platform, and another 10 to take over the online ttrpg space.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

This is a bit of an outdated sentiment, IMO. MtG is a huge moneymaker, sure, but so are the dnd books and so are licensed products that use the IP. That said, selling magic cards depends on not ruining thier reputation, so…

In their Q2 2022 earning calls, they told that MtG is generating 70% to 80% of WotC revenue. Given that some revenue must also come from DnDBeyond (even if it's an early acquisition), licencing to VTT and D&D videogames (they mention Dark Alliance in 2021 as a reason to explain the apparent lessening of revenue on the overall D&D segment, due to a comparison effect) and films, I'd still say that MtG dwarf book sales. Even if there is no other revenue for WotC than book sales and we take the highest estimate, it's still more than 2 to 1 and up to 5 to 1 in the latest quarter.

Note that I'd say that D&D branding will contribute a lot to the future film (though I wish them to attract viewers from outside the gamerspace), I wouldn't say so for the video games, where it is mostly generic fantasy (or building on its own brand, like BG3 or BG: DA or minsc and boo's plushies).

 

[HaroldTheHobbit]

At the moment I use Beyond and AboveVTT for D&D and Foundry for everything else. From what we know OneVTT may well be based on micro transactions or suchlike, which makes it a hard nope for me.
In that case I hope to be able to keep on using Above. If not we will play much less D&D and go with Foundry when we do, even though I find it a bit clumsy to combine with Beyond. And if they pull third party licenses we will stop playing D&D.

But as I've written before, I'm optimistic that OneVTT won't be finished or will be in a bad state by 2024, so hopefully it won't have any impact on other VTTs for the foreseeable future.

 

[TheSword]

To be honest I have more than enough maps, tokens etc to run Roll20 campaigns until I’m 70+. The character sheets are easy enough to modify.