D&D General Why Were the Dragon and Dungeon Magazines Discontinued?

[DEFCON 1]

The fact that this thread has generated like only three or four people saying they want Dragon and Dungeon Magazines in print again is precisely why they aren't. The market isn't there.

Yeah, us "veteran" players might remember our times with the mags back in the '80s fondly and want to recapture that feeling rather than read stuff on our computer screens... but the other 85% of the playerbase doesn't care about our memories and seem to be quite fine using tablets and phones.

 

[Riley]

I would still be subscribing to a 5e version of Dragon and Dungeon. Especially Dungeon.

The 3e version was awesome. Even the 4e version was good a lot of the time - though hard to read casually before I had a satisfactory iPad.

 

[darjr]

Forums are also going extinct though, that's why all the big websites like WoTC don't run any themselves anymore.

They do have a forum. They bought it at DnDBeyond. It looks pretty active. It’s not quite like the forums of old or like here and definitely was meant to be DnDBeyond focused.

D&D Beyond Forums - D&D Beyond

www.dndbeyond.com

 

[darjr]

It is worth noting that the only current official D&D magazine is D&D Adventurer, produced under license. That has a very different business model, essentially being a relatively pricey dice subscription service plus some printed content. That content is mostly a repackaging of the PHB and DMG, which sadly suggests that to be profitable, a modern magazine needs to sell "stuff" rather than quality written content.

I just got a printer page box of later Dragon magazines and a few Dungeon magazines and a lot of them (a lot of them!) had additional things. CDs and posters and maps and tokens and additional “magazines” like Polyhedron.

So that stuff isn’t new.

I do think (and agree) the content balance is very different.

 

[darjr]

I want a print Dungeon and Dragon magazine, but the fact I wasn’t subscribing since the 90s probably means I wouldn’t be now.

Though I did subscribe to DDI and downloaded them there and I did subscribe to DnDBeyond and Arcadia and currently now purchase things that might be a stand in for that content. So maybe I’d still get the digital version?

But like others have noted, there is a lot of competition.

 

[Parmandur]

I just got a printer page box of later Dragon magazines and a few Dungeon magazines and a lot of them (a lot of them!) had additional things. CDs and posters and maps and tokens and additional “magazines” like Polyhedron.

So that stuff isn’t new.

I do think (and agree) the content balance is very different.

Late 90s early Aughts magazines were great, they all started doing big things to try and compete with the internet...and when dialup was the order of the day, it worked for a while.

 

[Parmandur]

I want a print Dungeon and Dragon magazine, but the fact I wasn’t subscribing since the 90s probably means I wouldn’t be now.

Though I did subscribe to DDI and downloaded them there and I did subscribe to DnDBeyond and Arcadia and currently now purchase things that might be a stand in for that content. So maybe I’d still get the digital version?

But like others have noted, there is a lot of competition.

Oh, man, the nostalgia for that magazine feel is real, but it is hard to believe I would go for it in reality. Maybe if they did some sort of cross between Dungeon/Dragon and Highlights...for the children.

The DMsGuild is obviously a very different medium, but the main reason I find it comparable is that the pool of people who would have submitted old articles to Dragon/Dungeon are the same as who put stuff up on DMsGuild today.

 

[el-remmen]

I loved Dragon and Dungeon and while I dropped Dragon in the mid-90s when I felt like it didn't offer me much anymore (my last issues was in the 220s), I kept up with Dungeon until the 3E era where I just got a handful, but found the slick pages and the tiny text huge stat blocks on colored paper just too difficult to use (and I wasn't even that old yet!).


That said, I am slowly filling out my collection of Dungeons of the 1E and 2E era in print, since I still use them frequently for my 5E adventures.

I do prefer print (when I get digital things I often end up printing out all or part of it once I know I plan to use it), but I know that even if WotC went back to print versions of the mags tomorrow, I would probably still skip Dragon and would sample Dungeon but probably would not stick with it - no way to know. My guess is the slick production would not appeal to me.

I'd rather stick with getting indie zines or adventures and other game content not beholden to WotC's common denominator requirements (which is not a diss, I know the realities of a business - but I want something different)

 

[Stormonu]

As others have said, Wizards must have determined that it wasn't profitable, and Dragon had basically become an advertisement and supplement to whatever was being published that month - and at the time they were pretty much releasing free PDFs of anything that got cut from the books.

Paizo got to keep the list of subscribers, and I remember my subscription getting converted to their AP line - and a I ended up extending it through a few extra AP's.

I'm sad they went away from print, and the electronic version just wasn't the same and withered away (after it being initially a 4E online subscription, once 5E rolled around I wasn't even aware they were still making it, until they declared they were going to pull them off the web site). I do think they could do well with a return of Dungeon (especially if they coupled it with an option that gives you paper battle maps, minis, handouts or other physical product). Reviving Dragon would be much more difficult, as the content you see in it is pretty much covered by DMs Guild nowadays. If they were willing to put in the (significant) effort, they could revive Dragon as a "best of the best", compiling a handful of the better DM's Guild content and putting it out in print format.

I have Dragon #98 until the end of the print run and Dungeon #13 to the end of that run, but sadly they're all boxed up in a storage unit and I haven't looked at them in ages (I did get lucky enough to get the Dragon CD-ROM, and keep that on my drive if I ever want to look at something).

My favorite thing out of Dragon was actually the Fool Wolf stories. I miss the short fiction from Dragon a lot.

 

[Emerikol]

One of the reasons we can't have nice things is that big corporations need a certain amount of profit for each endeaver and profitable isn't enough. Dragon and Dungeon under Paizo was profitable. Paizo wasn't wanting to stop publication. They were forced to do so. So while I agree with all the magazines are dead people in general, a niche hobby can still carry such things. And it could be a pdf instead of a print magazine for sure. I think the print though would be profitable.