Wizards of the Coast Is Sunsetting Sigil's Active Development

EN World has received confirmation that Wizards of the Coast is planning to transition Sigil, its just-released VTT, to a D&D Beyond feature with no large future development planned. Earlier this week, Wizards of the Coast laid off approximately 30 staff members tied to the development of Sigil, a new D&D-focused VTT system. Ahead of the layoff, Dan Rawson, senior vice president of Dungeons & Dragons, sent out an internal email confirming that the project was essentially being shuttered. Rascal was the first to report the news and EN World was able to independently confirm the accuracy of their report.

The email can be read below:

Dear Team, I want to share an important update regarding Sigil. After several months of alpha testing, we’ve concluded that our aspirations for Sigil as a larger, standalone game with a distinct monetization path will not be realized. As such, we cannot maintain a large development effort and most of the Sigil team will be separated from the company this week. We are, however, proud of what the Sigil team has developed and want to make sure that fans and players on DDB can use it. To that end, we will transition Sigil to a DDB feature. We will maintain a small team to sustain Sigil and release products already developed at no additional cost to users. To those moving on as a result of this decision, we will provide robust support, including severance packages, 2024 bonus, career placement services, and internal opportunities where possible.

I want to take a moment to praise the entire Sigil team for their incredible work to deliver this product to our community. One of the things I’m most proud of here at D&D is our strong sense of purpose. We aim to honor our current players while ensuring D&D continues to build connections and bring joy to future generations. And that’s what the Sigil team was doing. Although we haven’t fully realized our vision for Sigil to scale, the team should be proud of their achievements.”

A full breakdown of Sigil's tumultous development can be found here. Rascal has several additional details about recent events that led to Sigil's early demise.

 

[SteveC]

On the dragon mini thing, I think the reason it's being mocked is because it sounded silly at the time, but WotC went out of their way to market it. Yes, it wasn't important, but tell that to WotC's marketers.

 

[Koloth]

Better for Hasbro to confirm the shutdown now and move on then for the issue to remain in doubt for weeks or months longer. At least now, everyone can make their VTT plans accordingly. As can the remaining Sigil developers.

 

[Chaltab]

They do not make any money for QOL improvements in DDB. They will fix serious bugs but development will only focus on money makers.

Are they gonna make any money of Sigil? Cuz a lot of people told them it was likely to fail and they did THAT anyway.

 

[Cergorach]

Well that was a complete waste of time and resources WotC could have used to improve almost anything else related to DDB…

Do your parents look at you the same way when you start something, but ultimately fail at it? Things are learned through failure, some people need to fail a LOT before they learn anything...

With your attitude there would be no D&D, WotC, and no DDB to improve. WotC/Hasbro spend a LOT of money acquiring DDB and even more integrating it into their company. Buying something is what you do when you know you can't do yourself. In the case with DDB, it might even have been an exclusivity contract they couldn't get out from under.

After X years of development, it's easy to say, they should have bought... Talespire, for example. People assume that the people that actually own/develop Talespire would want to sell to WotC/Hasbro and at the time, Talespire isn't where it is now. And I can tell you that while the DDB acquisition/integration seems to have gone smoothly, many, many acquisitions/integrations fail. Resulting often in hefty losses, sometimes even costing way more then the acquisition price...

Good 3D integration with a VTT, with the right assets, the right quality vs hardware resources, resulting in wide accessibility across almost all platforms could be an absolute game killer! Sure this costs more to make, but WotC would be able to sell it for more as well, effectively scaling what they could earn from D&D. In theory the plan is good. Even if you don't want it now, you might want it later, eventually you turn to dust and are replaced by a couple of other people that do want that 3D integration. Why quite a few AAA titles are failing is because they build on new platforms that give beautiful graphics, but don't spend the time to make it work on potatos. And over the last ~5 years many of us 'filthy casuals' refuse to spend a huge chunk on money on spaceheaters, thus leaving many of the 'casuals' not even able to play the game at all, not even at extremely low settings. On the other hand, we have developers that make it work and you can perfectly play their new game on 5 year old hardware. This development is not new, but not as evident as it's now and when Sigil was in it's start up phase I doubt many people realized this, thus the current situation of skewed expectations.

WotC tends to be not the company that makes good software products (there are a couple of exceptions), so we might expect that this is a likely outcome, that might not be the case internally for company executives and managers. There is a certain outlook and mentatlity in a certain country: "We can do anything! We are the best! We can't fail! Our sh!t doesn't stink!" so it isn't surprising that this mentality is also present in the corporate upper echelons. And while a positive attitude is all very good and well, it isn't going to help much when you walk in a minefield... And what we saw of the internal politics at WotC, that also isn't totally unexpected... A manager who wants to keep their jobs isn't going to say to management "Yeah... We suck at software, let's not do that again!", they start the project they don't have much faith in and maybe it's enough to keep drawing a paycheck for another couple of years. And who knows, maybe it actually works this time... And maybe it being killed won't land on their shoulders... A "No" gets you fired right now, a "Yes" might get you fired down the line...

 

[Xeviat]

Yeah with a product like Sigil you need to launch with a free premade adventure (probably one of the beginner boxes adventures) and have at least one or two full adventures for sale.

It did.

 

[Stormonu]

I agree with @Cergorach in that if you don't take a chance, you'll never know if it could be done or will be a success. I do think that there were red flags on who would adopt it and there should have been more investigation there before dumping loads of money into the project - if the customer base isn't there, you'd either better find a way to create it have a plan to entice those who don't know they need it yet ... and I don't think they did a good job of either.

As I recall, you had to have a Master Tier account to use it in the first place - if that's the case while they were getting it put together they should have given anyone with an Beyond account at least a shot at trying it out and have the "good stuff" at the paid tiers - get people used to and dependent on it, then go after their money.

On the development side, I'm assuming their biggest issue was probably performance - getting even something like 2D maps on Roll20 with semi-complex or populated maps taxes most computers; 3d animation with some folk's potato PCs or phones has to be a nightmare to manage/troubleshoot. This would be something I'd be looking at running from a remote server that just sends the screen picture to the clients (basically, streaming the output) and server farms aren't cheap to maintain.

 

[Chaltab]

On the development side, I'm assuming their biggest issue was probably performance - getting even something like 2D maps on Roll20 with semi-complex or populated maps taxes most computers; 3d animation with some folk's potato PCs or phones has to be a nightmare to manage/troubleshoot. This would be something I'd be looking at running from a remote server that just sends the screen picture to the clients (basically, streaming the output) and server farms aren't cheap to maintain.

Honestly this is what I find most confusing... even smart phones these days can run visuals more advanced than an Xbox 360. There was no need to make Sigil require a high-end computer to run. Building in something as taxing as Unreal 5 was IMO a strange choice.

 

[Stormonu]

Honestly this is what I find most confusing... even smart phones these days can run visuals more advanced than an Xbox 360. There was no need to make Sigil require a high-end computer to run. Building in something as taxing as Unreal 5 was IMO a strange choice.

Well, you do want a currently-supported, cross-platform code base that the programmers know how to use. Unreal or Unity were probably the two code bases looked at, and they may have chosen one over the other either due to their programmer's experience and/or the ability to import in/convert Wizkid's mini models. I'm guessing they were trying to use as much "off-the-shelf" software as they could since it was already experimental.

Just glad they didn't go with Silverlight (again!).

 

[Xeviat]

It really seems to me like they should have contracted Larian to make it. They could have used BG3's engine and assets. They already have a GM mode for their Divinity games. Could have a freemium model so it's free for players and have paid perks be part of D&D Beyond subscription.

 

[TheSword]

Do your parents look at you the same way when you start something, but ultimately fail at it? Things are learned through failure, some people need to fail a LOT before they learn anything...

With your attitude there would be no D&D, WotC, and no DDB to improve. WotC/Hasbro spend a LOT of money acquiring DDB and even more integrating it into their company. Buying something is what you do when you know you can't do yourself. In the case with DDB, it might even have been an exclusivity contract they couldn't get out from under.

After X years of development, it's easy to say, they should have bought... Talespire, for example. People assume that the people that actually own/develop Talespire would want to sell to WotC/Hasbro and at the time, Talespire isn't where it is now. And I can tell you that while the DDB acquisition/integration seems to have gone smoothly, many, many acquisitions/integrations fail. Resulting often in hefty losses, sometimes even costing way more then the acquisition price...

Good 3D integration with a VTT, with the right assets, the right quality vs hardware resources, resulting in wide accessibility across almost all platforms could be an absolute game killer! Sure this costs more to make, but WotC would be able to sell it for more as well, effectively scaling what they could earn from D&D. In theory the plan is good. Even if you don't want it now, you might want it later, eventually you turn to dust and are replaced by a couple of other people that do want that 3D integration. Why quite a few AAA titles are failing is because they build on new platforms that give beautiful graphics, but don't spend the time to make it work on potatos. And over the last ~5 years many of us 'filthy casuals' refuse to spend a huge chunk on money on spaceheaters, thus leaving many of the 'casuals' not even able to play the game at all, not even at extremely low settings. On the other hand, we have developers that make it work and you can perfectly play their new game on 5 year old hardware. This development is not new, but not as evident as it's now and when Sigil was in it's start up phase I doubt many people realized this, thus the current situation of skewed expectations.

WotC tends to be not the company that makes good software products (there are a couple of exceptions), so we might expect that this is a likely outcome, that might not be the case internally for company executives and managers. There is a certain outlook and mentatlity in a certain country: "We can do anything! We are the best! We can't fail! Our sh!t doesn't stink!" so it isn't surprising that this mentality is also present in the corporate upper echelons. And while a positive attitude is all very good and well, it isn't going to help much when you walk in a minefield... And what we saw of the internal politics at WotC, that also isn't totally unexpected... A manager who wants to keep their jobs isn't going to say to management "Yeah... We suck at software, let's not do that again!", they start the project they don't have much faith in and maybe it's enough to keep drawing a paycheck for another couple of years. And who knows, maybe it actually works this time... And maybe it being killed won't land on their shoulders... A "No" gets you fired right now, a "Yes" might get you fired down the line...

I agree wholeheartedly with the first half. Regarding the second half I don’t think that the country you’re talking about thinks they can’t fail at all. I think it’s that there is far more capital to put behind projects and failing at something is not a bar to future success or investment. That is a positive thing not a negative and it is a reason that a lot of business success is cultivated in that country.

We need to stop seeing someone or something failing as being a dirty problem. It’s easy to play the blame game but it’s pretty self defeating. I think you’re also making that point but the whole C-suite/management blame plays into this.