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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cergorach" data-source="post: 9616488" data-attributes="member: 725">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...</blockquote>

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