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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8069757" data-attributes="member: 18">Possible to envision? It was literally the goal with 4th Edition (go back and watch the original 4E adverts if you've forgotten). Events prevented that from happening, but this isn't just something you might imagine WotC doing, it's something they tried before, and the reasons to try it then are only far stronger now.Yeah what's publicly known is mostly video games studios, but it's not trivial to successfully make AAA video games, and they're going for not one but two AAA studios. Why? Why not license out D&D's brand or whatever? Because they can make enormously more money if they do it themselves. Whether it'd be enough to make it worthwhile remains an open question but they certainly though it was in 2008, so it seems unlike that they would think it wasn't in 2020.With Beyond/Roll 20/etc. there are three issues which mean the profitability is limited for everyone involved:1) Marketing reach is limited. None of the companies who currently do this stuff are WotC. Their marketing reach is very short. Beyond with even moderate marketing, got I suspect a lot further than Roll 20 or the like ever has, in terms of picking up players. If WotC were doing it themselves, this would not be the case. Adverts and links could be in every physical book, and the site could be fully integrated into WotC's own sites. The uptake difference could thus be pretty huge. So that's one way to improve profitability.2) Everyone only gets a percentage and WotC doesn't get a subscription. We don't know what that percentage is, but Beyond charges a subscription (for the DM at the very least) and charges for every book, and I would suspect WotC only get a cut of the charges for each book. Whether that's 30%, 50% or what I don't know. But it's a percentage, and I very much doubt they get any of the subscription for any of these services. If WotC did it themselves, they'd take on the costs, but they'd also get 100% of the sales, and any subscription fee, which realistically is likely to dwarf the costs (people typically wildly overestimate the development/support costs for things - for example, in the period in which WoW made its first $10bn, they spend $200m on  development and support - and yes that included developing two entire expansions, countless bits of content, supporting hundreds, I think thousands worldwide, of CSRs - as well as the rest of the staff - and all the servers and bandwidth). So that would be a huge profitability boost. Yes, some people will complain that they can't use the existing services, but the key thing is to match and beat what they offer - which would not be hard, technically.3) Competition. Beyond, Roll 20 and Fantasy Grounds are all competing against each other, and to some extent, against WotC. This doesn't really seem to be helping anyone, either. The end result is just a somewhat split market and reluctance to use other products. There's no intentional cross-marketing (I mean, a lot of use an app to make Beyond and Roll 20 work together, but I'm sure neither side is happy about it. Certainly it's not boosting profits.There's a lot of other stuff as well, like IP control. I mean, Beyond presents the WotC IP incredibly well, but they have also gone rogue a bit and included non-WotC stuff (which seemed to get cracked down on with one recent thing so...), but Roll 20 doesn't present it nearly as well, and I doubt Fantasy Grounds does either.DDI was only a moderate success because they didn't invest enough, and because of a murder, which lead to them providing a small fraction of the tools originally planned. It's not actually expensive or difficult to do, but it required experience they didn't have then, but clearly do have now. Further they were kind of ripping themselves off. I can be honest now and say I bought significantly fewer 4E products because of the DDI. If they'd had a "virtual book" system as well as the sub they could have made a lot more money (though they'd needed to have lowered the sub a bit - but we had like seven people using that one sub so it wasn't too bad).Further, D&D has several times as many players now as it did in early 4E, not just because they defeated the split, but also because they managed, albeit with some luck, to build 5E into this massive brand. The more players you have potentially using this, the better the cost/profit ratio becomes, because the development costs are largely fixed, and the support costs only increase gently.Sorry I know I'm going on about this! It's not a certainty, I just think it's highly likely. If I was WotC, I'd probably be really looking hard at how well Beyond does with their VTT, and it's great, whether I could buy them.</blockquote>

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