Reply To: Are we the grognards?

[onlyonepinman 18060xp 1]

I don’t think physical is out just yet. You have to remember that most RPG publishers cannot afford to develop the infrastructure required to support online gaming at the moment. Even looking at things like Roll20, there is a huge reliance on 3rd parties and communities to develop the relevant scripts and content to play anything other than D&D. I think D&D beyond is aimed at the mentally challenged (people who want to play D&dmD and just D&D), rather than Roleplayers (people who want to play a variety of RPGs rather than just D&D). It’s an attempt by WotC to create an ecosystem similar to GW where players spend all of their hobby money with them rather than going elsewhere and where every single aspect of the service can (and eventually will) be monetised. Unlike GW, this is the only way that WotC can do that because they don’t really own any significant IP, they just own the rules which are very hard to monetise to the degree they would like and virtually impossible to license in a meaningful way.

 

WotC’s new VTT, D&D Beyond, has also not been universally well received, with lots of player concerns about things like micro transactions, lack of ownership. This is all part of the concept of everything being a service to which you must subscribe, ad infinitum, rather than a product that you buy once. And these are very real concerns, you need only look at the videogames industry to see how bad that world really is – if you have ever heard the phrase “you will own nothing and be happy”, this is exactly what it refers to. You buy a game but buried in the terms and conditions are clauses that essentially mean you only own it for as long as the digital service from whom you buy it is prepared to host it. Unisoft recently discontinued one of their games to a not insignificant amount of outrage from digital owners. There have been numerous instances of games service providers being unavailable for periods of time leading to customers simply being unable to play digital games. So I really don’t think that digital is the future because fundamentally people like ownership of things. Going beyond that, Tesla do it with their cars where they essentially throttle the power output at around 80% unless you pay a monthly subscription.  BMW recently introduced it for features like heated seats and heated steering wheels – the car has the features when it’s built but you can’t access them unless you pay a monthly subscription.  Really, as people we need to wake up to this trend because it’s really, really bad for consumers.  No matter what the service providers might tell you, outright ownership is to the benefit of the consumer, subscription is to the benefit of the seller and it’s definitely a “right” we should do our utmost to protect.  I would also argue that currently I don’t think we have strong enough legislation in place to govern digital purchases to protect consumers service providers simply pulling the plug and depriving you of the product you paid for

 

Sadly I am sure D&D Beyond will be successful, although hopefully not as successful as WotC would like. But we, as players, have a duty to oppose D&D Beyond if we want to protect and maintain a healthy, vibrant games industry that exists beyond the corporate boundaries of the likes of WotC. This really should not be that difficult, because let’s face it, D&D is fucking horrible.

Buy physical folks.  Always buy physical.  And in the case of D&D, buy someone else’s physical products, there are far, far better RPGs out there