Ashes to Ashes, Bytes to Bits

The news of D&D Beyond's 3D VTT being gutted is no surprise. They were never using the right strategy in the first place. They had no "3D store" in place, no creators, no 3D map makers, and no online store where they shared profits with digital content creators.

Were they just hoping new figures and maps would appear?

What were they selling without a plan?

An idea?

I have been in the consumer 3D market. You start your artist and creator programs long before the launch. You fire up the online store, and you give the creators a share for creating cool new things for your VTT. Be honest; the company isn't going to build and provide all the content themselves.

The big secret is that your content creators will help you sell the platform.

Just ask DriveThruRPG.

Then again, for performance reasons, how are you going to QA all that digital content to make sure someone shipping a model with 8K textures, with possible assets ripped from other 3d games (another major headache), won't crash your VTT and make it run out of resources? If you say you are creating it all in-house, that is a ton of work few can afford or sustain.

And the competition, even in the 3D tabletop space, is well established. Even Roll20 is a good enough experience, and I don't care if my maps are hand-drawn scribbles and my pawns are 2d images. The game isn't in what you see; it is what you see in your mind.

I don't need to play on the same map or in the same tavern every time I play D&D.

AI won't save you, either. Many in the hobby detest it.

Baldur's Gate 3 killed this. The people in the "3d experience" will be playing mods for that game for 10 years, and when Larian comes out with the spiritual successor that offers even more mod and creator support, building a platform the BG3 teased, the gaming crowd will be playing that. Whoever creates it, I am betting it is a race now that the game made a billion dollars. The next company with the "BG3-like" roleplaying platform will rake in the cash.

The OGL killed this, too. If they were able to follow through on the plan to "take it all," then no one would have anywhere else to play. They were doomed either way, win or lose.

The 5.5E rules were built for the VTT; without that, we have a system without a purpose. Even 5E relies too much on online character creation tools, which are designed into the system so they can lock you into a platform. Shadowdark is far easier to play with anyone, and it does not need online tools. Even the Open 5E creators are finding a lack of character creation tools is killing them, and they are scrambling to get those working.

D&D now has the burden of failure after failure in the digital online play space, just like they failed at movies and streaming. They can never make it work since they are not a software, entertainment, or social media company. They planned for a 10 or 20-year pandemic, and here we are.

Licensing the IP is where we go from here.

Or selling it all.

It feels like a sad "beginning of the end" from here.

I am happy I have replacements.