Wizards of the Coast Just Ended It 

So, by self-distributing, Hasbro can pass down the higher prices to the consumer, making physical books less affordable. Then, the digital media is offered at a more attractive price, and when players stop buying books they can phase out physical altogether, eliminating the middleman completely! Hasbro, you were a beacon of fun when I was a kid... What have you become?!?

Losing their distributing deal with Random House was the final nail in the coffin for TSR back in the 90's, and the thing that allowed WotC to buy them out in the first place. The more things change...

And this is why Greed is the downfall of so many. They let the money control their actions, now they pay for it. Shame, because OG wizards was actually a decent company until Hasbro sunk its greedy hands into the company

Hasbro's worst nightmare is the day when players realize that they don't need to buy these products, because D&D is essentially playing make-believe, and that's not something that you can really control. DMs can use whatever version of the game they want. They can buy thirty year old AD&D textbooks for pennies and run a game from that. The only limit is the imagination of the DM and their players.

I, despite being a 40+ year RPGer, care not if WotC goes belly up. I still have my collection of 3.x DnD that won't be going anywhere. We still have the OGL and the Creative Commons elements to draw from to make any content that follows those guidelines. D&D may die but long live RGP!

A. Stop buying wotc books. B. Start getting Kobold PRESS, AAW Games, etc books. C. Stop covering that trash company D. Start covering companies that pay attention to their customers.

It is up to US! YOU and ME to STOP supporting the corporate GREED by not giving them your $$$. It is the only way they will learn. They don't respect their customers, why should their customers respect them? I pay enough monthly bills a month without adding Hasbro/Wizards.

Wizards/Hasbro is steering away from the tabletop hobby, and tabletop hobbyists, whom they view as troublesome and not very profitable. They don't care if they alienate us, because there are relatively few of us, we aren't particularly brand loyal, and they face a growing amount of direct 5e-compatible competition in a shrinking marketplace. They see the future of D&D as virtual, with millions of new customers pouring into D&D fandom through the D&D movie (whoops!) and Baldur's Gate (over 5 million copies sold thru Steam by mid-October). These new, younger customers are used to paying monthly subscriptions and microtransactions, and have no experience playing around a table, so they won't miss the experience. As Wizards/Hasbro sees it, D&D has a bright future, it just doesn't involve groups of friends gathering around tables and rolling physical dice. Basically, they are steering the ship of D&D away from us, and we need to stop caring that it's happening. We're better off with the better quality games and supplements provided by more responsive third-party and indie publishers. The future of the tabletop hobby is also bright, it just doesn't involve Wizards of the Coast.

Welcome to watching a corporation trying it's damndest to make ridiculously priced virtual merchandise you don't own actually look like a deal compared to having a physical copy of things to do what you wish.

To be honest I'm surprised that this hasn't happened sooner. There's been a rope around the necks of MTG and D&D for years. The damage done the last three years seems to have really started to kick the chair out from under both companies. Then factor in the Hasbro greed machine in an inflated economy was a losing battle on borrowed time.

There are no ice cream trucks in Ireland, that was clearly the sound of one of their similar, but obviously different, whiskey trucks.

I've been playing D&D over 35 years, through all the bankruptcies and licensing issues and company switches and mess. One of the biggest reasons I didn't immediately jump on board when 4th edition, then 5th released, was pure buyer fatigue. My older books were still perfectly fine, and when they started releasing multiple issues of a PHB or DMG (all at $35+ each) it stopped being about the hobby and more of a cash grab. I wish I could say I was surprised by this move, especially given Hasbro's track record, but I'm not. And the surest way for us as consumers to protest is to refuse to play along. There are other options.

Here's hoping the D&D franchise will be passed on to more responsible hands.

Creating a de facto price hike for physical media also gives Wizards more room to implement price hikes on their drm-locked digital versions.

Easy Las. Even the Irish can get down on their luck. So get his shoes while your at it.

I don't think we will see too much of a price hike, at least not to the level you are implying. You have to take into account that whilst Penguin was able to negotiate for lower prices they also added in their own profit margins when forwarding the books to the retailers. That middle man step is being removed from the process. Having worked in retail for almost 30yrs I know that removing a third party can just as often cause things to become cheaper by the time they reach the shelf. I think we need to wait and see how this plays out and drop the fear mongering.

At this point, any hardcore D&D player, not just a D&D fan collecting books, but a real D&D player, would just moev over to Torrents to get all of their D&D stuff while Hasbro/WoC finally dies off.

Fact: if WotC folds, everyone’s books, dice, and character sheets will disappear like some kind of Nerd Rapture.

10:47 100%. There was a vid i watched awhile back going over the history of D&D. I dont remember what it was called, else I'd link it here. D&D has always gone through cycles where passionate devs make the game great, player count and income increases, marketing and sales folks get promoted (because they are most closely linked to that income number) and replace the devs, company starts making terrible decisions trying to chase the dollar, the sharks leave when the money is gone and the devs who cared enough about the game to stick it out get to make the decisions again. This has resulted in the new editions as the people in charge shape the game to their visions. WotC is trying to push sixth edition, so if we check the historical record, we are into the 'cash-grab' phase. Just as people still play 3e and 3.5, people will still play 5e and 7e might even be good again. TLDR: WotC may die, but D&D will survive

"Value Pricing" has been the norm for decades. It is not about what it costs the producer, it is about how much the consumer will pay. I think the books are already selling at the upper limit of the range. Hasbro/WOTC will likely charge retailers roughly the same price, just pocket more of the margin.

I also would like to point out that, at least here in "the States" that deal with Penguin is part of why you could always find D&D with even your smaller 'Mom and Pop' local bookstores. The same distributor that got them 90% of their books also carried the 'entry drug to TTRPGs' of D&D. (This is also true for the Big Box Book Stores, which is why Barnes and Noble has most EVERY book you could want, but when you look for TTRPGS your choices are D&D, Pathfinder, or _shut up, that's not real._ ) A great many of those stores do not _and will not_ have an arrangement with Hasbro directly for distribution. So, they will go to the secondary wholesalers like Alliance they go to when people (like this crazy guy here, it's me) ask to order specific _not D&D_ TTRPG books. OR And I expect this situation more often, not having a relationship with other games wholesalers, many of those smaller stores will simply stop carrying TTRPGs _at all_ and it will lead to it being harder to get new people into the hobby in areas without the giant book retailers.

I do believe that this is going to lead to a Golden age of piracy when it comes to D&D pdf's and people will print and bind them on their own. I can't wait to see all the hobbyists get to work :D

Sadly, skeletons will never follow a railroad. They'll just plant themselves up at the boneyard and never leave.

If you don't buy their crap then you won't have to worry about buying their crap. 🏴‍☠

This is great news for small-house indie publishers. The more Hasbro squeeze gamers for money, the more likely we are to seek viable and less costly alternatives.

Spoiler: I have never purchased any of the D&D books or content from Wizards/Hasbro. I stopped buying D&D content back when TSR screwed me and all the SPI customers. Here's the open secret: YOU HAVE WHAT YOU NEED. You don't need 5.5 if you have the 5e source books. Just because millionaires say you need new books don't mean you need new books. Hasbro is capitalizing on your greed and envy. You don't have to go there.

I feel like you should say as an intro "I heard you liked discourse, so I added some discourse to your discourse" and then, of course, when you introduce your inevitable beanie/sock puppet/stuffed toy as a companion, you can say "I added some discourse to my discourse to your discourse..." and then you can say, when the stuffed toy gets a smaller stuffed toy "I added some discourse to their discourse etc," This could be a terrible idea, and I may very well have had too much caffeine today.

To be fair, $55, while a reduction from the stock's previous value, is not a low price for public stock. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if Hasbro intends to run WotC into the ground, reducing the brand to ignominy. They've done it before. As a Boomer, I remember when Tonka trucks were high-quality, nigh-indestructible toy construction and service trucks made of sheet steel with full working capability. You could make those trucks do everything their real-life counterparts did (within reason), which was awesome for kids. Soon after Hasbro (which had been a producer of five and dime knock-offs) merged with Tonka, the quality fell off immensely. Now Tonka trucks are injection molded garbage.

The future is grimdark indeed..

The ultimate goal for Hasbro is to encourage as many people as possible to pay a subscription for access to the game digitally and to pay microtransactions for anything beyond the basics. The books will still exist as an onboarding tool but will be expensive and predominantly for collectors. You can spend $300 on the core books or play digitally for a mere $9 per month (+ microtransactions for anything beyond the basics)

Wizards of the Coast fucked around. Now they're finding out. Seems like everything is in order here.

I dont know how she did the maths. If Hasbro decides to distribute d&D themselves it doesn’t mean that the price is going to grow, it just means that they are going to get higher margins on their product. I don’t see how this will automatically make the price go up.

"We want to unlock the type of recurrent spending we see in video games" But you have... people will get new stories and minis and other stuff every now and then and that's more than enough. Video game with recurrent spending forced into them are why we hate the state of the video games industry and have been for a while now...

To be fair, NORMALLY, when you cut out the middle man, you get lower prices. Likely, the cost of books won't increase or decrease, but Hasbro will just get a bigger profit margin....I hope. Now, where's my eyepatch and peg leg....

I couldn't of afford most of this stuff in 1st place & now it's going up just crazy, Remember this folks no one needs these companies all u need is a pencil & paper & ur imagination. Take hold of the universe inside you.

D&D has a near $0 barrier of entry for players, so this is a far cry from the end of D&D. Prices may or may not go up, but Hasbro will pocket more $$$ for themselves. At the end of the day, WotC is a company that has to make money and always acting like business moves are the end of the world is overdramatic and ridiculous. This isn't even a scandal. At most, we should be concerned that Hasbro is cutting ties with partners and may became even more insular and less responsive to fans. And if prices go up, its going to fall on Dungeon Masters like it always does. So really, there is no cause for this alarmism. Just stay abreast of the changes because we wont really know for sure where this is all going until late 2024. It makes sense that companies are trying to move to a digital world, less costs, more profits, etc, but it also makes sense that this move means that EVEN WITHOUT RAISING PRICES they can satisfy their needs for more profits. At the end of the day, if people stop buying D&D products as a response then WotC is just as boned as any other day of the week.

Hey don’t we still have giant piles of 5e books? Oh cool. So wizards can go away DCC any one?

"Cocks takes care of himself!" is quite a headline. Handy indeed. Captain, my Captain.

The replacing your players with skeletons/railroad joke was awesome.

Hopefully they do collapse, and no one picks up the pieces. Let DnD become public domain as it should be, let the people, the ones that actually use and care about the setting, write it as they please and let the canon be currated by personal choice and loving fans.

I don’t care how successful Hasbro can monetize D&D, it’s not a big enough hobby to sustain a large corporation indefinitely. With every one of these actions, Hasbro is showing how desperate they are to squeeze every nickel out of their customer base. At some point they will hit a wall with their excesses and drive away more customers than they attract with all of their fancy bells and whistles.

This is why I started work on putting the world I've played in for over a decade onto paper for others to enjoy. We win this by leaving them behind.

It's entirely possible Hasbro could fulfill to Target et al at the same price as Penguin and do it for less than the margins they were giving up to Penguin. WOTC already has non-book distribution with all these retailers (Penguin ain't buying 10,000 copies of Monopoly)

Let me take a different perspective perhaps for a moment... Hasbro has now cut out the middle man (Penguin) and are selling directly to retailers. Without knowing the price Penguin was selling their negotiated pricing from Hasbro to the retailers, removing them in this situation could actually provide cheaper prices to the retailers (and ultimately the wider public). Without more data, I'm not sure we can make the assumption that this will cause prices to rise for us - since actually there are less companies (Hasbro -> Penguin (out) -> Retailers -> Public) touching the product before it gets to us which may actually reduce the overall price.

So, just to point out as a Hasbro shareholder, the stocks haven't hit an all time low at all, or even in the past 52 weeks. Regardless, as someone who started an LLC and has been working on a sourcebook and module for the past 7 months this is amazing news. Hearing the community, they're tired of the official content but not the game. For us GMs who have been playing this game already with our own homebrew and the OGL (if even that), the time is now to capitalize on Wizards fumbling and make our homebrew the "Product Identity" that Wizards is so concerned about preserving! Thank you as well, Dungeons & Discourse, you've helped me and my business keep up to date with the Clowns of the Coast!

My answer, twenty five or so years ago was to run the games I knew and owned and ignore the chronic rehashes that Gygax himself had nothing to do with it after his divorce and his ex getting control. I've seen several tables who took the came course- not just with D&D itself but Shadowrun also. My late friend and long time DM gave me many great times and memories; I'm not playing actively any more, but I hold and finger my original D&D books- tired, old, frayed, well loved. Neither Hasbro or Wizards can kill D&D, not really, as long as one of us still treasures it.

3:10 Wow, actually lined up well!

Capitalism sorts everything out. If a product is not worth what the provider wants to charge than the provider fails to make a profit.

Bob Mammon is super-happy with this. Dungeons and Dragons *is* TTRPGs in the minds of, well, everyone. Effectively everyone. And that's why Hasbro Wizards is totally cool with all of this.

Everybody said the same thing when marvel dropped Diamond distribution in the 90s, and went to direct distribution. Spoiler alert: prices stayed the same. The video even mentions WotC is taking higher margins: so why would they dramatically raise prices? The amount of illogical doom predictions is astounding. Especially coming from people that have never worked in retail distribution before. Here’s the thing: NOBODYs making money on print media anymore. I’d imagine Hasbro is following the same business model as Marvel or DC on print media, no profit. The money comes from movies, and with the success of the latest dnd movie, WotC doesn’t need to make any money on print media. The strength of the dnd brand does that for them.

"One moment, ice cream" is going to end up being used by an upcoming villain in a D&D session. This, I swear!

Gary Gygax created D&D and thus TSR was born. TSR was struggling but managing to keep their heads above water. Wizards of the Coast acquired TSR and saved them. D&D moved forward and grew and expanded. At a certain point Wizards of the Coast needed more capital than they were generating to continue expanding. Hasbro acquired Wizards of the Coast and saved them. Hasbro has been milking Wizards of the Coast for years to boost their stock price. Now the economy has gone to s**t and no one has money to buy games and Magic cards. There’s no one to save Hasbro. Instead of whining about corporate greed, people should be thinking about what will happen to the overall tabletop gaming environment if one of the biggest tabletop gaming companies in the world takes a dive. If you think the economy will be any kinder to small independent game companies you’re deluding yourself. If anything you may see more small independent game companies being acquired by the big players

I discovered Dragonlance during my O Level exams in 1988 & started playing in 1990 so i have a lot of AD&D books. I didn't buy 3/3.5 because my best mate bought them all & i got into Pathfinder when that became a thing. My current campaign (playng The Red Hand of Doom) is a mix of 3/3.5 & Pathfinder as the 2 systems mesh perfectly & we can use the bits we like from both games. Wizards main problem is that all they are going to do is lose new customers. Most of us older players still play their favourite systems which for my group for the most part is 3/3.5 or AD&D or Pathfinder. So we don't really care how much they try to sell us new books for because we're still going to be playing with books we've already had for 10+ years that have been long since discontinued & have no interest in buying overpriced books to keep up with what's new. We do have some 5e but we only use it as an intro to D&D & once newbies get experienced enough they graduate to the older systems for additional campaigns.

by cutting out Penguin house, they **could** be cutting out the middle man, increasing the margin that Penquin House would take as its cut, and sell the books to retailers directly at the same price by leveraging Hasbro's existing distribution arm and bundling it in with negotiations that those retailers make with Hasbro for toys etc. I dont see cutting out Penguin House necessarily **has** to increase price to the retailer or the consumer, though it is likely based on their track record. Still, i'm not certain I see this making a significant impact for at least several years.

In the end, the game belongs to all of us. We are all capable of playing d&d without giving them a single dime. If they make things too ridiculous, the thing that will happen is that Wizards and Hasbro will feel the pinch while the rest of us continue playing d&d without their permission because we don't need it.

I don't think eliminating a middleman is going to make the prices go up more than they otherwise would. Monopoly isn't especially expensive. What makes people think that Penguin is some sort of saint and that Hasbro is some sort of villain? The prices are already ludicrously high even though Penguin is the distributor.

Ice Cream!!!

DnD has survived 2 previous owners collapses ( because of their own greed) it will survive the collapse of WOTC

The death of Wizards and D&D is the best thing that can happen to the Roleplay community. There is a ton of roleplay systems that are miles better than anything Wizards has ever come up with or ever will come up with.

D&D really has horrible luck with women that have the last name Williams.

Feck me this is tight. I thought it might be semi positive, didn't think of how it's essentially reinforcing a monopoly. 😮

So we're cutting out one of the middlemen, and the only possibility is the end price will go up? It is possible they can charge more than PHR charged them, but less then PHR charged the retailers. Middlemen always take a cut.

Sounds like hasbro is in danger of experiencing a spike in pirating, proportionally to an increase in product pricing.

10 steps to destroying a company’s reputation and value 1.) Wotc creates some of the best nerd games known to man 2.) Wotc supports the playing community, bringing in new players who buy their products 3.) Wotc products become very profitable, especially with their support for the community 4.) Hasbro sees a very profitable company and buys it 5.) Wotc under hasbro stops supporting the company 6.) new players stop engaging and and old players are no longer incentivized to but product 7.) hasbro sees a drop in profit and cuts expenditures to fix the margins 8.) cut content and support continues the downward spiral of unsupported players 9.) hasbro goes uh oh and increases prices for the few remaining players 10.) players get upset about being constantly screwed, further destroying public relations, hurting retailers and customers alike

I see. Well, this will murder independent stores.

Listen here, missy : Woolworths is JUST as reliable today as they were a decade ago....

Irish and a mugger? That's a scary combination!

Come to Pathfinder. Most of us will accept you with open arms. Revised rules are releasing in November.

The thing is as a distributor Random/Penguin (RHP) they do negotiate the cost/unit they also have contractual discounts built into there relationship to retail stores as well that has to be built in. Yes it removes RHP taking a cut but it loses so much in logistics, distribution, sales support and ease for the stores to access product. It also allowed speciality stores to access RHP product beyond the game manuals. It’s a (shockingly) short sighted decision and will bite them in the ass unless they have a dedicated worldwide sales staff talking up their products on every sales call. This is how you restrict access and hurt every independent game and book store out there. It’s really going to come down to what the margin will end up being as if it’s too low , stores will now carry. Why waste shelf space on something I may may $10 off of and use it for product I make $20. (Simplified example-I know).

Price is determined by the interaction of demand and supply forces, not just supply. If the price of dnd books becomes too much then we will see increased sales in Pathfinder, Kobold Press etc. In the medium to long term this will enable a competitor of Hasbro to build their own RPG generic digital platform like DnD Beyond and we may finally see the competition we need to end the Hasbro RPG Monopoly.

I wonder if the Washing State AG went public with charges? That would cause this type of chain of events.

To be fair, they are eliminating a middle man, not changing the MSRP they already print on the books before sending them to Penguin or the Bookstore. The book MSRP is $49.99 Habro sells to Penguin for $25 who sells to Bookstore for $35 who seeks to you for $49.99. Now, Hasbro sells to Bookstore for $35 and Bookstore sells to you for $49.99, increasing Hasbro profit without changing your price.

This actually proves this is a good time to dump a bunch of money into Hasbro's stock because it's going to climb again after they're done shorting it 🤓

Suggested Retail price for a book: $59.00 WotC asking price from vendors: $59.00 Vendors price to consumers: $75.00 That is what they are going to do but it will blow up in their face. Let them burn and turn to ash. Hasbro/NotC are just greedy corporate cow-milkers and need to be driven back into the darkness. The great era of game-shrink is about to occur. Our beloved industry will return to 1980's level of engagement and popularity.

Once again, at the risk of sounding repetitive, the solution to all these issues is and always has been G.U.R.P.S

Random House is the largest distribution network for books in the world. They have the clout to prevent retailers from carrying Hasbro products. Penguin is a publisher, so they were the ones printing the physical books for Hasbro. Hasbro just shot themselves in the foot.

I saw this coming. I also see that they will move to collectable books only. $100+ a pop. Everything else PDF online micro-transaction etc. Only problem is this is a lot like the comic industry plan which, has been a abject failure. So, yeah. Not likely to go well.

Thank god that dungeons and dragons is basically just a storytelling game that can’t actually be killed because the content is largely created by the players and DMs

It's time to raise the black flag, It's piracy time.

D&D won't die. New editions might become unviable and Hasbro/WotC might go belly up (good riddance), but people will just keep playing from the books they already own.

As much as I've enjoyed playing D&D or MTG over the years, I can't say that I'd miss WotC if and when they go belly up... which honestly, hopefully happens soon.

Seems weird that dungeons and dragons is hitting a low period they just released Baldur's Gate 3 and it's been a huge success

I guess we’ll just have to end capitalism 🤷‍♀️ I won’t be buying D&D books again. Mostly after the last dumpster fire but this just reaffirms it.

Look, when a friend/party member dies, you can either spend multiple thousands of gold pieces in diamonds to bring them back to die again, or spend like 50gp to _animate dead_ and now they actually *do what you tell them to do!* Looks like an easy decision to me. 💀

As a game store I get far better service and support from GW than any other distro or publisher.

Ah Wizards... Evil is Evil. Lesser, greater, middling… Makes no difference.

The reason wasn't wizards themselves, it was the owner company Hasbro who tried to increase revenue from the company at the expense of its player base. At some point, increasing profitability requirements grew beyond its customer base's monetary capacity to support its ever-increasing prices that grew beyond the consumer's spending habits on hobby products.

Your talking about Penguin as if they don’t (like Walmart) use their size to force publishers like Wizards to sell at reduced prices to them and then “encourage” retailers to sell at the listed cover price. They’re the typical middleman who try constantly to claim the biggest share of the end sale price of a product they neither make nor actually sell. On the other hand, one of the connecting strands of all these stories this week is that Hasbro is trying to get all the money. They don’t want an independent company providing MTG judges; _they_ want to do that. They don’t want Penguin distributing D&D books, they want to do it themselves. They’re trying to cut out the middlemen, and get the money they used to pay other companies to do that for themselves. Not entirely bad decisions from a business perspective, why let someone else take 25% of your possible profit to do a job that Hasbro can already do (Hasbro distributes it’s own toys, for example). But, Wizards has created a massive economy around D&D and, because of that, they have a constant and consistent moneymaker. Instead of FOSTERING good relations with all these third party folks, they keep trying to alienate them, or blatantly grab some of the money they make. It’s reminiscent of the farmer who kills his golden-egg-laying goose to get all the gold that must be in there only to find that’s not where the gold is, and now they’ve killed the goose, too.

On one hand it's rather depressing to see D&D go the way of apple and Warhammer, on the other hand it'll be interesting to see small D&D stores start popping up.

Hasbro: "Man, we goofed up!" (Grabs shotgun and aims at other foot) "This'll fix it!"

AD&D went downhill when the Blume brothers sold their shares of TSR to Lorraine Williams who then ousted Gary Gygax from his own company.

I don't quite follow....It used to be: Hasbro sells to Penguin for $A, Penguin sells it to Stores for $B, Store sells it to us for $C....Now Hasbro can just sell directly to Stores for $B, and Stores still sell to us at $C. The only thing left out is Penguin's cut.

The expectation that all corporations must constantly increase their profitability year-on-year kills otherwise successful businesses. Because that demands constant squeezing of suppliers, employees and customers, and they ultimately end up squeezing too hard and breaking something important.

So, now that 5e is all open in perpetuity, this doesn’t matter anymore. WotC adventures suck for the most part anyway. Third party publishers are the future.

I'll never understand why people buy the books when there are many websites that provide the same information freely and neatly. No one wants to play OneD&D anyway. I'll be just like those geezers who still play 3.5e

Vertical integration has another name, it's called a monopoly. Over 100 Years ago, Movie studios had vertical integration from making movies, all the way down to owning certain theaters, that's why many downtown cities might have an old RKO, or FOX cinema. This is what got their monopoly busted up, and one of the main examples of why anti-trust laws went into effect almost 100 years ago. Today though, the studios are at it again with streaming services. Disney+, and Disney owning Lucasfilms and 20 Century Fox is a travesty, and has given Disney so much pull in hollywood it's frightening.

Someone really should tell hasbro/wotc that the book of vile darkness was not meant as a CEO training manual.

I don’t know how much you know about Blizzard Entertainment and it’s downward spiral since Activision bought them but it looks like Hasbro saw what was happening there and said, “Wait, why aren’t we doing that with WotC?” Basically, it’s about milking as much money from their IP as possible with min/maxing their spending to produce barely(arguable) viable products that people will just buy because of the name on the cover. The milking comes from subscriptions, battle passes, and cosmetics that start at “reasonable” prices and that slowly increase and/or they put cooler, more useful/powerful stuff behind a new premium tier. So the digital books will start out cheaper until they cost the same as physical. Then revisions and changes to those books will be locked behind the current, but now more expensive, master tier subscription. The upcoming VTT will feature a litany of cosmetics and bugs that’ll never truly be fixed(fixing bugs doesn’t make money, new features, also buggy, do). The battle pass will happen by giving unique cosmetics, classes, subclasses and an adventure. Then you probably progress by total time played in their VTT. I’m sure the only way to purchase these things will be through their proprietary virtual currency that can only be earned in the battle pass and purchased in packs that have just barely not enough in them to actually buy what you want, so you have to purchase the next size up to actually get what you wanted. D&D will become a micro transaction hellscape that is only truly playable through D&D Beyond or whatever they are going to call it unless you pirate pdf/jpg copies and manually enter the info into a different, more open, VTT. Or you buy 3rd party D&D sourcebooks because Hasbro/WotC will keep the OGL untouched because they can’t point to that and say, “But see, we are the good guys. We just need this monetization to fund the creation of more sourcebooks and VTT features that you want because it’s so expensive and the old way didn’t work.” But the people developing this stuff will never see a pay raise, so they’ll leave and WotC hire less and less talented people because nobody wants to work for their terrible pay. But profit margins will go up so Hasbro won’t care.

I went to L.A. once, got to visit a Hobbit Dungeon. Best $35k I've ever spent, and as a bonus I learned what you could do with whipped cream and an unhealthy lack of boundaries.

When Games Workshop moved from pewter to finecast they claimed it would drop prices and improve quality. Finecast was a huge flop and the prices went up, which they claimed was part of the cost of switching to finecast. Then they changed to plastic when finecast was proven to be inferior in quality. During all this the price ROSE from the time they were doing pewter. So going from metal to plastic made their products rise in price despite lowering in cost of production. PEOPLE STILL PLAY THIS. What makes you think idiots aren't still going to gobble up crap D&D products?