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| #1mrburack_dupJun 12, 2008 10:00:25 | There is so much wrong with the things you guys have done here that i hardly know where to begin, as a matter of fact i've tried to write this post a half-dozen times already, and i just get so disgusted with the whole situation that i give up in frustration. The only thing about 4th edition that really interested me was the possibility of playing online with friends who live far away from me. Let me state for the record that i and my friends/players are in our 30s & 40s, and we have good jobs and plenty of disposable income. I intended to buy the books ASAP when they came out, but i came to the website before i could get to the store. When i figured out that D&DI was not ready yet i decided to wait and get more info before i bought the books and i'm very glad i did. I am willing to pay $15 per month on two conditions.
I would be willing to pay $10 per month if only condition 2 from above was met. If neither of those conditions were met, i would be willing to pay $5 a month. I could convince my friends to pay that amount or pay it for them. If you can't run this business with that kind of pricing scheme, then either you are doing something wrong or this business plan just doesn't work. At your current price plan you are getting $0 per month from me and all my friends plus most of us won't even buy the 4th ed. books. How does your business plan look with those numbers? By being late on delivering D&DI and putting forward a pricing scheme that appears to be motivated more by greed than by market research and good business planning you have soured me on the whole 4th edition. |
| #2trevorscroftJun 12, 2008 10:14:18 | If you are looking for a way to play with friends over the internet (or even face to face), here are a couple options that are available: http://rpgvirtualtabletop.com/vts.html |
| #3cart_sprinterJun 12, 2008 10:30:24 | I am willing to pay $15 per month on two conditions. Speculation: I believe they are going to provide a way to play on the game table with tokens, and tokens of everything will be available as the program is updated. What will cost extra, because it is an option that is not needed to play and is purely up to the user to have, is the 3D Virtual Miniature. I do not know if the same can be said of the tiles, but given what i've read I believe the 2-d versions of them will be included in the subscription as well. According to the FAQ: V-minis will be shared at the session, so that if only one member at the digital table has purchased them everyone at the table benefits. They will also be providing guest passes each month for people to give to non-subscribers the ability to play and these guest passes are included in the subscription, as well as extras can be purchased. The number of guest passes given to a subscriber each month is not know as of yet. Also one player can control multiple characters, so if any of your group shares a monitor they will only need one subscription or guest pass. Hope that helps. |
| #4malkav666Jun 12, 2008 10:37:13 | Speculation: I believe they are going to provide a way to play on the game table with tokens, and tokens of everything will be available as the program is updated. What will cost extra, because it is an option that is not needed to play and is purely up to the user to have, is the 3D Virtual Miniature. I do not know if the same can be said of the tiles, but given what i've read I believe the 2-d versions of them will be included in the subscription as well. Tokens are simply not going to cut it. If I want to play with tokens I will play with the FREE alternatives, all of which have tokens. DDI has prices that compare tot hat of MMO digital subscriptions. MMOs give me the graphics, they animate them, and everyt hing is 3-d. MMOs would go out of business if they tried to sell the graphics for the monsters and challenges as "extras" and offered 2-d tokens as replacements for those that did not want to buyt he graphics. Tokens fail in a subscription baesed environment. Now if it were a FREE service, then I would have no issues buying the digital components I wanted. But alas its not free. Its 15 bucks a month. they can include the graphics for that price or they get 0 dollars a month from me any my gaming friends. My dollars will be my vote. love, malkav |
| #5gizmoiscariotJun 12, 2008 10:39:11 | Speculation: I believe they are going to provide a way to play on the game table with tokens, and tokens of everything will be available as the program is updated. What will cost extra, because it is an option that is not needed to play and is purely up to the user to have, is the 3D Virtual Miniature. I do not know if the same can be said of the tiles, but given what i've read I believe the 2-d versions of them will be included in the subscription as well. I agree with this and like the idea of the v minis, however the issue many may have (and its one I have) is that on the D&D Game Table site they tout the idea of 3d and mention minis. If someone who had not been crawling the forums may read that, they might be shocked to know that you only get some 3d stuff and unless you want to pay extra (for something that many, tho not really myself think is too much already) is overkill. If they would clarify that 2D tokens could be used on the main site, the people then would see that 3d minis is the extra component but is not required to play on the table (as there will be 2d tokens that can represent whatever). |
| #6cart_sprinterJun 12, 2008 10:51:06 | I can understand that, but do not lose sight of the fact that $15 dollars a month is not for the game table only. It is for the Character Visualizer that can create custom minis for the Game Table. It is for the Character Builder that can create sheets that can be imported into the Game Table. It is for the rules compendium that is linked to the Character Builder and Game Table and that will have feats, powers, and such from supplements without requiring you to buy anything else. It is for the Dragon and Dungeon articles that are going to be placed into the Rules Compendium, and hopefully Dungeon adventure maps that can be ported into the Game Table. It is for the Dungeon Builder that allows you to make custom maps and import them into the Game Table. The $15 a month is not for one single component but for the interconnectivity and benefits of all the other components of the D&Di. $15 a month that can be mitigated to $10 a month with a year subscription. There have also been claims of a lower price for early subscribers. It is still ultimately up to the comsumer if the above is worth it or not. It's just something to keep in mind. |
| #7mudbunnyJun 12, 2008 10:52:40 | IIRC, there have also been rumors of early subscribers Update - Checked, all initial subscribers gets a "starter set of minis." (from http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/CriticalHits/~3/242816401/) |
| #8malkav666Jun 12, 2008 13:39:37 | I can understand that, but do not lose sight of the fact that $15 dollars a month is not for the game table only. It is for the Character Visualizer that can create custom minis for the Game Table. It is for the Character Builder that can create sheets that can be imported into the Game Table. It is for the rules compendium that is linked to the Character Builder and Game Table and that will have feats, powers, and such from supplements without requiring you to buy anything else. It is for the Dragon and Dungeon articles that are going to be placed into the Rules Compendium, and hopefully Dungeon adventure maps that can be ported into the Game Table. It is for the Dungeon Builder that allows you to make custom maps and import them into the Game Table. \ but see thats the real issue isnt it? Nothing else in DDIs entire package is new, and most of the offerings hae been for free by other folks. They need to loosen up the microtransaction vice. The only folks whoa re going to lose out are going to be them, and those very few players looking to join a worldwide gaming table only to find it a barren wasteland because of the pricing. Would be a shame if one of the one time fee/free providers decided ot include 3-d content. That would spell the end of DDI me thinks. They should open the floodgates and try and get as many folks on board as possible. I just dont see it happening with the nipple pinch to the wallet that is being served up. Yeah the articles are decent, but nothing else in the entire package other than the articles and the game table are unique. I just hope they take this time they have gained from the programs not being ready to take a real good look at the pricing issue. I think it is the hinge on which a smashing success and an abysmal failure is tied to. love, malkav |
| #9hellmuteJun 12, 2008 18:13:53 | IIRC, there have also been rumors of early subscribers Not to mention that all the monsters form MM that was jsut released will NOT be in game table, nor will all the monsters from any other publication as Stated by Ken Troop in his recent threads. |
| #10gizmoiscariotJun 12, 2008 18:57:15 | Not to mention that all the monsters form MM that was jsut released will NOT be in game table, nor will all the monsters from any other publication as Stated by Ken Troop in his recent threads. Where have you seen that none of the MM monsters will be released? Seems a bit odd as since that is the only 4e thing out that has monsters in it which means what, 0 minis? Since the game table is 4e inspired, I would suspect that at least some of the basic low 4e stuff will show up (skeletons, kobolds and whatever). |
| #11KentinalJun 12, 2008 19:37:10 | Where have you seen that none of the MM monsters will be released? Seems a bit odd as since that is the only 4e thing out that has monsters in it which means what, 0 minis? Since the game table is 4e inspired, I would suspect that at least some of the basic low 4e stuff will show up (skeletons, kobolds and whatever). *bangs head into keyboard* Not all in MM will be provided as part of membership does not mean none will be released. It has been stated officially some minis will be provided that are in the MM with membership. It has also been stated officially that all monsters in the MM will not have a minie, at least for now. |
| #12gizmoiscariotJun 12, 2008 20:43:27 | *bangs head into keyboard* I was saying that same thing (not sure if you misunderstood me). |
| #13snarky_monkeyJun 12, 2008 21:03:03 | I was saying that same thing (not sure if you misunderstood me). I believe Kentinal was under the impression that YOU misunderstood Hellmute's comment. Truth is, with all due respect to Hellmute, the way they worded it, it sounded as if they were saying none of the monsters from the manual would be turned into minis. I personally got their meaning, but then I knew about the starter set before I read the post. ;) I am very bummed that it will be a "starter set" and not the full manual. I guess it will all come down to just what is in the set to begin with whether I am going to be truly pee'd or not. |
| #14gizmoiscariotJun 12, 2008 21:06:21 | I believe Kentinal was under the impression that YOU misunderstood Hellmute's comment. Truth is, with all due respect to Hellmute, the way he worded it, it sounded as if he was saying none of the monsters from the manual would be turned into minis. I personally got his meaning, but then I knew about the starter set before I read his post. ;) Ah ok. And I agree, if it comes out and they only come with just the virtual minis of the normal races and classes and like 10 different monsters (orc, skeleton, kobold and so on) I think it would be rather lame. Unless the v minis that you can buy are real cheap. Alot of this comes down to we will find out when they release the info and at that point we can make a decision on what we think. Before that is speculation at best. |
| #15KentinalJun 12, 2008 21:10:58 | I was saying that same thing (not sure if you misunderstood me). Well I kinda thought your answer did not properly answer the poster you replied to. That likely derived from the FAQ potion of my soul. hellmute said "Not to mention that all the monsters form MM that was jsut released will NOT be in game table," and you said "Where have you seen that none of the MM monsters will be released?" There appears to be a disconnect in your reply to hellmute that caught my attention. "Not all" does not equal "none". |
| #16giantslorJun 13, 2008 0:03:08 | I can understand that, but do not lose sight of the fact that $15 dollars a month is not for the game table only. It is for the Character Visualizer that can create custom minis for the Game Table. And how much content PER month will be added to the Visualizer? I doubt very much and I would not be surprised in the least if buying new models for the visualizer is a target for micro transactions. So yeah, that Gnoll Ranger you want to play, it may cost you. It is for the Character Builder that can create sheets that can be imported into the Game Table. Again, beyond new books and bug fixing, is a builder really worth a monthly fee? There are already half way decent xls sheets floating around. You also have to buy the books for additional material to be worth while. This comes up in the compendium too. It is for the rules compendium that is linked to the Character Builder and Game Table and that will have feats, powers, and such from supplements without requiring you to buy anything else. Are you sure? It has been stated that the compendium will not be a replacement for the books. It will not have things like how to resolve combat. It will supposedly allow you to see what feats 5 level halfling rouge can take, but it will not give in depth descriptions of that information. For that, you need the books. And it won't even reference page numbers and volumes from what I understand. So its sort of like etools, but bit more searchable. Edit: Since the table will not adjudicate rules, why on earth would you spend the time linking it to the compendium. Just pull up the compendium. It is for the Dragon and Dungeon articles that are going to be placed into the Rules Compendium, and hopefully Dungeon adventure maps that can be ported into the Game Table. This may be valuable, but keep in mind that the $15/month is more than the $14 cover price that both mags were for the last issue. The point of going paperless was to reduce cost. I don't know what a subscriber paid, but I would give AT BEST the mags a $5 per month slice of the action. They have said there will be modules and maps that they will release for you to use, and those will cost you just the vminis will. It is for the Dungeon Builder that allows you to make custom maps and import them into the Game Table. This is nice, but when the tell us they will be charging us for new tile sets, minis and dungeons, they why do we have the subscription? This cannot be a huge drain the servers. Where is the content that a subscription warrants? The $15 a month is not for one single component but for the interconnectivity and benefits of all the other components of the D&Di. $15 a month that can be mitigated to $10 a month with a year subscription. There have also been claims of a lower price for early subscribers. I agree. I simply just don't see the value. The contents of much of what will be available is simply reformatted information from the print books. That is pretty much all that the character builder and compendium will do. The visualizer is neat, but that is hardly a monthly content heavy app. The builder looks to be really, really cool, but why a monthly fee if we are to be nickel and dimed for the new stuff? So in the end it seems what you are really getting for you montly fee is a connection service to the table and two magazines. While the few articles released so far are nice, will they live up to their old standards? Of course this is all based on the assumption the tools will be finished as promised and will actually work together. With past and current performance, I would not hold my breath. I see DDI getting canned as easily as getting finished. |
| #17flamepulseJun 13, 2008 0:29:17 | I can get my heard around a extra cost to purchase vminis. but i wish they would have done it all the monsters in hte MM1 are included with the subscription price. now if you want minis for monsters in hte MM2(or other expansion book) then you buy the MM2 mini pack for x dollers, that in my mind would be reasonable. |
| #18mrburack_dupJun 13, 2008 21:56:24 | I can understand that, but do not lose sight of the fact that $15 dollars a month is not for the game table only. I am aware of what's supposed to be included - i had to spend a few hours doing research to find that information and now i'm telling them what i'm willing to pay for it. Almost everything they have mentioned so far is available through free or straight-purchase (non-subscription) third party applications. The only thing they really have going for them is the fact that they are integrating it all into one package that would (hopefully) work together seamlessly and be easy to use and access. I cannot imagine how they justify their pricing decision in light of this. P.S. Another pet peave - stop calling the game table a "3D environment." Neverwinter Nights allowed you to build 3D environments - dungeon tiles are not even close to that even if you stick a couple of bump-mapped textures and 3D models on top of them. |
| #19kalanthJun 13, 2008 22:04:01 | If production cost is their biggest concern then why not increase price some? $14.99 to $16.99 for example. 2 dollars, no big deal to average joe, but average Joe multiplied by 1 million subscribers and you have effectively doubled the income that you got before. Besides, why should we pay for the V-mini's when some MMO game companies dump content on their player base for free? See Turbine for a great example of this. I have pretty much written off running on on-line game because the economy sucks and I don't have the coin to buy a couple hundre virtual replica's of miniatures. Especially when I have two three foot tall tackle boxes filled with REAL mini's for my weekly game already. Keep you tokens, WoTC, this is a bad deal getting worse. |
| #20steerpike7Jun 13, 2008 22:47:09 | I'm with malkav et al. Not going to sub if it's just tokens. I can do just as well with free alternatives, and the rest of the features aren't that valuable to me. |
| #21seTinyJun 13, 2008 23:04:49 | Are you sure? It has been stated that the compendium will not be a replacement for the books. It will not have things like how to resolve combat. It will supposedly allow you to see what feats 5 level halfling rouge can take, but it will not give in depth descriptions of that information. For that, you need the books. And it won't even reference page numbers and volumes from what I understand. So its sort of like etools, but bit more searchable. Edit: Since the table will not adjudicate rules, why on earth would you spend the time linking it to the compendium. Just pull up the compendium. What you have described is the free version of the Compendium. From the FAQ: -- [RC1] What is the difference for this feature between the subscriber and non-subscriber. For subscribers, the Compendium offers detailed text of the 4th Edition core rules mechanical elements (a power, a class, a race, a feat, a skill, a magic item...). But yes it will not tell you Combat rules, you will still need the PHB for that. However in the part you quoted, Cart_Sprinter said you wouldn't need to buy supplements, he (or she) didn't say that you wouldn't need the 3 Core books. Though I don't know if it will have any monster information on it, so maybe C_S is wrong and you will have to buy some supplements (if you want that information) There is another thing to keep in mind as well that C_S did not mention and it is the Guest passes. Since they will be giving subscribers a certain number of them each month, they are giving you back whatever they charge for them. For Example: If they give 4 passes a month, and charge $2 for them then they are giving you $8 a month back. A group of 5 can play for what amounts to $7 ($2 if a year subscriber) a month if they only play once a month plus the DM (the subscriber) gets everything else on top of that. Playing twice a month would mean that the same group of 5 would have to pay for the extra guest passes bringing the price per month back to $15 ($10) for 5 people to play twice a month on the game table. ($3 ($2) a person on one subscription). Again this is just an example and it could be better or worse. We will have to wait for the pricing plan for the passes and how many they give each month to see what value they will have. Now if you will never use these guest passes then it is of little value to you. Like C_S said, if you don't find a value in what is being offer that is your decision. If no one subscribes to it at $15 a month then they'll have to reexamine their pricing structure. Edit: In my case, I may not be able to use the Game Table except for a one shot here and there if available, as I have a schedule that is not fixed. It is one of the reason I don't have a RL group and must resort to PbP. I never know when I'll be free to game. For me I have to decide whether or not all of the other applications and such are worth the $15 a month. |
| #42middlemonsterJun 16, 2008 11:56:19 | middlemonster I was saying online games and D&Di are both software with online services. I'm sorry you couldn't make that connection. But you are really stretching when it comes to considering pricing for online software. Online software is what we are talking about. Not any of that other stuff. Your telling people that they should pay for it and I'm saying that they shouldn't. I wish you would stay on topic though, all this talk about Greece and phones is just stretching. I understand that your basing your opinions about how much things are worth based on desire and want. I'm basing my opinion on technical aspects, software comparison, graphic quality, how much it costs to maintain a product, and necessity when it comes to playing D&D online. So until you use argue using the same means you shouldn't be arguing with me you should be arguing with people who don't wanna play with D&Di just because they don't "feel" like it, not with people who have an opinion based on facts and not feelings. So, you really what you are saying is that no one is going to pay $40/month ($30 IS + $10 WotC) + $1500 up front (computer) for D&DI when they know that your services is $30/month (IS) + $1500 up front (computer) + software cost? Actually what I'm saying is instead of paying $10 per month you could pay nothing or like a $25-$40 charge once. I don't see how you can confuse that. Your point is that you would willingly pay $10 a month to play online with your friends, when you could infact not spend $10 a month and still play online with your friends. I'm saying you don't have to pay per month, and your saying you are willing to pay even though you don't have to. And thats fine, we understand that your willing to pay. But there are other people who don't want to pay $10 a month to do something they can do for free or for $25-40 dollars one time. And instead of giving up that one (eat out) meal per month so you can play with your friends, you can eat that meal and still play with your friends. |
| #43schadwe13Jun 16, 2008 12:04:53 | middlemonster Your "logic: is flawed. the $30 ISP and computer is not use SOLELY for DDI. I know I didn't build my rig just to use DDI. That means the cost in using DDI on my rig and ISP is negligible. As for your "cost analysis" for monthly entertainment, the issue is NOT that we have to pay $15/month. The issue is that the $15 is considered way overpriced for the service that is provided. No one minds paying $10 for a movie because it's a MULTI MILLION DOLLAR piece of entertainment. It's well worth the cost. But what if the theaters started to charge you extra to see the second half of the movie? What if they charged you to for the seat or air conditioning? I bet you'd get all gitty to be charged $5 to use a fork or $3 for the menu at your favorite restaurant because according to you, it cost them time and money to produce that menu and wash that fork. And why shouldn't they charge you extra? You should just go out less and be happy to pay more for each visit. I'm glad you won the lotto so you can just throw out $15 on anything that's waved in front of your face, but in the real world we all watch our spending and make sure we are getting the best value for our expenditures. |
| #44gizmoiscariotJun 16, 2008 12:17:00 | Your "logic: is flawed. the $30 ISP and computer is not use SOLELY for DDI. I know I didn't build my rig just to use DDI. That means the cost in using DDI on my rig and ISP is negligible. Your argument is sound except one really huge gaping flaw that all the haters on the forums (especially those that keep pointing to the price) has. Its not even out yet. How the hell do you know its not worth the $15? If its a service you don't plan on using its not going to matter the cost. Your cost vs usage is much lower. I generally consider using a easy to use formula for me. If I get an hours worth of entertainment for an hours worth of pay, its worth it. Considering it takes not even an hour to make up for the monthly fee for me (I realize not everyone makes that kind of money, and im by far not rich but still) then its worth it to me. Hell even if I was making minimum wage at 5.00 an hour (which I know its higher than that, but its easier to do the math) it comes out to before taxes 3 hours to make that up. This is how I determine worth as far as entertainment. Im sure many others have their own way of looking at it. However, since its not out yet, judging its value is kinda hard. Personally looking at how its advertised on the site, its worth the $15 a month to me. I suspect that if what you see on the site and what they envision it to be is not worth $15 a month to you (as far as I know this price point has been around for a long time regarding DDI, so its not something thats new) then it won't be worth it to you. I don't expect (tho would be happy if it was) for it to be better than what is currently presented. Certainly if its worse, than when it comes out I will reevaluate if its entertaining enough to qualify for me, as for anyone will make that decision. I wish people would stop hating on something that they have not used, and then trying to tell everyone that its not worth it as it may not be worth it to them and thats fine but im tired of all the hate. I guess the issue really comes down to that people have made their decisions at this point. Mine is Im looking forward to it, hope it is what they say and will buy it if it is that. If not I won't. Others have made the decision that it sucks. Others yet have made the decision that it looks good but they aren't willing to fork over the $15 a month and would rather consider $5 to $10. Personally, I hope they keep it at $15 as the higher they can get away with hopefully the better the product. I realize that im more than likely going to be flamed for this, so be it. |
| #45blackzeroJun 16, 2008 12:19:56 | This is all about value for price. DDi's service has to compare with the many ways to do the same thing for free or super-cheap. They have to somehow justify the pricetag. Will the online rules, the articles, minis, character creator and one stop shopping be enough to tip the scales? Too soon to tell right now. I can't say if the price is out of line, just right or too cheap cause right now it isn't ready. BlackZero |
| #46etarnonJun 16, 2008 13:52:52 | Right now, it's worth Zero. Hopefully, the little elves are working 24/7 to rectify that, right? |
| #47rcuhljrJun 16, 2008 14:13:24 | I'm not interested in purchasing a product where the cost being charged to me is completely divorced from the cost of production. If I buy a watch from someone I'm happy paying 250 for a very nice watch that works whenever I use it and I occasionally take it in for repair. I'm never going to be be happy paying 50 bucks a month to keep my watch and get battery changes and small repairs done. DDI might be a great value for people who want the two magazines, and all the tools. However for anyone (myself included) who wasn't even thinking of 4th ed until I heard about the online tools, and could care less about the magazines, the pricing model for the tools I'm interested in is a joke at my expense. |
| #48gizmoiscariotJun 16, 2008 14:36:32 | I'm not interested in purchasing a product where the cost being charged to me is completely divorced from the cost of production. If I buy a watch from someone I'm happy paying 250 for a very nice watch that works whenever I use it and I occasionally take it in for repair. I'm never going to be be happy paying 50 bucks a month to keep my watch and get battery changes and small repairs done. Since we aren't sure what all we get yet for a continued $15 a month, its hard to objectively say that. That being said, you look at World of Warcraft you can't tell me that it costs them $15 times each subscriber to create new content. Assuming they only had 1 million subscribers, which they have way more than that thats $15million bucks a MONTH (or if they still only charge 12 a month, fine $12 million. My point is the same). Say they have $50 million from subscriptions a month. There is no way that it takes that much money to come up with new content even if you could all the execs salaries down to the artist who comes up with the monster skins. |
| #49BW0222Jun 16, 2008 15:46:48 | middlemonster,I was saying online games and D&Di are both software with online services. So... all online software services must charge using WoWs model? No, Quickbooks charges yearly for tax code updates? D&D Online charges monthly? WoW charges once, but only includes a limited amount of content before forcing users to by other "packs" to go playing. MtG is free, but cards cost money? Virtual meeting software charges by the hour? Again, why do folks accept that MtG, D&D Online, etc. doesn't charge the same like WoW? Yet, D&DI is suppose to? You are still comparing apples and oranges. Schadwe13, My logic isn't that computers and ISP can only be used for D&DI. My logic is that if I'm spending hundreds of dollars per month in entertainment (phone, cable, ISP, computers, eating out, etc.) that $10 a month is not going to make any real difference in whether I choose one product over another. I'm going to judge the products solely on what they offer. If my monthly entertainment budget was $25/month, then obviously subscribing to D&DI over X product (free) would be factor. For most folks, it won't be a factor. gizmoiscariot, I'm certainly willing to accept that it might not be worth $10/month after having seen it. However, my point is that I (and most folks) spend significant amounts of money on entertainment. In the end, $10/month if nothing if it is worthwhile. It is such a tiny amount of most folks spending on entertainment that I doubt most folks will have any issue paying for it if it is even a tiny bit better than any other VTT. |
| #50epochgamesJun 16, 2008 15:57:52 | Since we aren't sure what all we get yet for a continued $15 a month, its hard to objectively say that. That being said, you look at World of Warcraft you can't tell me that it costs them $15 times each subscriber to create new content. Assuming they only had 1 million subscribers, which they have way more than that thats $15million bucks a MONTH (or if they still only charge 12 a month, fine $12 million. My point is the same). Say they have $50 million from subscriptions a month. There is no way that it takes that much money to come up with new content even if you could all the execs salaries down to the artist who comes up with the monster skins. Gizmo, you're right on in a big way. We do not know what it'll be worth. We've seen a handful of demo videos and we've seen a list of features, but no one has been able to come out and tell us why DDi is better than the rest, why it makes itself worth the proposed payment schedule. I think there are two big concerns here. 1. From what people have seen, it isn't showing the value (to those who don't like the proposed pricing). 2. WotC's failure to deliver. Past products, now DDi, and even the answers people are looking for. I for one want to try DDi, but I don't have high expectations since WotC has failed to address my concerns as to what make the product worth their proposed pricing. I also am concerned that more money dumped into funding a project that may potentially flounder will hurt the company, which I don't want to see happen and I don't want to see an extra $10 on the cover price of a book trying to recuperate cost. |
| #51rcuhljrJun 16, 2008 16:02:07 | Since we aren't sure what all we get yet for a continued $15 a month, its hard to objectively say that. I know what tools I'm interested in, the character creator and the game table. They told us what these products are, we know a baseline what we are getting. Working as a software developer I have a good ballpark for what is involved in the creation and maintenance of these tools. That being said, you look at World of Warcraft you can't tell me that it costs them $15 times each subscriber to create new content. Assuming they only had 1 million subscribers, which they have way more than that thats $15million bucks a MONTH (or if they still only charge 12 a month, fine $12 million. My point is the same). Say they have $50 million from subscriptions a month. There is no way that it takes that much money to come up with new content even if you could all the execs salaries down to the artist who comes up with the monster skins. Most mmorpgs spend 50% of their monthly income on keeping the game running right off the bat. We are talking about the massive server farms, the bandwidth costs, full crews of techs to monitor the servers 24 hours a day, external customer service, and payed in game customer service representatives. These ALL scale with the number of players in the game. Everquest (the most populous game at the time, and the cited figures) was spending 1.5 million a month only on these factors for a game that topped out at 500k players? and was bringing in 2.7 million a month at the time. (citation This doesn't take into account the fact that they are under constant development, releasing free content. That means a full team of developers, a full QA department. I can't even ballpark how much overhead goes into PC/Mac compatibility and the fact that they release WoW in different languages in multiple countries At this point I haven't even counted in costs associated with buildings/infrastructure for any of these employees. The requirements for the gametable and character builder are joke. They can be quickly developed by an out of house developer with experience in the area for a pittance of an upfront cost with almost no long term maintenance costs. Now they could purposefully design them in some horrible way to try and justify the cost, but I'm not more inclined to try and pay for their horrible decisions. For every kB of data that should need to be transferred for the gametable through WoTC's servers a MMORPG would receive a ballpark of 8mB of data. Considering the rising costs for total volumes of bandwidth, We're looking at the fact that for every penny WOTC spends per user for bandwidth Blizzard is spending 10 dollars for that same user. All of this is ignoring the initial costs that blizzard spent, 5 years of development employing hundreds of developers? versus Gametable/Char creator which I'd be shocked if they have more then 5-10 on for more then a year and change? Seriously you make yourself sound like and idiot when you compare Microsoft excel and the windows built in calculator and think they should both cost the same, or even be in the same ballpark. Optimistically WoW is bringing in 70~ million a month. They are spending 20 million minimal on employees. Not even talking buildings, hardware, infrastructure. If you assume the average wow user plays 12 hour a week you're looking at 1.8 million gig of bandwidth a month, do you think a backbone line that can handle that much data in a highly spike prone environment not to mention do so while keeping response times reasonable for your clients is cheap? (most mmorpg users can expect 50-150 ms response times assuming a reasonable connection to the internet and they aren't being screwed up by something silly like tcp_ack settings or the like) There's no arguing that blizzard is making a profit, and frankly as the dominant product on the market (they are an order of their magnitude larger then their competitors and 2 years ago made up 2/3'ds of the entire market citation) They deserve to be. But to claim that they are making some obscene profit, or anything more then a small percentage of the monthly fee is a farce. I'd be surprised if they where doing much better then 5-15% of the monthly fee, which they deserve for the position in the market they've managed to secure. Frankly I wouldn't be happy with them if they reduced their monthly costs by 10%, since I'm paying them because I want the company to do well and reinvest the profits they can make into developing more titles with similar levels of quality. Just the same I wouldn't begrudge WoTC making a similar level of profit, however to claim that WoTC will have similar operating costs for the features I want as a mmorpg does, is at best a bold faced lie told in ignorance. You're welcome to stick to your pedantic arguments that DDI is 'worth it' but don't ever try to say that the pricing is competitive for the gametable/creator option. (which due to their refusal to sell separately has an outrageously inflated price, gee ken thanks for saving me money and giving me a better value.) |
| #52middlemonsterJun 17, 2008 6:20:22 | Yeah, if they sold the gamers table as a separate application they would make mad money. I'd pay $50-60(once) for the Gamer's Table, Character Generator, Visualizer, and DM Toolkit. I wouldn't even need the magazines, or compendium. And just cause I'd appreciate them selling me those apps to use anytime I'd want I would gladly buy new vminis when new monster's manuals came out. I'd pay $15 for a pack of 100 vminis, or $10 for a pack of 1-200 3d object to use when building dungeons. But I won't let them sap money out of me for the rest of my life, especially if some other company offers me a better deal. |
| #53BW0222Jun 17, 2008 9:52:38 | middlemonster, Yeah, if they sold the gamers table as a separate application they would make mad money. I'd pay $50-60(once) for the Gamer's Table, Character Generator, Visualizer, and DM Toolkit. Nonesense. You have zero proof that that model is even profitable. There are about four million folks actively playing D&D. Lets say one million folks actually buy this (and that would be a lots of folks). At $50, that would be about $50 million over the next two years. Meanwhile let's look at what it costs to run this. Let's be kind and say that you have five programmers, a QA person, a manager, two graphic artists/visualizers, two folks in sales/marketting, two writers/editors, and four support folks, plus contract out IT, accouting, payroll, HR, legal, etc. Say $2 million per year factoring in taxes, medical, dental, training, turn over, cost of hiring, etc. Say $2.5 million when you add in office space, phone, development tools, computers, internet access, software, printers, etc. Then add half million a year on marketting - doing it really cheap. Then you likely have licensing fees on the VOIP, outsourcing and handling the hosting and support costs for a million users ($1/user per year?), etc. I figure it would cost a good $4 million or so a year to run a company with twenty employees, outsourced services, some marketting, and hosting a million users a year. Now, the group has been running for a two years prior to making any real sales. That is likely at least $4 million (assume some folks aren't needed for the startup). Ok, so they make $50 million over a few years. In the absolute best case it costs them $4 million + $4 million/year. As a public company, you make $22 million a year for two years, and then carry $44 million of debt (cost of maintaining the services to those who bought your software) for a decade or so? At the end of ten years, you'd have spend every cent you take in. What kind of business model is that? Or Hasbrow could just take $4 million + $4 million / year and put it into a bank account and at the end of a decade take out the $60 million. Zero risk, zero hassle, the money is available if you need it, no big debts on your SEC filings, no shareholders asking what the heck you are doing, etc. Sorry, WoW pricing only works under the assumptions that they can repeatedly sell you $50 games every year and that the service becomes obsolete and ends after 3-5 years - being replaced by something else folks are spending money on. |
| #54middlemonsterJun 17, 2008 11:28:49 | middlemonster, So do you have any proof that your whole marketing ideas are even reasonable or make any sense when your talking about a multi million dollar corporation attached to a much richer corporation? You don't think the Gamers Table will be replaced when 5th edition comes out in about 5 years? They wouldn't have to charge for maintaining the servers if the DMs ran the servers from their computers, which doesn't take much. All wizards would need to maintain is a rules compendium, the magazines, and a "dating" service for people to find player/DMs. Wizards can maintain all the costs by selling the virtual miniatures, adventure packs, and pdf supplements. Wizards isn't making only D&Di its selling soooooo many games, like Magic, Heroscape, Star Wars, D&D Online, D&D minis, boardgames, etc, and making way more than you're considering here it doesn't need that 15 dollars a month charge at all. They just put it in there cause people will pay it. I'm saying they would make mad money cause more people would go for a one time payment than a subscription. |
| #55malkav666Jun 17, 2008 11:39:14 | middlemonster, You have nothing to back up your numbers with my friend. Your point is moot. There are no facts of any manner supporting any part of yuor post. You may as well be talking abuot the financial repurcussions of a carebear invasion. love, malkav |
| #56rcuhljrJun 17, 2008 11:43:52 | As a public company, you make $22 million a year for two years, and then carry $44 million of debt (cost of maintaining the services to those who bought your software) for a decade or so? At the end of ten years, you'd have spend every cent you take in. What kind of business model is that? A poor one, that's why they wouldn't do what you'd suggest. You really think they'd keep a full staff of developers on this thing each and every year? The entire section of the company can be frozen sans one developer and support staff. If there still spending over a million a year they did something horribly wrong. Now they have profitability for 20-30 years on one product which is unheard of in software really. If they have new content they need to release they can swing up the development team and use micro transactions to cover new development costs. Frankly I wouldn't even mind if Hasbro was breaking even or losing money on the game table, it's about building customer loyalty and expanding the market. It's the same reason video game consoles often sell for less then they cost the manufacturer to make. A well crafted reasonably priced game table gets thousands upon thousands of new people playing DND, new people into the hobby, and new people buying their best profit item, the books. Once the book is developed it's pure profit outside of printing and errata costs. Do you know that D2 has still been releasing patches and blizzard still hosts the battle.net servers going on 8 years now. Those servers are more expansive then anything that should be needed by DDI. |
| #57eleranJun 17, 2008 12:35:21 | Right now, it's worth Zero. Which is convenient since that is exactly what we are being charged. |
| #58BW0222Jun 17, 2008 15:12:20 | middlemonster,So do you have any proof that your whole marketing ideas are even reasonable or make any sense when your talking about a multi million dollar corporation attached to a much richer corporation? My marketting ideas? You are the one who only wants to pay one up front price ($50-60) and get free unlimited use of the software forever. That was your model. All I did was put rough numbers to what it would cost WotC do so and give an estimate of what their revenues might be like. If you feel my numbers are unreasonable, then let's see your numbers. I'd love to see how you think you can develop software, maintain and support it, deliver it online, sell it, etc. for less than $4 million a year? And yes I think those numbers make sense towards a multi-million dollar company belonging to a publically traded company. WotC has to present its business case for D&DI to Hasbro's board the same as every other department. No one in their right mind could float getting $50 million up front and then requiring about the same amount of money delivering the service over ten years. You don't think the Gamers Table will be replaced when 5th edition comes out in about 5 years? No. 3e has been around for eight years. There is no reason to suspect that the market can handle a new version every five years. In addition, there is no evidence that WotC could cancel existing memberships or force them to buy new product. Also, presumably some folks would still be buying D&DI in four years, so you are going to cut them off after one year? Sorry, your model requires them to maintain and support the current version forever. They wouldn't have to charge for maintaining the servers if the DMs ran the servers from their computers, which doesn't take much. All wizards would need to maintain is a rules compendium, the magazines, and a "dating" service for people to find player/DMs. Really? You mean they don't need programmers to maintain the product against say new operating systems, fix bugs, add new fig models, address deficiencies? They don't need support people? They don't need any marketting and they'll get three times the number of users as MtGOL? They don't need any accounting staff to deal with a million $50 purchases, deal with credit card companies? They don't need legal, HR, offices, phones, CRM systems, account management system, etc. Even if all this was free, is there any reason to think that downloads and the marshalling service isn't going to run $1/person per year? I don't know too many sites which have a million people running through on a daily basis and still doesn't run a million a year? Let's see your numbers. Heck, if you have a plan to develop this software and maintain this service for even two million a year, why don't you take it to Hasbro or go raise venture capital to setup the service yourself? Wizards isn't making only D&Di its selling soooooo many games, like Magic, Heroscape, Star Wars, D&D Online, D&D minis, boardgames, etc, and making way more than you're considering here it doesn't need that 15 dollars a month charge at all WotC is owned by a public company. It isn't a charity. No sane company says, "Because we made X dollars on these products, we can come out with a new product that losses X dollars." D&DI needs to be profitable by itself. Otherwise, no public company can afford to carry it. Each product stands on its own or it either dropped or sold. I'm saying they would make mad money cause more people would go for a one time payment than a subscription. Let's see your numbers. malkav666, You have nothing to back up your numbers with my friend. Your point is moot. There are no facts of any manner supporting any part of yuor post. You may as well be talking abuot the financial repurcussions of a carebear invasion. Really? Which numbers do you disagree with? Most are trival to support. 4 million active folks playing D&D (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_&_Dragons). True of false? One million folks buying a $50 D&DI over two years? That would be a 25% market share in two years. MtGOL only has 300,000 accounts (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_the_gathering_online) out of an estimated five million card players. Staffing? Do you have any reason to think that it wouldn't take four developers, a QA person, manager, two graphic artists/visualizers, two in marketting/sales, two writers/editors, four support folks, plus outsourcing other functions. Salaries are trival to estimate (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/salaries.html). Payroll taxes (http://www.suburbancomputer.com/tips_tax.htm), employer healthcare cost (http://www.nchc.org/facts/cost.shtml), phone, office space (http://www.officefinders.com/glossary.php), and other costs are well known in the US. Marketting? You have a problem with $500,000/year. That is only a fraction of the likely budget of MtG Online (http://www.cabletvadbureau.com/Case%20Studies/CSWizards.htm, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic:_The_Gathering) which only got 300,000 subscribers. |
| #59rcuhljrJun 18, 2008 13:53:54 | I'd love to see how you think you can develop software Development is that thing that gets covered by... sales.. yeah.. maintain and support it 2 guys, one to maintain server and hardware, and one for software maintanence. Support is built in with the Hasbro umbrella, add the DDi manual to the stack next to the other 10 their phone workers have. so there's 200k of your 4 million yearly. deliver it online Free. sell it Generally a positive form of revenue for less than $4 million a year? I seem to have come in quite a bit under that. No one in their right mind could float getting $50 million up front and then requiring about the same amount of money delivering the service over ten years. Duh.. that's why they aren't going to spend that much over 10 years unless they do something stupid like you suggest, and most companies avoid doing that. There is no reason to suspect that the market can handle a new version every five years. When your operating costs are an order of magnitude lower then your estimates you're looking at 50 years instead of 5. In addition, there is no evidence that WotC could cancel existing memberships or force them to buy new product. Also, presumably some folks would still be buying D&DI in four years, so you are going to cut them off after one year? Sorry, your model requires them to maintain and support the current version forever. Not really, most software licensing says they can cancel support whenever they'd like to. However as we pointed out people using this software 10 years down the line still aren't costing the company money over their initial purchase, not too mention whatever they are spending on related products. Really? You mean they don't need programmers to maintain the product against say new operating systems, Good lord no..just.. no. Horizontal OS expansion? Not happening unless it's deemed profitable via new sales, thus covering itself. Vertical OS expansion? Yeah microsoft is creating a new non backwards compatible CLR and shooting itself in the foot next week. I'm not paying for any company that's charging me against a pre-emptive upgrade to that. I can still run 20 year old programs on a vista box. fix bugs 4 workers tops for initial surge, reigning back by 6 months to the one guy mentioned above. Seriously, unit, system, integration testing, do it people. add new fig models, You mean the ones they are charging extra for? oh where oh where could they cover that cost from... address deficiencies? Yes I want to pay a monthly fee for my next car so toyata might decide to come back and put in a windshield they didn't add when they built it. They don't need support people? Covered under the coproprate umbrella and payed for at very nice rate due to economies of scale and specialization. They don't need any marketting and they'll get three times the number of users as MtGOL? They don't need any accounting staff to deal with a million $50 purchases, deal with credit card companies? They don't need legal, HR, offices, phones, CRM systems, account management system, etc. Even if all this was free They'll have plenty of marketing, but marketing for any niche market game is going to be lower cost then mainstream advertising. I bet the free youtube video of the gametable hooked a lot more then just me. is there any reason to think that downloads and the marshalling service isn't going to run $1/person per year? Downloads can be done free as mentioned. The marshalling should run about .1-1 cent per person per year. In order to even cost 20 cents per person you'd need something in the ballpark a user using 20mb of bandwidth a week(that'd be 40 first time website views(once they've cached your layout this increases to 120) every day, or 5000 verifications for tools) while being overcharged for it. I don't know too many sites which have a million people running through on a daily basis and still doesn't run a million a year? I get the feeling the things you don't know make up quite a substantial list. Let's see your numbers. Heck, if you have a plan to develop this software and maintain this service for even two million a year, why don't you take it to Hasbro or go raise venture capital to setup the service yourself? No, because Hasbro is already going to make it as cheap as they feel is worthwhile. When you're in the middle of the gold rush no one is looking at process improvement. It's rare to find a solid focus on efficiency of development costs in an environment with extreme profit, the motivation just isn't there. It's been seen time and time again in industry. WotC is owned by a public company. It isn't a charity. No sane company says, "Because we made X dollars on these products, we can come out with a new product that losses X dollars." D&DI needs to be profitable by itself. Otherwise, no public company can afford to carry it. Each product stands on its own or it either dropped or sold. Your naivete is so cute. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_leader Seriously you are making my brain hurt. Staffing? Do you have any reason to think that it wouldn't take four developers, a QA person, manager, two graphic artists/visualizers, two in marketting/sales, two writers/editors, four support folks, plus outsourcing other functions. Salaries are trival to estimate (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/salaries.html). Payroll taxes (http://www.suburbancomputer.com/tips_tax.htm), employer healthcare cost (http://www.nchc.org/facts/cost.shtml), phone, office space (http://www.officefinders.com/glossary.php) See above for the first half, and for the rest, see the fees payed into corporation which provides any extra services needed. |
| #60kalidorJun 19, 2008 1:59:23 | I hope my post is read by the developers, because I have some serious concerns as well -- In addition to, and perhaps as well as, the concerns above by others. I understand that Wizards is trying to compete with the computer gaming market to regain its audience and attract new members. This is why the 4E rules appear to be the D&D game converted into an MMO and converted back into a table top game. I don't have a problem with that. But with Insider, there simply is no reason I've seen to justify any monthly fee for what is essentially a software package. A one time cost of $60 dollars for the 'game' is more than reasonable, and is all anyone should have to or be willing to pay for something such as this. Lets break it down. World of Warcraft charges $15 a month for its game. It has already been stated many times that Insider is NOT the D&D game, but simply a medium to play it on. That right there should be reason enough not to charge a monthly fee for it. WoW offers HUNDREDS of unique character models. WoW offers HUNDREDS of unique locations and environments. WoW offers HUNDREDS of interactive quests, activities and games within the game. WoW offers THOUSANDS of unique weapons, armor and equipment capabilities. WoW is staffed by a 24 hour support team that is available by telephone, email or in game for any kind of support issue. Wow employes DOZENS of programmers, artists and testers. WoW must maintain servers and bandwidth cost for millions of users. WoW offers "free" updates and patches that constantly improve the game, fix problems and provide addtional content. Again, this is all provided at no extra charge above the monthly fee. The only time WoW ever charges for an expansion, is when said expansion includes ALL of the above points expanding the game to allow for years of additional activity. Insider is a great idea, but let's face it -- the interactive nature doesn't exceed some animations, maps and a few tools for play. Does not include the D&D game in any form. Does not require any sort of massive bandwidth or server set up. The fact is, if Wizards were to charge $4.99 a month or $45 dollars a year, it would still be hard, in my mind, to truly justify that cost for what is essentially a stand alone piece of software. But I would probably be willing to play it. But at $15 a month, Wizards is frankly shooting itself in the foot. Their goal, as I stated before, is to reclaim the MMO and computer gaming market share. But most people only have a limited amount of monthly income, much less now with gas prices exceeding 4 dollars a gallon. They are looking for ways to spend as little as possible and entertain themselves as much as possible without leaving the house. When you ask someone where they think they are getting the best value for their money spent at $15 dollars a month, they are going to look at their options. When they already have at least 1 dozen different MMOs to choose from, that they can play for hours upon hours a day, week after week, that choice is hard enough. But when you throw a utility program into the mix that they might get 8 hours a WEEK to use if they are lucky, the decision is made pretty easy for them. And in doing so, their choice is made and Wizards has failed at its attempt to reclaim the electronic gaming market. I don't know what your marketing research has led you to believe, but if its more than 5 dollars a month and that 5 dollars a month isn't all inclusive, Insider will fail. There's no doubt in my mind. To think this product, great as it may be, can even begin to compete with a sliver of what a true MMO offers is a very bold and daring assumption. Don't get greedy guys. Sell the product as a software package and eliminate the monthly and especially the add on fees. From all I've read about this software, it plays more like Diablo on Battle.net than any MMO. And Battle.net multiplay has and will always be a free service that comes with the software. And Diablo was still a complete, stand alone game. |
| #61BW0222Jun 19, 2008 2:52:59 | rcuhljr, Your naivete is so cute. Your plan is: * Spend $0 on sales/marketting - no staff, no budget, phones, CRM system, etc. - and you project selling to a million users. That is several times times the number as MtGOL or D&DOL managed with full marketting department each spending millions upon millions. Yet, some Youtube videos (view by a few tens of thousands) are going to sell a million copies? * A single IT person is going to manage a system capable of tracking a million online users - marshalling, accounts, credit cards, databases, hubs, etc. * You have a single developer who is going to maintain several applications, manage reporting, collection, testing, fixing, deployment, documentation of issues; while rendering v-minis and tiles without any graphic artists. This person is also going to QA their own work in a publically traded ISO9000 company. * You are going to find an ISP who is going to provide downloads, marshalling, databases, servers, backups, credit card processing, for free. * You are going to off load hundreds of thousands of e-mails and phone calls each year, including those about credit cards and account information, to your publically traded parent company's support department (if they have one as such) and they aren't going to account this against your department/project? * You are going to run a $50 million dollar project within a publically trades ISO-9000 company without no manager, accounting, legal, etc.? and I'm naive? rcuhljr... sorry, your numbers don't make sense. It is so easy to disprove your business model. If any company could sell an online service to one million people for only $200K per year... you should be able to name one. And BTW... name calling won't work. |
| #62BW0222Jun 19, 2008 3:24:19 | Kalidor I understand that Wizards is trying to compete with the computer gaming market to regain its audience and attract new members. Incorrect. Wizards knows that it can't reach the MMO market with D&DI, since D&D is constrained by real world limitations which has nothing to do with price. The ability to bring new players into D&DI is constrained by the number of good DMs on the system willing to run public games. For example, let's say on opening day, D&DI was free and one million new D&D players signed up and tried to play. Well... they would be browsing through the marshalling area looking for open games and most would never find one. Unless WotC managed to convince 200,000 existing DMs to run online games, you would have one million new gamers really mad. And of course WotC can't find 200,000 exsting DMs since there are only 4 million D&D players and that would be 20% of the available DMs needing to volunteer their time. You also have the inherent issues with needing the books, needing help in making characters, needing a really patient DM to teach you things, length of time it takes to get reasonably good at the game, number of real world "idiots" ruining games, etc. You are highly unlikely to convince a million new players to play D&DI on a regular basis. MtGOL and D&DI only managed a few hundred thousand. WotC likely knows that D&DI will have a few roles: 1. Allow existing players to play online with friends who have moved. 2. Allow existing players in remote areas to find new folks online and play. 3. Support online conventions or RPGA-like events for existing players. 4. Allow new players who have not yet found a group to try playing online and hopefully find real world groups. My guess is that at best, it works like an RPGA game day or something for new players. |
| #63devlonirJun 19, 2008 3:40:58 | In my opinion, the best pricing model is not letting people know what they pay for. I would go for a way in which you dont askl money for v-minis and tiles but need people to buy the hardcopy books before they are able to get the content (including v-minis and tiles) from the book. I think this was something heard early on by the DDi crew. An example. (numbers need not be exactly accurate). current pricing DDi subscription: $15 per month Hardcopy cost: $30 (average 1.2 books per month sold per customer) micropayments for V-minis: $0.10 per model (average 10 sold each month per customer) total revenue each month per customer that uses all these products: $ 15 + (30 x 1.2) + (0.10 x 10) = $52 without asking extra money for v-minis and tiles DDi subscription: $15 per month (what i think a lot of people are willing to pay when they get their v-minis and tiles without mico payment) Hardcopy cost: $33 (sales go down a bit with pricing, 1.15 each month per customer) total revenue each month per customer using both products: $ 15 + (33 x 1.15) = $ 52,95 That is more then with micro payments. This doesnt take into account the fact that WotC will have less customers using DDi when they need to add micro payments to get the full experience they want. People can miss a fixed and known amount of cash each month but are weary of micro payments and the amounts they can go up to each month without them knowing it. Customers will not feel double screwed when first having to buy the books and then having to buy content on DDi to use the books there and the less complications and extra payments something needs, the more people will play it. A good example of that last remark is again MMOs. How many 'Free' MMOs are out there that require micro-payments to get the really cool stuff. Those MMOs have nothing near the playerbase of WoW, or EQ, or Age of Conan coming up. Heck, most dont even have the playerbase of DDO! And why is that? Because people simply HATE micro payments when buying digital stuff. They are used to paying a monthly fee to use it, but are not used to micro payments. Also, from a business point of view, a more stable monthly income coming from a (slightly higher) monthly payment is better then hoping something new you make gets bought enough to pay for the manhours that went into making it. You may not hit the JACKPOT when it comes to making money, but your business has a nice and stable income on which you can build a future. aka.. and this goes to any WotC person that hopefully read it: Don't make the mistake of micro payments, it will create a much smaller playerbase then just a monthly fee will do. Everyone on here and most people i talk to about DDi say something along the line of "Great, i'd pay a monthly fee for it. 20 dollars? sure!" But when confronted with the fact that they will need to pay 10-15 dollars and then need to make extra micro-payments for the v-minis and tiles they soon step back and consider just using the real table with their real minis over this. |
| #64rcuhljrJun 19, 2008 13:22:23 | * Spend $0 on sales/marketting - no staff, no budget, phones, CRM system, etc. - and you project selling to a million users. That is several times times the number as MtGOL or D&DOL managed with full marketting department each spending millions upon millions. Yet, some Youtube videos (view by a few tens of thousands) are going to sell a million copies? No but thanks for being wrong. Every gaming company in existence has supported advertising pushes without charging recurring fees, I'm not sure why it's needed now. I merely pointed out that a lot of the advertising for this game occurs in blogs, game stores, and word of mouth, not historically expensive advertising arenas. * A single IT person is going to manage a system capable of tracking a million online users - marshalling, accounts, credit cards, databases, hubs, etc. No, they'll hook into the same corporate infrastructure that their corporation uses for all their other products. As far as the actual IT, yes one person assuming they designed it right they can get by fine with a ridiculously small server with a couple of blades. * You have a single developer who is going to maintain several applications, manage reporting, collection, testing, fixing, deployment, documentation of issues; while rendering v-minis and tiles without any graphic artists. This person is also going to QA their own work in a publically traded ISO9000 company. One person is fine to fix things like "There's a typo in the database." and "We need to change the text on this ability." Which is about all they should have. These are applications of complexity equivalent with school projects. Thousands of companies have done just as much if not more maintenance on more complex products with nothing but initial sales to cover it. Since you keep bringing up the vmini's, THEY ARE CHARGING FOR THOSE. that covers any graphics artists. * You are going to find an ISP who is going to provide downloads, marshalling, databases, servers, backups, credit card processing, for free. No, I listed the cost of bandwidth. Downloads are free though, bit torrent. Databases and backups are covered under their hardware IT worker. Credit card processing is handled in billing which is done by the parent corporation. * You are going to off load hundreds of thousands of e-mails and phone calls each year, including those about credit cards and account information, to your publically traded parent company's support department (if they have one as such) and they aren't going to account this against your department/project? Oh it will be accounted, but the infrastructure is already in place and due to economies of scale the relative cost is much lower then you seem to imagine. * You are going to run a $50 million dollar project within a publically trades ISO-9000 company without no manager, accounting, legal, etc.? You keep saying publically traded ISO-9000 like it means something other then "We're really good at writing a paper trail." But yes, we are SOLEY looking at the costs of keeping this service running. What exactly does maintenance need with any manager other then the poor shmuck from their corporation who gets saddled with oversight. Marketing, legal, and managerial get outsourced to the parent company, who spends exactly as much on marketing as they think it's worth. rcuhljr... sorry, your numbers don't make sense. It is so easy to disprove your business model. If any company could sell an online service to one million people for only $200K per year... you should be able to name one. You mean the business model used by THOUSANDS of products successfully? Or are you going to try to claim a concept so common that it's got it's own damn wiki page doesn't exist again, cause that was funny last time. But since you want to know about online services here you go... (All costs listed are from publicly released financial statements compared against traffic rankings from alexa.com) www.answers.com Yearly operating costs per million users 12,500 dollars. (750k quarter operating cost, normalized against googles 100 million daily searches using comparitive reaches from alexa to yield 60 million visitors per quarter to www.answers.com) www.google.com 81,000 dollars per 1 million searches (Public statement for 2007 1st Q lists 972 million in operating costs, 500 million of which was payroll. Mind you these guys do STUPID amounts of work and research in unrelated fields, and honestly they probably offer more content then most mmorpgs. regardless, they bring in 12 billion searches conservatively from SEW giving us our costs assuming they spent everything solely on their webpage.) www.wikipedia.com 275k per 1 million registered contributors (I'm not even going to count people who visit their sites and just read, this is getting too easy. 2 million operating costs from their 2007 year end financial reports versus 7.3 million registered contributors.) All available from their publicly released financial statements none older then the full year of 2007. Answer.com's values were derived from relative traffic statistics at the website linked above. (googles views per day / googles reach / # page views per user) = unique web users for alexa.(UWU) UWU*reach for answer.com = daily user count, * 365/4 = quarterly user count to compare to quarterly costs. And BTW... name calling won't work. I was just trying to get you to read, which apparently failed. |
| #65mudbunnyJun 19, 2008 13:57:55 | Hey guys. The discussion of various business models is quite interesting, and I encourage you to continue. That being said, please keep the name-calling out of it. It does nothing to improve your side of the argument and, more often than not, dilutes the effectiveness of your points. |
| #66rcuhljrJun 19, 2008 14:05:52 | Hey guys. I'm venting my spleen that this forum is down more often then not lately on the occasional times I get to post :P Also the forum ate my first response, so rewriting it didn't put me in a good mood. c'est la vi |
| #67BW0222Jun 19, 2008 16:36:23 | rcuhljr,No but thanks for being wrong. I'm wrong for pointing out that your model ($200k/year) has no marketting budget? No, they'll hook into the same corporate infrastructure that their corporation uses for all their other products. And who does that make it free? How does moving the cost to another department somehow mean that Hasbro isn't going to have to pay for it? And of course there is no reason to think that Hasbro has that kind of bandwith, servers, IT staff, databases, etc. just lying around. It is three times the number of users a MtGOL. No, I listed the cost of bandwidth. Downloads are free though, bit torrent. Databases and backups are covered under their hardware IT worker. Credit card processing is handled in billing which is done by the parent corporation. Bit torrent is a PtP download system. It would require subscribes to host the application for the downloads. No business can rely on its customers or third-parties setting up PtP downloading software in order to allow folks to access which they already paid for. Sorry, T3 lines run at $5000 a month in the US, and any site running a million suscribers would be using many of them. You would also need remote sites to reduce access time/fault tollerant the servers, etc. And you mean when you hire an IT worker for $100,000 a year, he comes with a free copy of Oracle/MS SQL, several dozen blade servers, and a few dozen tape backup arrays? Oh it will be accounted, but the infrastructure is already in place and due to economies of scale the relative cost is much lower then you seem to imagine. What economies of scale? Hasbro doesn't have any big farms serving up 25 million users or so which one could drop an extra million on top of without noticing it. A one million D&DI base would be larger than MtGs 300,000 users by several times. Nor is there anything to suggest that D&DI can just be added on to exiting servers even if Hasbro had 15-20 lying around. It is a seperate application with separate user bases, databases, backup, credit card processing, etc. Nor would any sane company house them on the same servers for maintanence, performance, and fault tollerance reasons. You keep saying publically traded ISO-9000 like it means something other then "We're really good at writing a paper trail." It does. It means that Hasbro is commited fair and honest accounting practices - which the SEC will inspect. That means you can't pretend that marketting, support, sales, administrative, etc. costs don't exist within a project or get the go-ahead unless you have properly budgetted for them. But yes, we are SOLEY looking at the costs of keeping this service running. You mean your costs? You want to pretend that it won't cost WotC anything to sell, provide technical support, manage, maintain, provide bandwidth/servers, etc. It can magically burden its parent company with these costs and Hasbro is going to accept this? Sorry, in the real world, and certainly a publically traded company... these are costs associated with keeping the service running. If WotC/Hasbro doesn't pay these costs it doesn't won't get a million subscribers. Sure... any model is profitable if you remove marketting, support, administration, etc. from the equation. Marketing, legal, and managerial get outsourced to the parent company, who spends exactly as much on marketing as they think it's worth. Sweeping millions of dollars a year under the rug, doesn't make your model profitable or even sustainable. You might think that giving your parents your bills makes your business plans profitable, but Hasbro, its investors, and the SEC won't. www.answers.com Yearly operating costs per million users 12,500 dollars. Besides an advertising model... anual revenues are $9.3 million. Number of employees 53. At $100,000 per employee, it costs them $5.3 million in salaries alone to provide that service. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Answers.com www.google.com Besides an advertising model... anual revenues of $16.6 billion. Net income $4.2 billion. In other words, it cost them $12.4 billion to make $16.6 billion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google www.wikipedia.com Besides the fact that wikipedia is a charity... it has anual revenues of $2 million and 14 paid employees. At $100,000 per employee that is 1.4 million in salaries alone. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation I was just trying to get you to read, which apparently failed. Calling someone naive is an insult. Your reasons don't make it any less so. If you honestly think it encourages anyone to listen or take your points seriously, you really need help. If your "loss leader" link is some other business plan in which you think WotC might make money in some other way and that the entire D&DI system would be placed under "marketting", then I'd love to see your numbers. We already know that Hasbro limited RPGA expendatures significantly when these started hitting the high hundred thousands, so we I would seriously doubt that Hasbro would accept a $4 million/year marketting tool just on the hopes that making more book sales. I see no evidence that it would cost WotC significantly less than $4 million a year to run D&DI. My numbers are likely less than its actual costs and I have already tossed that model a huge bone in giving them one million users with almost no marketting and a use base of only about four million D&D players. |
| #68rcuhljrJun 19, 2008 17:45:52 | I'm wrong for pointing out that your model ($200k/year) has no marketting budget? Yes. 200k was never the entire plan, it was one listed part. I didn't have solid numbers on the rest however it seemed apparent that conclusions could be drawn to their size. And who does that make it free? How does moving the cost to another department somehow mean that Hasbro isn't going to have to pay for it? And of course there is no reason to think that Hasbro has that kind of bandwith, servers, IT staff, databases, etc. just lying around. It is three times the number of users a MtGOL. I've never said it's free, I said it's not going to cost as much as you think, ala my examples at the end of my post. Bit torrent is a PtP download system. It would require subscribes to host the application for the downloads. No business can rely on its customers or third-parties setting up PtP downloading software in order to allow folks to access which they already paid for. Several companies have already done it. Including WoW. Sorry, T3 lines run at $5000 a month in the US, and any site running a million suscribers would be using many of them. Uh.. no it really won't. Do you realize how little bandwidth this service uses? Lets say everyone only plays during the same 12 hour window, and every user averages 4 hours per week. during that time they use 5kb a minute. you're talking a throughput equivalent to 1 t3. (assuming 760 5kB pageview pipeline for the t3). But lets say they decide to overkill and get 3. that's under 200k for a year. Assuming they just run a matchmaking service on a hosted site which I think would be a better option then you're looking at 6k-50k in hosting bandwidth costs, depending on how much you get ripped off. (60k GB a year bandwidth) You would also need remote sites to reduce access time/fault tollerant the servers, etc. And you mean when you hire an IT worker for $100,000 a year, he comes with a free copy of Oracle/MS SQL, several dozen blade servers, and a few dozen tape backup arrays? This is why you use an off site host for your matching service, economies of scale, they will provide fault tolerance and reliability. MySql = Free Blade servers = one time cost as is a backup procedure Thus all covered by the initial sale of the game. What economies of scale? Hasbro doesn't have any big farms serving up 25 million users or so which one could drop an extra million on top of without noticing it. How many customers do you think Hasbro deals with through it's entire corporation? I'm willing to bet it's a good bit more then 1 million. A one million D&DI base would be larger than MtGs 300,000 users by several times. And... MtGs is one product Hasbro owns.. not all of them. Nor is there anything to suggest that D&DI can just be added on to exiting servers even if Hasbro had 15-20 lying around. I never suggested using Hasbro's hardware for hosting of actual applications. Nor would any sane company house them on the same servers for maintanence, performance, and fault tollerance reasons. See above. It does. It means that Hasbro is commited fair and honest accounting practices - which the SEC will inspect. That means you can't pretend that marketting, support, sales, administrative, etc. costs don't exist within a project or get the go-ahead unless you have properly budgetted for them. No one is pretending they don't exist, I'm just saying you don't seem to understand how much of the picture they actually make up. You mean your costs? You want to pretend that it won't cost WotC anything to sell, provide technical support, manage, maintain, provide bandwidth/servers, etc. It can magically burden its parent company with these costs and Hasbro is going to accept this? You're not getting this. NO ONE SAID THE COSTS DON'T EXIST. I am saying they are not not out of proportion with the ability to run an application off of it's initial sales. I demonstrated what these operating costs are like below. Sweeping millions of dollars a year under the rug, doesn't make your model profitable or even sustainable. You might think that giving your parents your bills makes your business plans profitable, but Hasbro, its investors, and the SEC won't. So other then the fact that there's hundreds of examples of others using these models profitably you don't think it's possible? (Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo II, etc. etc.) Besides an advertising model... anual revenues are $9.3 million. Number of employees 53. At $100,000 per employee, it costs them $5.3 million in salaries alone to provide that service. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Answers.com Who cares if they are advertising models? The point of this is how much it costs them to provide the service PER MILLION USERS. It's called division. You divide the total amount they spend by how many million users they have per year. Besides an advertising model... anual revenues of $16.6 billion. Net income $4.2 billion. In other words, it cost them $12.4 billion to make $16.6 billion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google You still think advertising model means something.. and once again forgot how to divide. get back to me when you do that. Besides the fact that wikipedia is a charity... it has anual revenues of $2 million and 14 paid employees. At $100,000 per employee that is 1.4 million in salaries alone. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation Why do we care if it's a charity? Do you really think the lack of advertising is going to be the big difference? So three strikes and you're out. Learn to divide by how many million users they have in a year. If your "loss leader" link is some other business plan in which you think WotC might make money in some other way and that the entire D&DI system would be placed under "marketting", then I'd love to see your numbers. You didn't believe that a company would ever sell something it was losing money on. I proved you wrong. If you're wondering how it applies here... Lets say they eat 1 million a year and give these products away. Don't even charge. This generates massive goodwill and increased interest in DND across the board, more people start playing the game and more books get purchased. The question is would the cost of developing and offering the software be offset by increased sale, and no one can say for sure but many companies give it a shot. (some industries are built around the concept, automotive, video games) We already know that Hasbro limited RPGA expendatures significantly when these started hitting the high hundred thousands, so we I would seriously doubt that Hasbro would accept a $4 million/year marketting tool just on the hopes that making more book sales. That would be 4 million a year that can't justify. Other companies offer similar/better services for free (D2) How do you explain this being possible for them yet impossible here? I see no evidence that it would cost WotC significantly less than $4 million a year to run D&DI. My numbers are likely less than its actual costs and I have already tossed that model a huge bone in giving them one million users with almost no marketting and a use base of only about four million D&D players. So other then the fact that I showed three companies that all do it for less, and in addition I listed off more companies that used this as their business model and largely regarded as some of the most successful competitors in their field, you still think it's impossible. Let me explain how logic works. You make a statement. I show a specific counter example. Only one counter example is required to disprove your theory. It is possible to provide this product for no more then initial sales cost and still be profitable Prove to me that Diablo II didn't happen. It's perfectly possible, now the question is why isn't WoTC doing it? |
| #69KentinalJun 19, 2008 19:21:18 | Cost Accounting is always interesting as there are two components, the fixed in place costs and the variable costs. We do not know how the program will be implemented, how much the host will reply on shared resources. There is development costs but they do not matter to ongoing operations, these cost are planned to be recovered from a positive cost flow in the future. What is spent does not matter anymore in discussion. The only announced fixed cost for this project we know of is a job announcement for one person to lead a team. For the on going project this is the only known fixed cost. It is clear to infer already existing infrastructure, personal and equipment will be allocated part of the time to this project. As such such existing fixed costs a percentage will be allocated to the new unit, but those costs will no longer be allocated to a prior existing unit. Thus cost neutral to the overall company. Every unit needs to justify its continued existence, which of course can lead to internal debates on allocation. The variable depends on usage, bandwidth and support staff for the unit usage. The numbers of users effect this. The new unit for some of these could perhaps draw on prior unit resources similar to fixed cost reallocation. Under the current sell add ons one might argue that some R&D should be a fixed cost of the new unit. We have no idea of how much this will cost because we do not know how much time is being allocated from R&D to this project and if such effort will remained fixed. So this should fall into spend and hope to get back later classification. It should not matter to the new unit if the design team finally implements z movement, the new unit just has to implement it in the software. Oh I do expect and hope that some new servers will be added and some new hires as well to oversee the servers and maintain the existing ones, which are mostly a fixed cost factor of an increasing server load (some costs are variable because of load). Bandwidth is a major factor of user use, though increased usage can require some new hires that only exist in a job as long as the demand is there. There is no need for PR for the Unit, the existing PR unit can allocate part of its costs to the new unit based on percentage of work, just as R&D does, or Building space is allocated. Purchase of T1 or T3 clearly might be required, perhaps many new ones might be needed, these are variable depending on load. I am sure some exist already that are not fully used. All in all without knowing enough about the program or how unit is resourced is is impossible to know how much it will cost to pay for DDI. |
| #70the_almighty_onionJun 19, 2008 19:47:05 | Sorry, T3 lines run at $5000 a month in the US, and any site running a million suscribers would be using many of them. Seriously, where do you get these numbers from? In particular, the 5kb/user/minute (equating to 85.3 bps/user less than 0.2% of a 56kbps dial-up connection)? Maybe you intended that number to be 5kB (40960b/user/minute = 682.7bps/user which is still likely low if any of the applications are actively tracked by each user, the metrics of the applications are likely exponential to the number of users actively participating in any given session). Given that the majority of those users will be accessing services during the same 12 hour window, a reasonable assumption of 500,000 total users of which up to 300,000 will likely be on during peak hours (operating off of the 4 million active D&D players figure posted earlier), and the existence of guest user passes which I'll arbitrarily say could add an additional 50,000 users at any given moment: 350,000*682.7 = 238,933,333.3bps or 29,866,666Bps (227.86Mbps or 28.48MBps) IF the load of each user is only 682.7bps. IF this astronomically low load is in fact what is required to maintain a stable connection to the table a single DS-3 lease would be able to handle all of the application traffic with just over 15Mbps as a buffer to handle spikes in traffic and the inevitable difference between rated values and RW throughput. The virtual tabletop includes voice chat. Voice chat uses from 24kbps to 128kbps per channe (thats 24,576bps to 131,072bps for those of you that don't have your binary powers figured out yet). If this doesn't show that 682.7bps (or in the case of your actual syntax 85.3bps) is an unrealistically low number, I don't know what will. The conventional POTS line that your old fashioned house-phone uses up to 64kbps (65,536bps)(but can handle quite a bit more throughput in different frequencies) just to handle the human voice. To handle music (something I expect the vtt will be able to do) the sampling rate needs to be increased which pushes bandwidth usage into the higher end of the above range. Operating at even the lowest end of the common bandwidth usage for voice and only 5 players including the DM at a table that makes the necessary bandwidth for voice alone become 122,880bps IF the T and X of each channel use the same lease, 245,760bps if T and X have individual channels (120-240kbps with the lowest, connection oriented bandwidth use for voice coms over the web; connectionless applications are not included in this analysis as they are riddled with technical shortcomings). Realistically WotC will need to have server farms in multiple locations within the US alone, (not to mention locations in Europe, Asia, etc.) each of which will require multiple DS-3 connections to maintain a QoS worth subscriber rates, connected by a backbone DS-4, DS-5, or possibly (and this would likely be overkill) OC-48 lease, just to run the virtual tabletop. If redundancy is considered, many times more. This isn't going to be your bargain basement vtt and freeware voice chat, the infrastructure required to operate it will be well beyond what you need to have you and your 4 friends do something similar with cheap substitutes. MySql = Free Blade servers = one time cost as is a backup procedure Suggesting that a major player which is already using supported versions of SQL convert to freeware with no support staff is ludicrous. Digital backups are certainly not a one time cost, even if you use the same media repeatedly there is are elements of wear and failure. Servers are absolutely not a one time expense, they require maintenance on a regular basis, increase overhead in operating costs, and for an undertaking like DDi, a full time staff (possibly multiple full time staffs). |
| #71gizmoiscariotJun 19, 2008 20:07:43 | Very few places get T3s now, more people just get ATM connections as they are usually cheaper. And data centers will probabably have like OC-12 or OC-48. Oc-12 is 622 Mbit/s. Oc-48 is 2488 Mbit/s. Needless to say these are expensive but is probably what they use (I would love WOTC to say what they have for a backbone but its possible they host their servers in a remote data center.) |
| #72the_almighty_onionJun 19, 2008 21:44:39 | Unless WotC is branching into the telecommunications industry or is willing to lay new infrastructure between each site, they will use the infrastructure already present in the form of a lease just like every other non-telecom company does. Granted I don't forsee AT&T or any other telecom player installing any serious quantity of new DS-3s, but that is for entirely different reasons than bandwidth. |
| #73hellmuteJun 19, 2008 23:27:47 | they host their servers in a remote data center They do. http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/results.jsp?domain=wizards.com |
| #74rcuhljrJun 19, 2008 23:32:45 | Seriously, where do you get these numbers from? In particular, the 5kb/user/minute (equating to 85.3 bps/user less than 0.2% of a 56kbps dial-up connection)? Maybe you intended that number to be 5kB (40960b/user/minute = 682.7bps/user which is still likely low if any of the applications are actively tracked by each user Yes that was a typo, it's 5kB. It was an off the cuff ballpark I drew up in a previous thread, I'd honestly be suprised if they were transmitting more then 1.2 mb on average per 4 hours of use, however I tried to average out what each piece of software would need network for. Game table shouldn't require any of their bandwidth other then an initial 3-6kB exchange to verify the user and make sure they have access to the tool and what functions, etc. Other then that I'm not aware of any reason for it to require bandwidth. The source compendium (which I hadn't previously been including in this discussion but lets toss it on) is most likely <1kB upstream search request, 1-3kB downstream result, figure about 45 seconds to read and rules lawyer the result before looking up something else. The character creator shouldn't need any more then the game table takes up, however worst case they save/store characters on their server, probably 3-5kB custom file format on load/save. The only one up in the air is how they do players finding games. If they put it on a website with a hosting company (I think the better option) you're most likely looking at a reasonable initial 10-25 pages loads, then sporadic checks in the future. This can be reduced by a good feature set (high usability search, notification for games created matching your criterion) Assuming they keep this nuts and bolts a clean page could run 30-45kb so a good initial spike of usage (not outside of estimates, but hefty). Assuming they build it into the game table, they save some space on transmit since they'll just be sending some value hash that the client can display without the fluff of images and text in html. On the other hand to increase usability they'll need to send information about more games at once, so I think this one might come out worse, however it's spiking until the user joins a game, then is gone. As to the other hours, I selected 12 hours in the gaming day since realistically more people play at certain peak hours, and bandwidth needs to be able to handle those peaks, By compressing all usage into half the day I make the scenario worse then I'd assume the average is so my estimation is erring on the side of caution. For the other, 1 4 hour session of DND seemed reasonable a week, however people will probably utilize some of the tools more, but the calculation is really looking at 4 hours of semi steady server requests. (the metrics of the applications are likely exponential to the number of users actively participating in any given session). I'm not sure why the server should be impacted by a game that can be hosted entirely without it as long as all the clients have validated, unless you mean session to refer to the whole block of x users on the system at time y. Given that the majority of those users will be accessing services during the same 12 hour window, a reasonable assumption of 500,000 total users of which up to 300,000 will likely be on during peak hours (operating off of the 4 million active D&D players figure posted earlier), and the existence of guest user passes which I'll arbitrarily say could add an additional 50,000 users at any given moment: 350,000*682.7 = 238,933,333.3bps or 29,866,666Bps (227.86Mbps or 28.48MBps) IF the load of each user is only 682.7bps. IF this astronomically low load is in fact what is required to maintain a stable connection to the table I'm not seeing why it's necessary to have a stable live pinging communication between the server and an active table? *edit unless they want the server to keep an active list of live games, although your talking one ping every minute or half minute, that's what, 64 bytes? edit* The virtual tabletop includes voice chat. Voice chat uses from 24kbps to 128kbps per channe (thats 24,576bps to 131,072bps for those of you that don't have your binary powers figured out yet). If this doesn't show that 682.7bps (or in the case of your actual syntax 85.3bps) is an inrealistically low number, I don't know what will. Running the voip through their own server would be a HORRIBLE idea. Much better to have a client computer handle the relay. (Otherwise I'd rather use a free 8 person ventrilo server and not pay a monthly fee towards bandwidth for something one user with broadband can handle. I know I've run 20+ computers with vent out of my wireless with cable) Suggesting that a major player which is already using supported versions of SQL convert to freeware with no support staff is ludicrous. Digital backups are certainly not a one time cost, even if you use the same media repeatedly there is are elements of wear and failure. Servers are absolutely not a one time expense, they require maintenance on a regular basis, increase overhead in operating costs, and for an undertaking like DDi, a full time staff (possibly multiple full time staffs). He listed SQL as a new cost, if they are already running Oracle or MS then they can stick with it, and it's not an added cost. As far as one time costs, we're talking for a reasonable service lifetime and orders of magnitude. If you set aside a 100k chunk, you can keep a blade server up and running until anyone who's heard of DOS is dead in their graves. If they aren't running their own VOIP servers (need I repeat a horrible idea) the server strain is really going to be minimal. They are doing NO more rigorous work on their end then data verification and database queries, all of which has no real time importance. This isn't a mmorpg or FPS where a user experiencing 500ms lag spikes is unacceptable, if your server takes .5-1 second during peak load spikes to determine if someone can log in or to return a query from the compendium the user likely isn't even going to know. |
| #75the_almighty_onionJun 20, 2008 0:18:15 | Yes that was a typo, it's 5kB. It was an off the cuff ballpark I drew up in a previous thread, I'd honestly be suprised if they were transmitting more then 1.2 mb on average per 4 hours of use, however I tried to average out what each piece of software would need network for. Game table shouldn't require any of their bandwidth other then an initial 3-6kB exchange to verify the user and make sure they have access to the tool and what functions, etc. Other then that I'm not aware of any reason for it to require bandwidth. The source compendium (which I hadn't previously been including in this discussion but lets toss it on) is most likely <1kB upstream search request, 1-3kB downstream result, figure about 45 seconds to read and rules lawyer the result before looking up something else. The character creator shouldn't need any more then the game table takes up, however worst case they save/store characters on their server, probably 3-5kB custom file format on load/save. The only one up in the air is how they do players finding games. If they put it on a website with a hosting company (I think the better option) you're most likely looking at a reasonable initial 10-25 pages loads, then sporadic checks in the future. This can be reduced by a good feature set (high usability search, notification for games created matching your criterion) Assuming they keep this nuts and bolts a clean page could run 30-45kb so a good initial spike of usage (not outside of estimates, but hefty). Assuming they build it into the game table, they save some space on transmit since they'll just be sending some value hash that the client can display without the fluff of images and text in html. On the other hand to increase usability they'll need to send information about more games at once, so I think this one might come out worse, however it's spiking until the user joins a game, then is gone. Politely disagree. The online gaming community is generally more actvie than the PnP community. 1 4 hour session seems very passive to me. In fact 1 4 hour session is fairly passive for the PnP players around here, I expect a lot more. Further, nothing I have read implies that the game table will be hosted by the users, doing so would put fully functioning software into the hands of the end user (not advisable for an online subscription service). Unless the good people at WotC have some truly sophisticated techniques, my social group could have it reverse engineered and running independent from WotC within a few days. I'm not sure why the server should be impacted by a game that can be hosted entirely without it as long as all the clients have validated, unless you mean session to refer to the whole block of x users on the system at time y. It is likely to be a connection oriented environment. [INDENT] The D&D Game Table allows players to connect anytime and anywhere, features a fully integrated Voice-Over IP as well as text chat, and is designed to simulate the tabletop game experience as much as possible. [/INDENT] With ventrilo and other sub-standard, connectionless VoiP freeware users are prone to experience hiccups in communication, and the latency issues which we have both recognized. The latency may not be game breaking in a DnD game, but hiccups during the DMs carefully prepped flavor text would be. I'm not seeing why it's necessary to have a stable live pinging communication between the server and an active table? *edit unless they want the server to keep an active list of live games, although your talking one ping every minute or half minute, that's what, 64 bytes? edit* See above, pinging the lobby server is certainly not a high load process, maintaining a connection oriented application that is relatively safe from reverse engineering is. Running the voip through their own server would be a HORRIBLE idea. Much better to have a client computer handle the relay. (Otherwise I'd rather use a free 8 person ventrilo server and not pay a monthly fee towards bandwidth for something one user with broadband can handle. I know I've run 20+ computers with vent out of my wireless with cable) See above, ventrilo, teamspeak, roger wilco and all the other freeware is connectionless in nature (would be happy to be proven wrong) and prone to performance failures. Also, to some of the less technically savvy players, configuring freeware VoiP may be outside their grasp (I personally make a fairly steady side income configuring applications for the less than savvy crowd). He listed SQL as a new cost, if they are already running Oracle or MS then they can stick with it, and it's not an added cost. As far as one time costs, we're talking for a reasonable service lifetime and orders of magnitude. If you set aside a 100k chunk, you can keep a blade server up and running until anyone who's heard of DOS is dead in their graves. If they aren't running their own VOIP servers (need I repeat a horrible idea) the server strain is really going to be minimal. They are doing NO more rigorous work on their end then data verification and database queries, all of which has no real time importance. This isn't a mmorpg or FPS where a user experiencing 500ms lag spikes is unacceptable, if your server takes .5-1 second during peak load spikes to determine if someone can log in or to return a query from the compendium the user likely isn't even going to know. If they expand the use of a pre-existing license of Oracle or MS, they may need to pay additional licensing fees. 100k wouldn't pay the salary of a first year graduate of the school I tutor at for 3 years, WotC will likely want someone a little less green to be heading any given server farm and will thus need to pay more. Summary: Would using a freeware VoiP reduce bandwidth needs? Yes. Would using a connectionless VoiP simulate an at the table experience to the best of their abilities? No. Would hosting the vtt on the end user's platform reduce bandwidth needs? Yes Would hosting the vtt on the end user's platform increase vulnerability to piracy and reverse engineering? Yes. Will expanding database usage to more machines increase the cost of licensing? Most likely. Would adding to the databases already in use by WotC/Hasbro create a vulnerability to malicious intrusion? Yes, absolutely, without a doubt. Would 100k be a reasonable estimate of the costs involved in maintaining the servers, routers, and switches necessary to operate an operation as you described? Maybe, if the administration and IT responsibilities were shared by one person and they worked part time. Would 100k be a reasonable estimate of the costs involved in maintaining aforementioned hardware in an operation as I described? No, not a chance, we'll sooner see Luna declared a plutoid as it hurtles toward the sun. Did I miss any key arguements? |
| #76snarky_monkeyJun 20, 2008 1:35:05 | I know this isn't exactly what everyone is talking about, so forgive me if this interrupts this thread but I actually had a question. Does anyone know how difficult it is to convert one format of 3d model to a different format? Like say, from the format they used to make the physical minis, to the ones used on the virtual table? One model is the same as another, technically right? So, if that's the case, why exactly are we not getting the full MM of v-minis in the starter package, and instead paying for new ones? I know the monsters are updated and in some case different looking, but from what I have seen so far the differences are mostly coloration. The paint job? The conversion cost? I'd love if anyone who's in the know about these things to give their two cents. |
| #77mrburack_dupJun 20, 2008 7:31:20 | Actually, I know a lot of folks that are willing to pay $15 a month for D&DI. Just because you and your friends apparently don't have as much disposable cash as you thought, doesn't necessarily invalidate the business plan. Just because you and your friends are willing to bend over and take whatever you're given doesn't necessarily validate it either. Since the tools aren't even available then it doesn't really matter which of us is right - at this point, D&DI is still a massive failure no matter how many "would" or "would nots" there are. |
| #78webrunnerJun 20, 2008 8:17:58 | Why compare it to WoW? Why not compare it to Dungeons and Dragons online: There's more points of comparison there. |
| #79funkelhandJun 20, 2008 8:43:22 | Is D&DO still around? Last time I saw it mentioned was when Penny Arcade pittied some marketing person of D&DO promoting some update... |
| #80gizmoiscariotJun 20, 2008 9:26:01 | Is D&DO still around? Last time I saw it mentioned was when Penny Arcade pittied some marketing person of D&DO promoting some update... I was excited for D&D Online. Played the beta, hated it and never bought it. |
| #81giantslorJun 20, 2008 10:54:04 | I was excited for D&D Online. Played the beta, hated it and never bought it. Been playing DDO since launch and still love it. Alot has been changed and added, but I think many MMOs and hard core PnP still may not like it. Many of the annoying early bugs have been fixed. 1. The combat is more interactive than WoW and more akin to FPS. I hate WoW type combat. Just not my bag. 2. While adventure areas have been added, its not a huge world where you have to walk 40 minutes while killing fanged bunnies on the way in order to get to your quest. You just do the quest. Many people did not like this. 3. Its still Eberron. My PnP buddies could never get over this. They wanted Forgotten Realms and Eberron aint it. I like the setting. DDO pulls it off very well. 4. Lots and lots of content has been added. Lots of new models, zones, spells, effects have been added. Monks were just introduced as well. Still no gnomes, but eh, they're just monsters now anyway :P. (RAR?) All for $15/month. I've yet to pay for anything else yet... hint. 5. Its not teeming with users like some other MMO worlds, but I like the population levels. Compared to others, I also find I run into many fewer annoying kids or just immature adults. Its generally a very congenial player base. In all, I really like DDO. If anyone wants to give it another spin, drop me a PM. If you have any questions, let me know. My home is on Argonesson. |
| #82rcuhljrJun 20, 2008 11:05:51 | Politely disagree. The online gaming community is generally more actvie than the PnP community. 1 4 hour session seems very passive to me. In fact 1 4 hour session is fairly passive for the PnP players around here, I expect a lot more. This is an average number. I'm trying to strike a balance between the people who have the time to play 3-4 games a week, and the seperated crowd of people that this system is trying to reach out too (too far apart, don't have the time for pnp) where once a month may be all they play. If I wanted to play 20 hours a week I'd find a game designed for it, I'm not interested in joining a random game every day, hoping the GM doesn't randomly house rule something stupid and that he's not some nutjob who kills off characters for the fun of it.. nah I'd rather use the tool to play with static groups I know and trust. Further, nothing I have read implies that the game table will be hosted by the users, doing so would put fully functioning software into the hands of the end user (not advisable for an online subscription service). You are aware the crux of my argument is to not make it a subscription service? right? And that if they'd had a clue when designing it they wouldn't do it that way with a "well screw it we can just charge the users for it" attitude. Thus there's no motivation. It's circular logic to design your program around how you want to charge the user. "Hey, we really want to milk these bastards, lets make sure it's as hard as possible to crack" Unless the good people at WotC have some truly sophisticated techniques, my social group could have it reverse engineered and running independent from WotC within a few days. What's your point? That's true no matter what design model they choose. I can guarantee any server they have won't be as complicated as the one running a mmorpg and look at how many of those have emulated servers, EQ, WoW, AC off the top of my head. With ventrilo and other sub-standard, connectionless VoiP freeware users are prone to experience hiccups in communication, and the latency issues which we have both recognized. The latency may not be game breaking in a DnD game, but hiccups during the DMs carefully prepped flavor text would be. The latency I acknowledged is in regards to their servers, not the clients. I've used ventrilo/TS for several years for a variety of games and for PNP with IRC, I've never had an issue with vent lag for the GM. Also with the proper codex ventrilo is hardly substandard, it sounds better then any phone call I've made in years. See above, pinging the lobby server is certainly not a high load process, maintaining a connection oriented application that is relatively safe from reverse engineering is. Don't charge monthly, and Don't punish your customers for piracy (/Cough rootdisk /cough MassEffect /cough securom) See above, ventrilo, teamspeak, roger wilco and all the other freeware is connectionless in nature (would be happy to be proven wrong) and prone to performance failures. Also, to some of the less technically savvy players, configuring freeware VoiP may be outside their grasp (I personally make a fairly steady side income configuring applications for the less than savvy crowd) I've never had performance issues. One well written guide on the internet explaining how to configure ventrilo and any one can do it. If it's really that hard for people, then make it an optional feature and let them pay for it. If they expand the use of a pre-existing license of Oracle or MS, they may need to pay additional licensing fees. 100k wouldn't pay the salary of a first year graduate of the school I tutor at for 3 years, WotC will likely want someone a little less green to be heading any given server farm and will thus need to pay more. 100k was the hardware cost, I wasn't talking about the guy. And for a server farm for an application that I described above, not running everything through their own servers, they can probably it to the an Existing IT workload, this server is going to be far from hammered. Summary: Would using a freeware VoiP reduce bandwidth needs? Yes. No offense but it's not to the best of their abilities, they could bring in full fiber optics from my house to everyone I play with, and hire professional voice actors to read the lines I write down. But just like your cost example I'm not interested in paying for that. Make there 'super sound good special' and add on for fools who hate their money, I'd rather have a perfectly workable service for free. Would hosting the vtt on the end user's platform reduce bandwidth needs? Yes It's vulnerable in both cases, however in one situation they have a much greater motivation to reverse engineer it. Will expanding database usage to more machines increase the cost of licensing? Most likely. No argument, however you haven't established that it would be impossible to cover these costs out of initial sales. Would adding to the databases already in use by WotC/Hasbro create a vulnerability to malicious intrusion? Yes, absolutely, without a doubt. What vulnerable malicious intrusions are you worried about in this scenario? Would 100k be a reasonable estimate of the costs involved in maintaining the servers, routers, and switches necessary to operate an operation as you described? Maybe, if the administration and IT responsibilities were shared by one person and they worked part time. 100k per annum. Would 100k be a reasonable estimate of the costs involved in maintaining aforementioned hardware in an operation as I described? No, not a chance, we'll sooner see Luna declared a plutoid as it hurtles toward the sun. That's why I think your setup is a poor decision. Did I miss any key arguements? Only in the fact that you seem to think that punishing customers for piracy is a good plan, were as I don't. |
| #83gizmoiscariotJun 20, 2008 11:17:18 | Been playing DDO since launch and still love it. Alot has been changed and added, but I think many MMOs and hard core PnP still may not like it. Many of the annoying early bugs have been fixed. One of my big issues with it that just ****** me off to no end is there was one area in the beta near the start that you walked through and ended up getting hit with a trap. The trap would then zap all your strength. And I mean, like all of it. To like 1. Which then didn't let you do anything and you could not restore it from what I remember without like a potion (its been a while). And the saving throws were like done 10 times while walking through, and you were bound to fail at least once so I didn't see the point. There were a few other things but stuff like that killed it for me. Perhaps they have fixed that or didn't make it so harsh now. |
| #84rcuhljrJun 20, 2008 11:28:15 | There were a few other things but stuff like that killed it for me. Perhaps they have fixed that or didn't make it so harsh now. I didn't mind the bugs, I cut a good bit of slack for that, my issues revolved around... Bane weapons - Everyone had like 5 of them by level 2 and if you didn't have one you weren't contributing because they were brokenly awesome. Repetition - Very few instances at any level range, compounded by the fact that 1/2 of the ones at the level were poorly designed/balanced/deathtraps so no one ran them which meant you got to run the same instance 4-5 times as your ONLY way of leveling up. Those dungeons get a lot less exciting seeing the same traps, monsters and surprises over and over again. This doesn't even scratch the surface if you started a new character. Lawls protection from evil - Did they ever fix this? It was basically required god mode at one point, it prevent pretty much any spell from hitting you. (Which you kinda needed if you wanted to get out of the level 2-3 dungeon alive, the one they thought a kobold shaman at the end of a long tunnel with a fireball spell would be awesome) It got really, really repetitious, and it felt weird getting worthless crap from quests over and over just so I could go buy my next +4 weapon from the shiny magic weapon emporium with every weapon ever at bargain basement prices. On the plus side I liked how they interpreted dnd rules into character gen and leveling, and most dungeons were fun once or twice. I basically bought it as a way to replace NWN/NWN2 to play dnd with separated friends (which is what I want DDI for) and it just didn't live up for that. |
| #85giantslorJun 20, 2008 11:44:48 | They have fixed many of the issues mentioned. I still have many of the Amulets of the Sliver Flame that gave you permanent protection from evil. It was pretty handy way back when, but it has brought back in line. Not sure what are you mean for the traps, but I don't remember it at all. Traps can be nastly, especially on elite difficultly. Some can on shot even my highest HP characters, but thats part of the fun. Traps are supposed to be deadly. The loot is still Monty Hall, but you can tune your end rewards a bit better. One of the new areas started support of crafting. I hate crafting and farming, but its there to a small extent with the promise to add more. The repetition is still there, but in what MMO is there not repetitions. You are either dungeon slogging for tramping through the country collecting junk to turn in. Its part of the game. But there is a significant amount of new content for all levels, so it is not nearly as bad as when it launched. Anyway, not trying to derail, but DDO has gotten much better. Turbine has done a good job at turning it around IMO. |
| #86hellmuteJun 20, 2008 22:09:11 | Is D&DO still around? Last time I saw it mentioned was when Penny Arcade pittied some marketing person of D&DO promoting some update... Dungeons & Dragons Online: Stormreach was developed by Turbine, Inc. over the course of approximately two years of development. The initial prototyping and concepting was done by Jason Booth, Dan Ogles, Cardell Kerr, Ken Troop, and Michael Sheidow, in coordination with Wizards of the Coast, the current publisher of the Dungeons and Dragons pen and paper game. Later this initial team was moved to work on Turbine's other title in development Lord of the Rings Online, or left the company. Yes it is still around and probably partially being used in DDI. |
| #87UndrhilJun 21, 2008 2:33:32 | Question: Let's say you subscribe to D&Di and make heavy use of the tools therein. At some point, you pay for some v-minis for use on the v-table. A month later, you cancel your subscription to D&Di. The virtual table (from what I understand) will still be usable by you, but what about the v-minis? Unless they are going to allow you to store them on your PC and still use them, I don't see how this would work out. First, I can't really see them allowing you to store the v-minis on your PC since that would give people a way to "copy" the v-minis for their friends. Second, I can't see them allowing you to keep them stored on their servers if you aren't paying the monthly subscription fee. |
| #88hellmuteJun 21, 2008 7:22:41 | The vminis exist only on their servers. You may not have access to them anymore, but you should just like and Dragon or Dungeon during a subscription. Thee will be little space in the database to say if you own a mini or not. Might look something like this? vMini1=false=0 vMini2=true=1 so it would take very little space on their end to store you "list" of owned vMinis. |
| #89giantslorJun 21, 2008 9:27:12 | Yes it is still around and probably partially being used in DDI. I doubt that any DDO stuff is being used in DDI. Turbine is a stand alone company and merely licenses the Ebberron world from WoTC. If I am not mistaken, Ken is long gone from Turbine as well. While WoTC surely owns the IP, I would imagine that the physical art and what not is owned by Turbine and they would rightly want compensation for anything pulled from DDO (such as models) to put into DDI. |
| #90keokiJun 21, 2008 10:26:59 | Just because you and your friends are willing to bend over and take whatever you're given doesn't necessarily validate it either. Um... yeah, the tools haven't been released yet. So, by your definition, any product that hasn't been released yet is a failure. Meaning every product before it's release. Do I really have to point out the gaping hole in logic here? |
| #91rcuhljrJun 21, 2008 10:32:27 | Um... yeah, the tools haven't been released yet. So, by your definition, any product that hasn't been released yet is a failure. Meaning every product before it's release. Do I really have to point out the gaping hole in logic here? No, his Logic is the tools are a failure because they aren't released yet when the release date was two weeks ago, combined with the fact that the compendium at least was supposed to be out shortly, but is still MIA. |
| #92wotc_dmJun 22, 2008 0:28:15 | Question: Let's say you subscribe to D&Di and make heavy use of the tools therein. At some point, you pay for some v-minis for use on the v-table. A month later, you cancel your subscription to D&Di. The virtual table (from what I understand) will still be usable by you, but what about the v-minis? Unless they are going to allow you to store them on your PC and still use them, I don't see how this would work out. The V-Minis you own can still be "shared" with other participants if later you decide to get into a game session through guest passes. First, I can't really see them allowing you to store the v-minis on your PC since that would give people a way to "copy" the v-minis for their friends. Yes, we will keep the information of what you own on our servers. |
| #93keokiJun 22, 2008 3:03:36 | No, his Logic is the tools are a failure because they aren't released yet when the release date was two weeks ago, combined with the fact that the compendium at least was supposed to be out shortly, but is still MIA. That's interesting - I hadn't realized a date had been announced. Do you have a source? |
| #94giantslorJun 22, 2008 10:27:29 | That's interesting - I hadn't realized a date had been announced. Do you have a source? You are right, no dates were ever announced. It is the solely the fault of all those idiots that bought into the genius marketing blitz of WoTC (who set no date) that they assumed all from all the hype that the tools would be released when the books were. After all, in the cacophony of meet and greets, internet videos, book inserts, press coverage and the like, there was a single muted and obscure ampersand article that stated they tools would not be release. Its your own **** fault if you missed it. Also, the Ampersand article did suggest the Compendium would release the same time as 4e launched. But I guess you could say that the beta period has started and that no promises were made on 'initial rollout'. Those conceivably could be two totally separate things. D&D Insider’s free beta period coincides with the launch of 4th Edition. You get to try out the first digital components without paying the subscription fees, and you can provide feedback to help us improve your experience. The initial rollout includes Dragon and Dungeon online magazines, and the D&D Rules Compendium. But in the end you are correct. No promises were broken and none were made. All I know is that if my kids blew this kind of smoke up my rear, they would be punished and we would not be mincing the meaning of narrow definitions of words or phrases. |
| #95rcuhljrJun 22, 2008 10:52:31 | That's interesting - I hadn't realized a date had been announced. Do you have a source? OTher then the fliers they distributed? Or the multiple adds in the source book for a product that doesn't exist yet? Regardless Slor when into more detail then I'm going to bother with since you're trying to argue something that was settled a week ago. From the very beginning of this project our goal had been to launch the full suite of D&D Insider tools and applications with the launch of 4th edition. How could we want to do anything else? Our one piece of warning that they'd whiffed their goal was in a publication I'd never seen until after I purchased the core books. However we can bring up another failure... The very next focused goal for us is to get the Compendium, in its first iteration, up and running as soon as possible. Expect a more formal note from me about the Compendium posted onto the website soon. The first iteration may go live in a couple of weeks, it may be longer than that. No note has been posted, and were two weeks out without sight of the simplest application they are offering. |
| #96keokiJun 22, 2008 13:33:40 | OTher then the fliers they distributed? Or the multiple adds in the source book for a product that doesn't exist yet? I'm afraid I didn't get a flyer. I'm not sure what sourcebook you mean, unless you're referring to the core rulebooks, which list no date. Regardless Slor when into more detail then I'm going to bother with since you're trying to argue something that was settled a week ago. Actually, I was responding to a message posted two days ago. No note has been posted, and were two weeks out without sight of the simplest application they are offering. And no date either. Thank you for proving my point again. |
| #97FatherAzerunJun 22, 2008 15:39:11 | I am a longtime player of Dungeons & Dragons since that old glorified first edition -- and I have long been an apologist when TSR and later Wizards made errors or missteps, and have always lauded them when their innovative ideas (such as the OGL, which was a brilliant step for the community) have borne fruit. That said, I am terribly disappointed and disturbed by the types of communication regarding D&D I, 4th Edition rollout, and choices that have been made that appear more greedy than directed at bolstering or enhancing player experience, loyalty, or value. The failures of 4th edition launch can be categorized as follows: Emphasis on Features not Available at Product Launch It has been rightly pointed out that release dates on the online-based tools by WOTC were always, well, ephemeral. But that belies the point that their marketing, including Associated Press stories, online interviews, and even that fine tag on the back of the three main sourcebooks (Get more at D&D Insider!) suggested that one of the MAIN reasons a need existed to move from 3 / 3.5 to 4.0 at a furious speed was to take advantage of said tools. First edition lasted from 1974 (though one can really say it picked up steam in 1977) through 1989 -- 12 to 14 years. Second edition lasted form 1989 to 2000 -- 11 years. Third Edition lasted a scant 3 years, until 2003; suddenly we needed the revised edition of 3.5, which has lasted just 5 years. The lack of the tolls availability is particularly embarrassing and egregious considering that the third edition books contained software to do character generation: The lack of being able to have even a simple, freely distributed Character generator as a small sampling of what the character vault might offer is completely unworthy of their project management skills. Creating a buzz about online tools being a primary new feature requiring and necessitating major changes in play style and character creation (4th edition clearly is far more different from previous editions than 3rd was to 2nd, for example) means that lacking such tools to ease players into the transition phase was a very poor decision indeed. Microtransactions, Product Purchases, and Appearance of Greed 4th edition emphasized that the new features of D&D I would bring together all sorts of goodies for players who chose to join up at what is a rather considerable premium. Consider the investment of the three primary books alone cost just under $100 -- a not insubstantial investment for teens and twenty year olds, a market needed if we are to replenish the field with new players. Add to that $180 a year (albeit supposedly "discounted" with a yearly subscription) and you are asking for a nearly #300 entry bar for players to gain access to these most basic of tools. The problem is that the virtual tabletop and other tools should share a business model more similar to Battlenet, whereas it appears to be headed much closer to an expansive, Subscription and microtransaction Magic the gathering Online model. Battlenet operates with an amazing number of players online, hosting games and leader boards, off of a single product purchase (Diablo, Warcraft 3, Diablo 2). For a $30-$50 entry fee, the player gains a matching service and virtual playground to meet and play the game with other players. Blizzard is able to advertise new software products, or book and marketing tie ins, to help defray the cost of running such a massive endeavor. (And yes, I am aware of the revenue giant that is WoW, but it doesn't run on Bnet and Bnet uses its own separate revenue stream.) Saying that players have to buy every single mini that they might want to use in an encounter is embarrassingly greedy. Why not instead go the route of mod-makers and offer the tools to create and paint your own virtual minis and have them downloadable by other players? Player-generated content has kept alive a number of games that might otherwise have been dustbinned later. Tap into the player's creative side to increase their loyalty and make them desire to buy primary and secondary sourcebooks. In addition the two "preview" books to fourth edition were primarily marketing tools, for which WOTC charged $20 a pop for. The two Wizards Presents series, Worlds and Monsters and Races and Classes, should have never been printed but instead distributed as free online PDFs. Or, if they were purchasable, give an envelope with a timecard (like an EQ / City of Heroes etc. timecard) that would have given 2-3 months of D&D Insider free. Luring people to buy books that were primarily marketing tools looks just plain greedy. One of the great benefits of D&D I was supposed to be the free subscriptions to Dragon Magazine and Dungeon Magazine. of course, since these are online-only versions, the costs associated with printing and delivery are incredibly cheap compared to traditional printing costs. However, I always enjoyed Dragon but never really has much use for Dungeon -- after all, I write all my own adventures. However, I am going to be told that these are benefits to my D&D Insider subscription -- if you really wanted to make players happier, charge less for D&D I, remove the embarrassing greed of microtransactions, and have Dragon and Dungeon be additional PDF subscriptions you can use. One consternation I have -- if I discontinue my D&D Insider subscription, will i still have access to all of teh magazine subscriptions I had "bought" -- or am I going to find that I am held hostage to maintaining D&D Insider to access already purchased items? Compare that to say Paizo's distribution system, where you buy a physical copy but get download rights to the PDF version for all the products you bought. A change in communications is necessary; more firm admissions as to timelines and development on the electronic tools and a stronger sense of what pricing and models can be expected may help diffuse some of teh tension. Removing the stigma of greed that seems to be surrounding teh idea of microtransactions would also be very wise; instead, create community mod-building tools where development of new miniatures and content can be generated enthusiastically by players, leading to larger buy-in and a likelihood of more people supporting the original game and its printed products as a result. |
| #98rcuhljrJun 22, 2008 23:46:05 | I'm afraid I didn't get a flyer. I'm glad for you? And no date either. Thank you for proving my point again. Ok, here's the quote from their ampersand article since you continue toiling under these false delusions of being right even though Ken troops own post says they screwed up. D&D Insider’s free beta period coincides with the launch of 4th Edition. You get to try out the first digital components without paying the subscription fees, and you can provide feedback to help us improve your experience. The initial rollout includes Dragon and Dungeon online magazines, and the D&D Rules Compendium You see that, the compendium was announced to release, three weeks ago. That's failing right there. |
| #99keokiJun 23, 2008 18:21:30 | You see that, the compendium was announced to release, three weeks ago. That's failing right there. Actually, the compendium is up now. And, once again, no firm date was given. Just because you happen to assume the "launch" of 4E to be June 6, 2008 instead of, say, June 2008 or even summer 2008 doesn't necessarily mean there was any deception or failure on the part of the publisher. |
| #100nexusvalheesJun 23, 2008 20:26:02 | Actually, the compendium is up now. And, once again, no firm date was given. Just because you happen to assume the "launch" of 4E to be June 6, 2008 instead of, say, June 2008 or even summer 2008 doesn't necessarily mean there was any deception or failure on the part of the publisher. So they didn't have a countdown on the main page they didn't have a release date of June 6, 2008 on the main page they didn't have launch party's at numerous gaming stores on June 6, 2008 they didn't say in various podcasts and you tube videos saying that DDi was to be launched with the core books in June wow just wow |
| #101keokiJun 24, 2008 1:33:51 | So they didn't have a countdown on the main page The only countdown I noticed was to the release of the core books. they didn't have a release date of June 6, 2008 on the main page Not for D&D Insider, no. they didn't have launch party's at numerous gaming stores on June 6, 2008 Not to my knowledge. June 6 was D&D Game Day, and only the core books were released. they didn't say in various podcasts and you tube videos saying that DDi was to be launched with the core books in June Possibly. Of course, June isn't over yet. |
| #102malkav666Jun 24, 2008 6:44:55 | I am a longtime player of Dungeons & Dragons since that old glorified first edition -- and I have long been an apologist when TSR and later Wizards made errors or missteps, and have always lauded them when their innovative ideas (such as the OGL, which was a brilliant step for the community) have borne fruit. This post resonates with me. I strongly agree with many of the points presented. Very good read. love, malkav |
| #103mightytevJun 24, 2008 7:09:38 | I am aware of what's supposed to be included - i had to spend a few hours doing research to find that information and now i'm telling them what i'm willing to pay for it. Posting on this forum isn't "telling them". If you want to let them know, email them or send them some snail mail. Don't assume they read every post on every subforum. |
| #104eleranJun 24, 2008 10:49:10 | So they didn't have a countdown on the main page Actually if you had merely taken reading comprehension as an at-will power you would have noticed that the countdown timer on the main page was ALWAYS for Worldwide D&D game day. Not, in fact, for the release of 4e. |
| #105fodiggJun 24, 2008 16:57:17 | Screw "V-minis". I will never pay for "pretend" minis. It's bad enough I pay for actual pieces of plastic when I could be using skittles. If I cannot create custom minis by uploading an image file then I won't be using their gaming table. It's really as simple as that. |
| #106leonfranzenJun 24, 2008 22:29:48 | Just adding my voice to the list of the disappointed. The subscription model is understandable. I was willing to fork over that much cash for a virtual tabletop with 3D minis. But then I heard of the vminis pricing scheme and the exclusion of non-subscribed users (yeah I know about "guest" passes). It feels to me that this endeavor is being run by marketing people that are really well versed in marketing physical products and they seem to be taking for granted that online, digital content works the same way. I don't know if it's true, but it's the only explanation I have for why the WOTC plan is so unrealistic. It CAN'T work. I'm actually more astonished than disgusted. |
| #107mrburack_dupJun 25, 2008 13:24:59 | That's interesting - I hadn't realized a date had been announced. Do you have a source? Given the amount of hype that D&D Insider has received and how much people were anticipating it, it should have been ready at 4th ed launch. Whether or not they announced that as the official release date, by not meeting that date they have lost so much momentum that they're going to have to work twice as hard and spend much more money promoting the service in order to get the same results they would have had before. Given the inane pricing scheme, those results are unlikely to be particularly impressive anyway, so take that for what it's worth. In discussing it with friends, i have come to the conclusion that Wizards must not be imagining the use of this service the same way we are. We (and i suspect most others) have been looking at it as an opportunity to expand the potential of a more traditional, ongoing campaign with a consistent set of players who can not or choose not to meet in person. It seems to me that Wizards intends it to be sort of a perpetual virtual convention where people set up individual scenarios and short-term events and drop in for casual, impromptu play fairly often but irregularly (very MMO-ish). Their price scheme just does not seem to make sense looking at it from my perspective. I doubt that this alternative vision of this service has a broad enough appeal to succeed, even if the pricing does make sense for it. |
| #108shivaxJun 28, 2008 2:42:42 | Just adding my voice to the list of the disappointed. The subscription model is understandable. I was willing to fork over that much cash for a virtual tabletop with 3D minis. But then I heard of the vminis pricing scheme and the exclusion of non-subscribed users (yeah I know about "guest" passes). It feels to me that this endeavor is being run by marketing people that are really well versed in marketing physical products and they seem to be taking for granted that online, digital content works the same way. I don't know if it's true, but it's the only explanation I have for why the WOTC plan is so unrealistic. It CAN'T work. I'm actually more astonished than disgusted. I have to agree. If they gave you multiple minitures for everything that were customizable (ie this kobold has a shortbow, this one a dagger, etc, etc) people STILL wouldn't play $15 a month for it. That they're asking for $15 a month, per person and then asking for even more money for virtual minitures is beyond the pale. The economic model cannot possibly succeed. They're asking for MMO cash and offering a product with next to no meat to it and then asking you to pay extra for what they should have given you to start with. I really wanted DDI to be an awesome tool so I could start playing D&D again, but it wont happen. Theres no way me or my friends are paying $15+ a month for next to nothing. Nothing in the product makes sense for such a high monthly charge. Its not a realistic business model at all. Just because someone can afford $20 for a cheeseburger doesn't mean people will pay for it. Even if a few people do, the business will still fail because most wont. |