WOTC has a ton of overhead when printing, selling, and shipping books. Not so much when selling digital content. Why would a company take their high overhead, lower profit item and include with it their lower overhead, higher profit item that they just purchased for millions of dollars? That would not be a very intelligent business decision if you ask me. They might give a digital discount code with a hardcover purchase but it definitely will not be a free!

Excellent.  Now's time to close the circle with a VTT by acquiring or partnering with FoundryVTT  :)

Foundry VTT needs A LOT of work to have any chance of being adopted widely.  Right now it's a big mess of random people's Patreon's subscriptions to enable functionality that should be part of the core product.  The average DM is just not going to put up with a platform that increases cost, complexity, and prep time.  I've been hosting a node.js instance and working on my world for literally months, and I'm nowhere near ready to dump this steaming pile on my players.

If WotC wants to keep the momentum going of finally entering the digital era in a meaningful way (this acquisition) I would implore them to acquire, "Tactical Adventures"  (https://youtu.be/sdfl9SsixUU?t=244).

I think it would be a huge mistake for WotC to squander years trying to write their own VTT this late in the game when Solasta already has 95% of what Wizards needs right now...a remarkable recreation of 5e (better than Baldur's Gate 3 imo), co-op multiplayer, a dungeon builder, quest builder, etc. Can you imagine mapping all that dndbeyond data over and importing it into Solasta as new character options, creature stat blocks, items, spells, etc?  With their native tools, they could easily release a Curse of Strahd type campaign as subscription-based DLC every other month for years and people would eat it up.  Throw in some NPC voice acting by the Critical Role cast and fans would be whipped up into a frenzy, paying whatever Hasbro asked.

I personally would love to see a resurgence of the Bioware/Neverwinter Nights persistent world era, running on modern hardware and rules with all that amazing DDB data. Solasta would just need to extend the number of concurrent players (currently 4 max), and add a new gamemaster login role.  And once under Hasbro's wing, why stop at a campaign setting nobody's heard of...the Solasta engine could be used to create Abeir-Toril, Exandria, Ebberon, Greyhawk, etc.

So, please tell your parent (and grandparent) companies to seize this very rare opportunity.  Finally give your tens of millions of adoring fans what they've been waiting to play for two decades now before a competitor does.

I'm sorry, I just wanna make sure...

Are we going to have to recreate our homebrews?

Quote from Helstiir >>

I'm sorry, I just wanna make sure...

Are we going to have to recreate our homebrews?

 
Why would we?

Hasbro is basically the EA of the board game world. You're gonna have to pay twice if you want digital and hard content. (Unless you pay extra for a book with a digital content code... that has not been released yet!) Haha. This is basically a nightmare. In a few months we'll probably be asked to pay double for our subscriptions too. 

Quote from dbletard >>

WOTC has a ton of overhead when printing, selling, and shipping books. Not so much when selling digital content. Why would a company take their high overhead, lower profit item and include with it their lower overhead, higher profit item that they just purchased for millions of dollars? That would not be a very intelligent business decision if you ask me. They might give a digital discount code with a hardcover purchase but it definitely will not be a free!

 dude, the digital costs as much as the physical. if you own one, you should own the other.

Sorry if this has been answered before but I couldn't find anything in regards ... if you already have a Wizards account, will there be someway link it to your soon to be converted DnD Beyond account? I really do not want/need two accounts to login to WoTC.

Oh found it .. solved my own question .. link in account settings here on DDB (for those like me that didn't know).

WOO WOO! Grats on the great news!

Legit though, you would sell more books if you could coordinate them including discount codes off digital copies of the same book. I think you'd sell more books AND digital copies. There's a lot of stuff in my library where I have one or the other.

So, do we need to create a Wizards of the Coast account or will they merge with DNDBEYOND accounts?

Please also buy Roll20! That would be FABULOUSO! to have everything for digital D&D playing all in one place

I think the absolute best we can hope for is being able to buy a bundle of book and digital content, like a blue ray. I think lots of people expect to be able to translate their prior book purchase to digital content, but how could WOTC handle that? Future content, I can totally see. I don’t see a practice way to backward support that.

Do we know anything about the continued use of services like beyond 20?

Quote from Z_U_R_N >>

Please also buy Roll20! That would be FABULOUSO! to have everything for digital D&D playing all in one place

 please don't, don't buy or build a VTT, there are plenty of products out there that do the job really well (Roll 20 not being one of them). Instead provide an API gateway that VTT's can hook into to provide an experiance similar to above VTT without needing the dodgy plugin that roll 20 etc have. 

I would like to see you cancel licensing on places like roll 20 and fantasy grounds and instead have DDB as the one stop shop (using that API) meaning users only need to buy everthing in 1 location. 

Quote from AWizardForHire >>

Do we know anything about the continued use of services like beyond 20?

 give them time, I do lobe that the merger hasn't fully happened yet and everyone expects information about everything now. 

My guess is that the licensing will continue in the medium term but I would not be surprised if they end Roll 20, fantasy grounds etc, and instead create an API in DDB that users who have a DDB account can tap into to pull everything into a VTT, much like they do for Discord now. Why sell a licence that only makes you a % of each sale when you can turn DDB into the sole Digital distributor and make 100% of the profit. 

Quote from MPA >>

So what happens to the moderators and forum administrators?  Are they out of a job?  Just asking for a friend.

 Ok so first of all from what I understand most moderators and forum admin are volunteers, I may be wrong there, there is no reason for WOTC to replace them or get rid, they have bought a product, the IP and the people that work on it. 

Having been on the end of the takeover of a tech company I can tell you that anyone who is salaried will probably receive a nice bump in salary and potential a golden handcuff deal. My one paid me an incremental bonus at 6, 12, 18 and 24 months in the form of additional shares. 

When a company makes a tech acquisition you are buying the product, but also the people who work on it, develop it, interact with it's customers. Those are all skills and relationships you do not want to lose on day 1 because if you do you instantly devalue the company you just bought. 

So if we buy the real book will it go into dnd beyond to now?

Quote from Yes001 >>

So if we buy the real book will it go into dnd beyond to now?

 
No

and those are simple PDFs. Wh8ich is an entirely different beast then what DDB is.