Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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D&D Beyond’s pricing for older 5e digital books is hard to defend as consumer friendly.
These are not physical books. There is no printing, no warehousing, no shipping, and no meaningful distribution cost in the old sense. The marginal cost of delivering a PDF is tiny. Yet the pricing stays near premium-book levels as though these files are scarce objects instead of repackaged digital text.
That would still be easier to tolerate if the product had moved with the times. It has not. The forum itself shows “Most users online: 210,427” tied to an August 2023 high-water mark, which is a fitting symbol of a platform that looks stuck while expecting customers to keep paying more for the same old digital material. In other industries, older products get cheaper as they age. Console hardware drops in price. Software gets discounted. Digital media usually becomes more affordable over time. Here, the opposite feeling dominates: the product gets older, but the price remains anchored as if nothing changed.
That is why this feels anti-consumer. Not because creators should not be paid, but because the pricing model ignores the actual form of the product being sold. A static digital file is not a hardcover book, and it should not be priced like one forever.
The result is a system that feels less like access to rules and more like paying a toll for the privilege of reading them.
A few points:
Which is no different from physical books—a "toll" to read the rules
Find my D&D Beyond articles here
Fair point on hardware depreciation. My complaint is narrower, digital books have near-zero marginal distribution cost and no inventory burden, yet they are still priced like premium goods long after release. Physical books at least have storage, shipping, and stock clearance pressure. Digital books do not. That is why the pricing feels increasingly disconnected from reality.
Console prices are going up, actually; despite being several years old the Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 have both had price increases. Purchase-once software is becoming increasingly rare as software companies move toward monthly or annual subscription models. Ebooks and digital music, movies, and TV episodes/series rarely go down in price. Video games are the rarity in that some get permanently discounted over time, but even that's not universal. And video games are in a unique position because due to changing requirements and compatibility, older games lose their appeal. Some become unplayable because they're not widely supported anymore. Others become unplayable because the looks, controls, story, etc. don't stand up to the test of time. Which is where remakes come in. So sure, you can get the original Resident Evil 3: Nemesis for something like $5, but it looks rough and controls rougher; so instead you can pay more for the 2020 remake, Resident Evil 3 (no subtitle).
But also, D&D books are premium products! A lot of hard work goes into these things! A lot of talented people design, write, illustrate, and edit for these books. And there are whole other teams of people who make D&D Beyond work, which comes with its own upkeep costs. As much as I'd love for all the things I want to be less expensive, I really want the site to get much-needed updates like the rebuild they're working on now.
That's fine, creators should be paid. That is not my objection. My objection is that a static digital file has no printing, storage, shipping, or inventory burden, so the price feels disconnected from the actual delivery cost and from any meaningful age-based depreciation. I am criticizing the pricing model, not the people doing the work.
There is a good justification for keeping prices similar, if you assume that the cost of printing/distribution for physical copies is allocated to programming/site maintenance for the digital. The problem is that this isn't happening. There's features going back to at least Tasha's that have never been implemented, and even now there's parts of the 2024 rules that don't work. A lot if it can be attributed to the backend needing to be rewritten, but that's been needed for at least 6 years (probably longer, I just happened to come across a post from then) and they've only announced that they're looking at it a few months ago. As things stand they're asking for too much money for something that doesn't work.
You have repeatedly claimed the site doesn't work. This hyperbolic vaguery confuses & intrigues me
What about the site's core fundamentals, & not just specifics and/or personal pet issues(The mention of Tasha's implies this is about 5e Aberant Mind & Clockwork Sorcerers), doesn't work?
DM, player & homebrewer(Current homebrew project is an unofficial conversion of SBURB/SGRUB from Homestuck into DND 5e)
Once made Maxwell's Silver Hammer come down upon Strahd's head to make sure he was dead.
Always study & sharpen philosophical razors. They save a lot of trouble.
Wizards of the Coast is and always will be a publishing house. That's it's primary focus and it's general cash source. Undervaluing the digital copies will actively damage their physical book sales.
They produce quality products. If they were to completely ditch the physical aspect (which they won't), they'd still have a team of writers on every item. You say "They should be cheaper", but $30 for a PDF product is cheaper than the industry standard for actual production houses (not DM's Guild or individuals). Kickstarters start the PDF ranks at $30-50 for a single book.
Just because you want it to be cheaper, in no way means it should be. The product is the content, not the media format.
They have been incentivized to charge for licensing magic items in all honesty. The content is rehashed old books 90% of the time. The whole model is sus when the programming features have barely moved in a decade. The little trickle now is not enough value but could be if they were serious about making it worth it. At this point I am a many years master tier legendary bundle + a bunch of physical and digital books. That there isn't a mix of free and paid content coming in, I just don't see the return on my investment as they are incentivized to devalue what I bought by rewriting into new books instead of updating my old ones for free as part of my Master Tier sub. Too much money lately for words I bought already. ...many times since the 80s.
Money talks. If you want them to change, you have to not buy the products.
The fact that they keep "rehashing old books" and people keep buying, says to them they're on the right path. And honestly, the majority of the playerbase doesn't want to take old adventures and rewrite them mechanically. They want someone to do that for them, then play the old games in 5.5e. Which is exactly what WOTC is doing.
You keep repeating the reasons why physical stock gets discounted whilst claiming it’s proof digital books, which have none of those costs, should be discounted. As has been pointed out most digital products *don’t* get discounted except in sales. Sony still charges nearly launch price for five year old games on the PS store, same for MS with the Xbox store. The simple fact is that the lack of physical costs means theres no incentive to sell older products at a discount, it’s unlikely to drive up sales significantly and it costs nothing to just leave them as they are