And you sincerely think that a model that encourages single time purchases is more viable when you have to spend most of your expenses in maintenance and upkeep?
Do you think I didn't take servers, personnel, development, etc. into account, under the "basics"?
Do you think I mentioned the free bundles without considering them a marketing expense?
Don't just assume people don't think. If you ever sold anything, you'll know discounts are never in red. They are designed to still be a profit income, in some way.
To put it simple: the discounted price is what you're actually aiming for, and full price is what you hope you can get if people are not too cautious. This is more true than ever in a system that does not require the customer to buy again the same asset, like a food company that can afford to lose money on a single time offer just to finalize the client on later purchases.
So yeah, I may not have access to this company business statement, but I had been exposed to their pricing and can measure it this way. If you do, please share it.
Sure, I may make better predictions with actual numbers at hand, but I do know how to make estimates. It's even part of my job! Managing natural resources is exactly like bookkeeping, except nobody gives you any financial statement and you have to figure out by yourself how much fish is in the sea and how climate, other species, a wide array of human activities and an undefined number of fishermen that may or may not follow regulations are going to affect your economy. I assure you it can be done, it shouldn't bug you just because you're not used to make these calculations with unknown numbers.
If you feel like it, we can be constructive about it and try to make a more reasonable guess if you feel like mine was unrealistic.
I assume that the current upkeep and maintenance is at least partially covered by the current forms of subscriptions.
Yes, I do not think you have covered those costs under "basics". Labor is one of the highest expenses a company incurs, and the pay range of wages is so varied that it is meaningless to give any accurate forms of estimate unless we have access to financial statements. We do not know how many staff there are and we do not how much they are paid on average. In regards to just cost of goods sold (COGS) alone, we do not even know how much Beyond has to pay Wizards for the licenses and how sales is divvied up, so making assumptions about gross margins and gross profit without any solid information is just throwing a dart in the dark, and we do not even know which wall or even room has the board.
You mentioned them giving away free bundles as a sign that it means the company is not starved of cash, but marketing expense alone is a poor indicator of financial health, and we do not even know what their marketing budget is. Plenty of businesses spend millions on ads and still go under water anyways. For example, General Motors and Chevrolet are two massive car companies in America and spent a ton of money on ads even during the Great Recession and they still required a bailout from the federal government.
Discounts are usually not sold at a loss, but it is not impossible. When businesses desperately need to gain momentum and foot traffic, selling at loss can be a last ditch attempt to remain in business. While I agree that Beyond most likely will not sell its products at cost or below cost, I do not think it is a good idea to estimate gross profit margins, let alone bottom line profit margins, if we have no COGS or even revenue to go off of.
Without financial statements, speculating on their numbers is the same as trying to manage natural resources without know what resources you have. Saying that you have been exposed to their pricing model and being able to diagnose their financial situation from that is the same as drawing a conclusion about the health of California's redwood forests by looking at a redwood tree in your backyard. What bugs me is that you seem to think accounting and bookkeeping is something so simple that people can just pull numbers out their butts and call it a day. When you are managing natural resources, there are still some measurements to go on, such as the size of a given area, an estimated number of specific flora and fauna over that area, and so on. The difference here for Beyond is that we are completely in the dark without any kind of meaningful numbers. Saying that you know the sales price and discounts of their products is the same as saying that you do not think the dart board is on the floor, ceiling, behind furniture, or near breakable objects (and we do not know where those furniture and fragile objects are), which provides exactly the amount of help you think it does to figure out where to throw the dart.
I wish we are at the level where we can argue whether those numbers are realistic or not. We are not even at that level yet. We do not even know what is considered realistic and what is not. Do we pick a revenue number from one million to ten million, or from ten million to a hundred million? In the best case scenario, if we ask the staff nicely and upper management approves, the best estimate we can come up with is the revenue if we can figure out how many subscribers there are and how many of each book are sold this year. I think it is out of the question to get any number deeper than revenue unless Beyond becomes a publicly traded company. I am almost certain that we are not going to get any number regarding COGS because that is most likely under contract with Wizards and it probably is not something that can be publicly disclosed freely. We can maybe get a rough estimate on rent and utilities by consulting local commercial real estate agents, but unless you know somebody near one of Beyond's offices, we are not getting those numbers either.
Yet to know how much fish is available you do not need to know the size of the area, and the estimated number will be annexed with your final answer, so you don't start from that as well.
The way it works is that you compare years from what you've got and search for an index for a start.
We can use the amount of fish caught in a single day by a single person in a specific place (and we personally go fish), we can track down sales at the port if people are nice but this usually doesn't happen (like looking at the financial statement) and we can look at the way prices change, which is the first thing to do and where I started here.
The assumption is that the market will stabilize on the most profitable prize for both parts (people will buy at a reasonable cost and sellers will sell at a reasonable profit).
So don't just start from saying we don't have any measurement, because we do. Their prices are a measurement, a place to start at least.
Consider this: you wrote in bold that to manage flora or fauna we need to estimate their number, while in fact it is not true at all. I may have talked to you in a way that made you feel like I was describing your work as easy, and for that I am sorry, but let me show you how mine is not quite as you think as well. When we manage wolves in the mountains (the university keeps track of many things), we never even ask ourselves how many wolves are there. We don't need to know, it's just a question that politicians ask because people like knowing numbers, but say I spent the astounding amount of money you need to track down and count every Wolf in a country: 628. Now what? The point is not the number, the point is population dynamics: are there more wolves this year, than before? Are they disappearing? These are the questions that let us know how well this resource is going. They are actually the only thing you need to know, to manage them effectively.
How do we keep track of them? Indexes. You can count how many times they marked the ground in a place. You can check how many dead deer you find. And so on. Most of the work in ecology is trying to figure out which thing you can measure and how well it reflects the actual thing you're monitoring.
Now you understand why I'm trying to figure out how this company is going and I keep telling you we don't really need actual numbers? It's called a black box system.
I'm not interested in how much is X, I just need to know if their X is going up or down, that we can do.
Sure, X is the most important thing if you're part of the company, probably even if you're an investor (but we could argue that they are interested if the arrow is pointing up or down, after all), but X is just a number. It won't tell you alone how the company is doing, to do that you need X and X-1, how was it going last year? What about 2 years ago?
Now, the thing is I chose prices as an index. If they go down often, there is growth (you cut on the single sell and your profit comes from more customers), if they go up often you're under a dry spell (you need to increase your prices to balance your expenses). At the same time if they consistently go down there is recession and if they consistently go up there is growth (but this second behaviour can only act in synchrony with the financial state of clients. If people can afford to pay more we can ask more for a better product, and so on).
Just as we start when we work with fish.
Now, I am fairly sure you may be a much better fisherman in this sea, so if explaining my method did convince you, let's go fishing. I'm sincerely curious about this information now.
Start by what we do have: did I miss anything about prices? Had they ever been lower? Did they lowered the amount of discount offers over time? Are prices significantly bad at telling us if there is growth or recession?
Is there anything else we can measure like the number of players, number of people posting on the forums, number of homebrew spells? Would that give us any idea of the dynamics behind their sales?
Yeah, we're throwing darts in a dark room. But we're not trying to get the best score, we just need to know if there is someone playing or if they are going away. You'll know when you hit them.
P.s: are we really interested in that, other than for personal curiosity?
My suggestion was to establish a subscription offer that lets players rent content for a reasonable price. It's definitely up to DNDbeyond, if they ever consider this offer, to decide which is the reasonable price for them. My numbers were only a rough estimate based on what the mean user might spend on the site, a mean that does indeed include people who get everything, but it also includes a vast majority of people that get much less or nothing at all (can we at least agree on that?).
In this black box we don't know much. We don't know if there is economic growth, we don't know how much they earn from each sell, we don't know how much they sell, we don't know how their licensing agreement works (maybe they have limited keys and need to gather enough profit from each of them, maybe they just pay a percentage on gross sales and call it a day).
At the same time, we know more and more people are getting interest in this wonderful game, more and more people are actively choosing to adopt expensive subscription models out of their own simple indecision and more and more people can find easy access to pirated content nowadays.
All I'm saying is: let them in. If those people help this community grow we'll all benefit from better tools, improved content and possibly even more published manuals.
The only risk is if this model could in some way affect sales negatively, which is something that, judging by how the community responded, won't probably happen.
You'd rather stick to what you've got, which is wonderful! It means the addition of my system won't change the behaviour of current users. It might simply lure more people in.
WotC actually tried this very thing for 4th edition.
It was a disaster because too many paid for 1 month, copied everything, then just used their copied stuff -- hundreds of dollars worth of content nabbed for free for just a few bucks. It's even more difficult for D&D Beyond, being a third party that has to buy licenses to give you access.
Let's say D&D Beyond paid out $600 you give you licenses so you could get this prime sub for $10 per month. This means it will take 60 months, or 5 years, just to break even. And what if you cancel your sub before then? Either they lock you in a 5-year contract as a minimum (which almost nobody will ever take) or risk the huge losses.
And that's one person. 10 people sign up? That's $6,000 D&D Beyond has to pay up front to give access, with years to wait to break even and huge risk of loss.
There is no possible way for this to be financially sustainable.
This model just doesn't work for this set-up.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
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But DNDbeyond is not the same as 4th edition manuals. They state it clearly many times: it's a tool. It helps you build characters, it works as a wiki, bringing up rules as you play... It's not something you can simply copy and paste, they're not selling pdfs like DMsguild.
If you stopped using DNDbeyond and switched to the content you grabbed, you'd be at the very same place where people who got the book in any other way would be.
Why do you think people buy twice the same book, hardcover and beyond? It's because they're two different things, and Beyond is something that cannot be copied because it works as a whole. It's the servers. It's the community. It's the search engine. It's the builders.
So no, I definitely do not think people would just subscribe for one month and then play offline with what they've got. What even is the point in buying stuff here then? Get a book or a pdf if you wanna do that. There are cheaper and easier options already for that.
Plus, can someone show me where they state their licensing system works by putting a fee on specific content purchased instead of putting the fee on sales?
Because you all talk by assuming that if X items are shown, Beyond has to pay wizards Y. What if instead the deal was that if X is earned, Beyond pays wizards Y? In this scenario (which I find more plausible since they also sell single modules from each book separately) they are not paying upfront 600 bucks for each subscriber. They are paying WoTC a % of each monthly earning. You know why I think this is more probably the case? Because they never sold out keys, from what I know. What are the odds?
Then again, maybe I'm wrong and for some reason each digital key has been sold separately by WoTC to DNDbeyond, but can you please share evidence about this instead of giving it as obvious truth?
But DNDbeyond is not the same as 4th edition manuals. They state it clearly many times: it's a tool. It helps you build characters, it works as a wiki, bringing up rules as you play... It's not something you can simply copy and paste, they're not selling pdfs like DMsguild.
If you stopped using DNDbeyond and switched to the content you grabbed, you'd be at the very same place where people who got the book in any other way would be.
Why do you think people buy twice the same book, hardcover and beyond? It's because they're two different things, and Beyond is something that cannot be copied because it works as a whole. It's the servers. It's the community. It's the search engine. It's the builders.
So no, I definitely do not think people would just subscribe for one month and then play offline with what they've got. What even is the point in buying stuff here then? Get a book or a pdf if you wanna do that. There are cheaper and easier options already for that.
except you can go through all of the rules if you wanted and copy-paste right off the website, cancel your subscription, then go in and add everything you copied back as homebrew using the existing tools with the *single* exception of the Artificer base class in this situation. Is it worth it for all of the monsters? probably not. But character options? People have done more for less.
Trying to get your physical content on Beyond is like going to Microsoft and saying "I have a physical Playstation disk, give me a digital Xbox version!"
WotC, somebody who doesn't have to buy licenses to grant content, had a toolset and compendium just like D&D Beyond. You had a character sheet that could add stuff you unlocked if you bought the books digitally. The only difference was you could not homebrew and it was a monthly sub to unlocked everything, like your prime sub idea.
And it failed, for reasons I have said.
D&D Beyond isn't just a toolset, btw, you do get a digital version of the books, ("the compendium"), which you could easily copy.
I have no idea why you're mentioning DMs Guild, which has nothing to do with anything I have said in any way shape or form.
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Click ✨ HERE ✨ For My Youtube Videos featuring Guides, Tips & Tricks for using D&D Beyond. Need help with Homebrew? Check out ✨ thisFAQ/Guide thread ✨ by IamSposta.
WotC, somebody who doesn't have to buy licenses to grant content, had a toolset and compendium just like D&D Beyond. You had a character sheet that could add stuff you unlocked if you bought the books digitally. The only difference was you could not homebrew and it was a monthly sub to unlocked everything, like your prime sub idea.
And it failed, for reasons I have said.
D&D Beyond isn't just a toolset, btw, you do get a digital version of the books, ("the compendium"), which you could easily copy.
I have no idea why you're mentioning DMs Guild, which has nothing to do with anything I have said in any way shape or form.
I mentioned DMsguild because their system would allow for the scenario you cited. DNDbeyond's fundamental role is the toolset, not the compendium. You can tell by the way they are implementing features that pimp that part of the site, like premium dice.
If 4th edition compendium didn't work it's for two reasons: 1) people didn't care about the tools more than they cared about the rules and 2)4th edition is a mess anyway.
[REDACTED]
I don't see this site losing revenue even if this rogue behaviour of stealing books increased to be honest.
This is not a book. It's a tool.
Notes: Please do not discuss, advocate, nor attempt to justify piracy
WotC, somebody who doesn't have to buy licenses to grant content, had a toolset and compendium just like D&D Beyond. You had a character sheet that could add stuff you unlocked if you bought the books digitally. The only difference was you could not homebrew and it was a monthly sub to unlocked everything, like your prime sub idea.
And it failed, for reasons I have said.
D&D Beyond isn't just a toolset, btw, you do get a digital version of the books, ("the compendium"), which you could easily copy.
I have no idea why you're mentioning DMs Guild, which has nothing to do with anything I have said in any way shape or form.
I mentioned DMsguild because their system would allow for the scenario you cited. DNDbeyond's fundamental role is the toolset, not the compendium. You can tell by the way they are implementing features that pimp that part of the site, like premium dice.
If 4th edition compendium didn't work it's for two reasons: 1) people didn't care about the tools more than they cared about the rules and 2)4th edition is a mess anyway.
[REDACTED]
I don't see this site losing revenue even if this rogue behaviour of stealing books increased to be honest.
This is not a book. It's a tool.
No, this is an online DnD bookstore that just happens to make tools you can use with the books you purchase from the site.
So don't just start from saying we don't have any measurement, because we do. Their prices are a measurement, a place to start at least.
Consider this: you wrote in bold that to manage flora or fauna we need to estimate their number, while in fact it is not true at all. I may have talked to you in a way that made you feel like I was describing your work as easy, and for that I am sorry, but let me show you how mine is not quite as you think as well. When we manage wolves in the mountains (the university keeps track of many things), we never even ask ourselves how many wolves are there. We don't need to know, it's just a question that politicians ask because people like knowing numbers, but say I spent the astounding amount of money you need to track down and count every Wolf in a country: 628. Now what? The point is not the number, the point is population dynamics: are there more wolves this year, than before? Are they disappearing? These are the questions that let us know how well this resource is going. They are actually the only thing you need to know, to manage them effectively.
How do we keep track of them? Indexes. You can count how many times they marked the ground in a place. You can check how many dead deer you find. And so on. Most of the work in ecology is trying to figure out which thing you can measure and how well it reflects the actual thing you're monitoring.
Now you understand why I'm trying to figure out how this company is going and I keep telling you we don't really need actual numbers? It's called a black box system.
I'm not interested in how much is X, I just need to know if their X is going up or down, that we can do.
Sure, X is the most important thing if you're part of the company, probably even if you're an investor (but we could argue that they are interested if the arrow is pointing up or down, after all), but X is just a number. It won't tell you alone how the company is doing, to do that you need X and X-1, how was it going last year? What about 2 years ago?
Now, the thing is I chose prices as an index. If they go down often, there is growth (you cut on the single sell and your profit comes from more customers), if they go up often you're under a dry spell (you need to increase your prices to balance your expenses). At the same time if they consistently go down there is recession and if they consistently go up there is growth (but this second behaviour can only act in synchrony with the financial state of clients. If people can afford to pay more we can ask more for a better product, and so on).
Just as we start when we work with fish.
That is not how you analyze a company's financial health. That just is not how it works. Just because prices fall over time does not mean the company is doing well. Similarly, just because prices rise over time does not mean a company is doing poorly. Product prices are not an index that indicates anything about a company's financial health.
Falling price could be a potential signal a company is doing poorly and it is attempting a last ditch effort to get attention and generate sales to save the business, or it could potentially indicate the company is doing well and is trying to price out its competitors. Similarly, rising prices could mean the company is having trouble keeping its expenses down and needs to pass on rising costs to consumers, or it could also mean the company is doing really well and the company can to raise prices while selling a similar quantity of products to generate even more revenue.
With no other information to go on, looking at product prices alone is utterly meaningless.
If you want to judge a company solely on the price of something, product price is not the place to look at, you want to look at the stock price of the company. Beyond is not a publicly traded company, so there is no way to judge Beyond's financial situation that way either. Stock price alone definitely is not an accurate index of judging a company's financial health either.
My numbers were only a rough estimate based on what the mean user might spend on the site, a mean that does indeed include people who get everything, but it also includes a vast majority of people that get much less or nothing at all (can we at least agree on that?).
No, that is not how market research is done. You do not assume what the average user might spend on the site and how they will spend it. In this case, you actually have to go out there and fish for that information. I am not a marketer, so I cannot comment on the details or the exact way it is done. With my limited knowledge of that field, I know that one way to conduct market research is through surveys. It can be done physically knocking on people's doors or through online surveys. For an example of a market research survey, I remember participating in LEGO's online surveys years ago, and I was asked to provide feedback on the perceived difficulty of a potential LEGO set based on image alone, what age range do I think the set attracts, what price range should it cost, and I believe there was a fourth criteria but I forgot what it was.
For Beyond, if they want to do market research to determine whether subscription that unlocks content is viable, they need to actually go out there and do research. If I am the chief marketing officer and got the authority and resources to do so, I would probably do something like send out surveys to my target market, and then use the information I gathered to launch a trial period for content subscription. Depending on how the trial goes, then I will determine whether it is a good idea to launch the product to a wider audience.
What Beyond should NOT do is launch content subscriptions assuming people will just pay for it without doing proper market research beforehand. And before they even think about doing market research, they should consult with Wizards to work things out first. Market research is expensive, and there is no point in going further into that idea if Wizards says no.
It is one thing to ask for content subscription, but it is a different thing to make claims about price points, sales volume, and profitability of content subscription without doing market research, and it is most definitely an entirely different thing to make claims about Beyond's financial health without looking at their financial documents first.
Allright, that's fine. Let's agree that we do not know yet how well this would effect them.
I just think it would happen. It's a theory.
Thus I'm here putting the card in the suggestion box. Now, regardless of what anyone of us concludes, I am fairly sure that this discussion has been up in the forums long enough until those that truly needed to read the suggestion did that. I'm fine with that.
I am fairly positive that, in the event they would consider this model, given how often people seem to ask for it, they will proceed with proper research, and you will see a banner somewhere with a bunch of questions, very much like the ones we were given a couple of weeks ago.
Or probably not just on this site, as you might probably notice the model I'm talking about is not a product for current users, but for new ones that do not already take part in the community because they don't like DNDbeyond current model.
I mean, look at the poll... less than 5% or participants said they would switch to the subscription anyway. Yeah, it's not a representative sample, but it tells you something already. What is the potential loss? Less sales? How? Would you buy less if this system you don't like simply appeared for someone else to enjoy?
The fear here is that people would stop buying at full price and switch to subscription, yet pretty much none of you showed interest in that. What is it that makes it so wrong in your eyes?
The only reasonable argument is if you assume they have to pay full price at WoTC for the entire library for each subscriber, which honestly does not make much sense. This is not a retail shop, it's digital content they sell. And this would be called renting anyway. If the agreement (which is private so we don't know it and we have no right in requesting to know it) is on the other hand that WoTC simply takes a part of the revenue on sales, then that first investment wouldn't be there at all.
And the second scenario is even more likely, since they offer you content a la carte, something that could not happen with a single license for an entire book. How would that work? They spend $30 on a book so that you can give them $1,50 to just get the class you like?
The entire point in debating finances is simply to estimate what would be the price of this offer. Take it or leave it. It won't change much, in the end.
I assume that the current upkeep and maintenance is at least partially covered by the current forms of subscriptions.
Yes, I do not think you have covered those costs under "basics". Labor is one of the highest expenses a company incurs, and the pay range of wages is so varied that it is meaningless to give any accurate forms of estimate unless we have access to financial statements. We do not know how many staff there are and we do not how much they are paid on average. In regards to just cost of goods sold (COGS) alone, we do not even know how much Beyond has to pay Wizards for the licenses and how sales is divvied up, so making assumptions about gross margins and gross profit without any solid information is just throwing a dart in the dark, and we do not even know which wall or even room has the board.
You mentioned them giving away free bundles as a sign that it means the company is not starved of cash, but marketing expense alone is a poor indicator of financial health, and we do not even know what their marketing budget is. Plenty of businesses spend millions on ads and still go under water anyways. For example, General Motors and Chevrolet are two massive car companies in America and spent a ton of money on ads even during the Great Recession and they still required a bailout from the federal government.
Discounts are usually not sold at a loss, but it is not impossible. When businesses desperately need to gain momentum and foot traffic, selling at loss can be a last ditch attempt to remain in business. While I agree that Beyond most likely will not sell its products at cost or below cost, I do not think it is a good idea to estimate gross profit margins, let alone bottom line profit margins, if we have no COGS or even revenue to go off of.
Without financial statements, speculating on their numbers is the same as trying to manage natural resources without know what resources you have. Saying that you have been exposed to their pricing model and being able to diagnose their financial situation from that is the same as drawing a conclusion about the health of California's redwood forests by looking at a redwood tree in your backyard. What bugs me is that you seem to think accounting and bookkeeping is something so simple that people can just pull numbers out their butts and call it a day. When you are managing natural resources, there are still some measurements to go on, such as the size of a given area, an estimated number of specific flora and fauna over that area, and so on. The difference here for Beyond is that we are completely in the dark without any kind of meaningful numbers. Saying that you know the sales price and discounts of their products is the same as saying that you do not think the dart board is on the floor, ceiling, behind furniture, or near breakable objects (and we do not know where those furniture and fragile objects are), which provides exactly the amount of help you think it does to figure out where to throw the dart.
I wish we are at the level where we can argue whether those numbers are realistic or not. We are not even at that level yet. We do not even know what is considered realistic and what is not. Do we pick a revenue number from one million to ten million, or from ten million to a hundred million? In the best case scenario, if we ask the staff nicely and upper management approves, the best estimate we can come up with is the revenue if we can figure out how many subscribers there are and how many of each book are sold this year. I think it is out of the question to get any number deeper than revenue unless Beyond becomes a publicly traded company. I am almost certain that we are not going to get any number regarding COGS because that is most likely under contract with Wizards and it probably is not something that can be publicly disclosed freely. We can maybe get a rough estimate on rent and utilities by consulting local commercial real estate agents, but unless you know somebody near one of Beyond's offices, we are not getting those numbers either.
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Yet to know how much fish is available you do not need to know the size of the area, and the estimated number will be annexed with your final answer, so you don't start from that as well.
The way it works is that you compare years from what you've got and search for an index for a start.
We can use the amount of fish caught in a single day by a single person in a specific place (and we personally go fish), we can track down sales at the port if people are nice but this usually doesn't happen (like looking at the financial statement) and we can look at the way prices change, which is the first thing to do and where I started here.
The assumption is that the market will stabilize on the most profitable prize for both parts (people will buy at a reasonable cost and sellers will sell at a reasonable profit).
So don't just start from saying we don't have any measurement, because we do. Their prices are a measurement, a place to start at least.
Consider this: you wrote in bold that to manage flora or fauna we need to estimate their number, while in fact it is not true at all. I may have talked to you in a way that made you feel like I was describing your work as easy, and for that I am sorry, but let me show you how mine is not quite as you think as well. When we manage wolves in the mountains (the university keeps track of many things), we never even ask ourselves how many wolves are there. We don't need to know, it's just a question that politicians ask because people like knowing numbers, but say I spent the astounding amount of money you need to track down and count every Wolf in a country: 628. Now what? The point is not the number, the point is population dynamics: are there more wolves this year, than before? Are they disappearing? These are the questions that let us know how well this resource is going. They are actually the only thing you need to know, to manage them effectively.
How do we keep track of them? Indexes. You can count how many times they marked the ground in a place. You can check how many dead deer you find. And so on. Most of the work in ecology is trying to figure out which thing you can measure and how well it reflects the actual thing you're monitoring.
Now you understand why I'm trying to figure out how this company is going and I keep telling you we don't really need actual numbers? It's called a black box system.
I'm not interested in how much is X, I just need to know if their X is going up or down, that we can do.
Sure, X is the most important thing if you're part of the company, probably even if you're an investor (but we could argue that they are interested if the arrow is pointing up or down, after all), but X is just a number. It won't tell you alone how the company is doing, to do that you need X and X-1, how was it going last year? What about 2 years ago?
Now, the thing is I chose prices as an index. If they go down often, there is growth (you cut on the single sell and your profit comes from more customers), if they go up often you're under a dry spell (you need to increase your prices to balance your expenses). At the same time if they consistently go down there is recession and if they consistently go up there is growth (but this second behaviour can only act in synchrony with the financial state of clients. If people can afford to pay more we can ask more for a better product, and so on).
Just as we start when we work with fish.
Now, I am fairly sure you may be a much better fisherman in this sea, so if explaining my method did convince you, let's go fishing. I'm sincerely curious about this information now.
Start by what we do have: did I miss anything about prices? Had they ever been lower? Did they lowered the amount of discount offers over time? Are prices significantly bad at telling us if there is growth or recession?
Is there anything else we can measure like the number of players, number of people posting on the forums, number of homebrew spells? Would that give us any idea of the dynamics behind their sales?
Yeah, we're throwing darts in a dark room. But we're not trying to get the best score, we just need to know if there is someone playing or if they are going away. You'll know when you hit them.
P.s: are we really interested in that, other than for personal curiosity?
My suggestion was to establish a subscription offer that lets players rent content for a reasonable price. It's definitely up to DNDbeyond, if they ever consider this offer, to decide which is the reasonable price for them. My numbers were only a rough estimate based on what the mean user might spend on the site, a mean that does indeed include people who get everything, but it also includes a vast majority of people that get much less or nothing at all (can we at least agree on that?).
In this black box we don't know much. We don't know if there is economic growth, we don't know how much they earn from each sell, we don't know how much they sell, we don't know how their licensing agreement works (maybe they have limited keys and need to gather enough profit from each of them, maybe they just pay a percentage on gross sales and call it a day).
At the same time, we know more and more people are getting interest in this wonderful game, more and more people are actively choosing to adopt expensive subscription models out of their own simple indecision and more and more people can find easy access to pirated content nowadays.
All I'm saying is: let them in. If those people help this community grow we'll all benefit from better tools, improved content and possibly even more published manuals.
The only risk is if this model could in some way affect sales negatively, which is something that, judging by how the community responded, won't probably happen.
You'd rather stick to what you've got, which is wonderful! It means the addition of my system won't change the behaviour of current users. It might simply lure more people in.
WotC actually tried this very thing for 4th edition.
It was a disaster because too many paid for 1 month, copied everything, then just used their copied stuff -- hundreds of dollars worth of content nabbed for free for just a few bucks. It's even more difficult for D&D Beyond, being a third party that has to buy licenses to give you access.
Let's say D&D Beyond paid out $600 you give you licenses so you could get this prime sub for $10 per month. This means it will take 60 months, or 5 years, just to break even. And what if you cancel your sub before then? Either they lock you in a 5-year contract as a minimum (which almost nobody will ever take) or risk the huge losses.
And that's one person. 10 people sign up? That's $6,000 D&D Beyond has to pay up front to give access, with years to wait to break even and huge risk of loss.
There is no possible way for this to be financially sustainable.
This model just doesn't work for this set-up.
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But DNDbeyond is not the same as 4th edition manuals. They state it clearly many times: it's a tool. It helps you build characters, it works as a wiki, bringing up rules as you play... It's not something you can simply copy and paste, they're not selling pdfs like DMsguild.
If you stopped using DNDbeyond and switched to the content you grabbed, you'd be at the very same place where people who got the book in any other way would be.
Why do you think people buy twice the same book, hardcover and beyond? It's because they're two different things, and Beyond is something that cannot be copied because it works as a whole. It's the servers. It's the community. It's the search engine. It's the builders.
So no, I definitely do not think people would just subscribe for one month and then play offline with what they've got. What even is the point in buying stuff here then? Get a book or a pdf if you wanna do that. There are cheaper and easier options already for that.
Plus, can someone show me where they state their licensing system works by putting a fee on specific content purchased instead of putting the fee on sales?
Because you all talk by assuming that if X items are shown, Beyond has to pay wizards Y. What if instead the deal was that if X is earned, Beyond pays wizards Y? In this scenario (which I find more plausible since they also sell single modules from each book separately) they are not paying upfront 600 bucks for each subscriber. They are paying WoTC a % of each monthly earning. You know why I think this is more probably the case? Because they never sold out keys, from what I know. What are the odds?
Then again, maybe I'm wrong and for some reason each digital key has been sold separately by WoTC to DNDbeyond, but can you please share evidence about this instead of giving it as obvious truth?
except you can go through all of the rules if you wanted and copy-paste right off the website, cancel your subscription, then go in and add everything you copied back as homebrew using the existing tools with the *single* exception of the Artificer base class in this situation. Is it worth it for all of the monsters? probably not. But character options? People have done more for less.
Formerly Devan Avalon.
Trying to get your physical content on Beyond is like going to Microsoft and saying "I have a physical Playstation disk, give me a digital Xbox version!"
You misunderstand.
WotC, somebody who doesn't have to buy licenses to grant content, had a toolset and compendium just like D&D Beyond. You had a character sheet that could add stuff you unlocked if you bought the books digitally. The only difference was you could not homebrew and it was a monthly sub to unlocked everything, like your prime sub idea.
And it failed, for reasons I have said.
D&D Beyond isn't just a toolset, btw, you do get a digital version of the books, ("the compendium"), which you could easily copy.
I have no idea why you're mentioning DMs Guild, which has nothing to do with anything I have said in any way shape or form.
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Just because you can grab it somewhere else for free means that the company needs to give it away almost for free?
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I mentioned DMsguild because their system would allow for the scenario you cited. DNDbeyond's fundamental role is the toolset, not the compendium. You can tell by the way they are implementing features that pimp that part of the site, like premium dice.
If 4th edition compendium didn't work it's for two reasons: 1) people didn't care about the tools more than they cared about the rules and 2)4th edition is a mess anyway.
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I don't see this site losing revenue even if this rogue behaviour of stealing books increased to be honest.
This is not a book. It's a tool.
No, this is an online DnD bookstore that just happens to make tools you can use with the books you purchase from the site.
That is not how you analyze a company's financial health. That just is not how it works. Just because prices fall over time does not mean the company is doing well. Similarly, just because prices rise over time does not mean a company is doing poorly. Product prices are not an index that indicates anything about a company's financial health.
Falling price could be a potential signal a company is doing poorly and it is attempting a last ditch effort to get attention and generate sales to save the business, or it could potentially indicate the company is doing well and is trying to price out its competitors. Similarly, rising prices could mean the company is having trouble keeping its expenses down and needs to pass on rising costs to consumers, or it could also mean the company is doing really well and the company can to raise prices while selling a similar quantity of products to generate even more revenue.
With no other information to go on, looking at product prices alone is utterly meaningless.
If you want to judge a company solely on the price of something, product price is not the place to look at, you want to look at the stock price of the company. Beyond is not a publicly traded company, so there is no way to judge Beyond's financial situation that way either. Stock price alone definitely is not an accurate index of judging a company's financial health either.
No, that is not how market research is done. You do not assume what the average user might spend on the site and how they will spend it. In this case, you actually have to go out there and fish for that information. I am not a marketer, so I cannot comment on the details or the exact way it is done. With my limited knowledge of that field, I know that one way to conduct market research is through surveys. It can be done physically knocking on people's doors or through online surveys. For an example of a market research survey, I remember participating in LEGO's online surveys years ago, and I was asked to provide feedback on the perceived difficulty of a potential LEGO set based on image alone, what age range do I think the set attracts, what price range should it cost, and I believe there was a fourth criteria but I forgot what it was.
For Beyond, if they want to do market research to determine whether subscription that unlocks content is viable, they need to actually go out there and do research. If I am the chief marketing officer and got the authority and resources to do so, I would probably do something like send out surveys to my target market, and then use the information I gathered to launch a trial period for content subscription. Depending on how the trial goes, then I will determine whether it is a good idea to launch the product to a wider audience.
What Beyond should NOT do is launch content subscriptions assuming people will just pay for it without doing proper market research beforehand. And before they even think about doing market research, they should consult with Wizards to work things out first. Market research is expensive, and there is no point in going further into that idea if Wizards says no.
It is one thing to ask for content subscription, but it is a different thing to make claims about price points, sales volume, and profitability of content subscription without doing market research, and it is most definitely an entirely different thing to make claims about Beyond's financial health without looking at their financial documents first.
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Allright, that's fine. Let's agree that we do not know yet how well this would effect them.
I just think it would happen. It's a theory.
Thus I'm here putting the card in the suggestion box. Now, regardless of what anyone of us concludes, I am fairly sure that this discussion has been up in the forums long enough until those that truly needed to read the suggestion did that. I'm fine with that.
I am fairly positive that, in the event they would consider this model, given how often people seem to ask for it, they will proceed with proper research, and you will see a banner somewhere with a bunch of questions, very much like the ones we were given a couple of weeks ago.
Or probably not just on this site, as you might probably notice the model I'm talking about is not a product for current users, but for new ones that do not already take part in the community because they don't like DNDbeyond current model.
I mean, look at the poll... less than 5% or participants said they would switch to the subscription anyway. Yeah, it's not a representative sample, but it tells you something already. What is the potential loss? Less sales? How? Would you buy less if this system you don't like simply appeared for someone else to enjoy?
The fear here is that people would stop buying at full price and switch to subscription, yet pretty much none of you showed interest in that. What is it that makes it so wrong in your eyes?
The only reasonable argument is if you assume they have to pay full price at WoTC for the entire library for each subscriber, which honestly does not make much sense. This is not a retail shop, it's digital content they sell. And this would be called renting anyway. If the agreement (which is private so we don't know it and we have no right in requesting to know it) is on the other hand that WoTC simply takes a part of the revenue on sales, then that first investment wouldn't be there at all.
And the second scenario is even more likely, since they offer you content a la carte, something that could not happen with a single license for an entire book. How would that work? They spend $30 on a book so that you can give them $1,50 to just get the class you like?
The entire point in debating finances is simply to estimate what would be the price of this offer. Take it or leave it. It won't change much, in the end.