In general the options are competing with custom build RPG VTTs like Talespire, and competing with something general purpose like Tabletop Simulator. The first would be better for D&D, the second would have general utility for all of Hasbro's games. Both would be hard but not impossible -- I wouldn't give them no chance of succeeding, but I also wouldn't give them a high chance. It sounds like the Sigil team wasn't entirely sure which lane they were actually taking, which wouldn't have helped either path.
A fully flushed out level builder, integration with the site for official content, the ability to run any ruleset I want via homebrew, custom stat blocks if desired for homebrew, custom model builder for PCs/NPCs, and the ability to run on a server so players could access the game from any device. Anything less and there are already better options available.
I don't expect nor foresee Wizbro allowing or enabling "any rule set" on this site, Heck they won't even fix things that make using their rule set work on the site. Sigil seems cool if you have the hardware to run it, but with them giving away things that could be monetized coupled with the subtle release and dumping 90% of the devs the writing is on the wall for Sigil, and DDB is getting so convoluted to use that it is not the new player onboarding tool it once was. All of this leave the D&D official digital (DDB) experience lacking in many of the areas it excelled at just before Wizbro bought it. DDB was far from perfect pre Wizbro, but now in most cases it is just as easy if not easier (especially in the long run if the player stays at the table) to onboard them with physical books, a pencil and a decent character sheet. The marketing department has ruined the character generation tools in the sense of onboarding new users to D&D.
Just out of curiosity, what would we have considered a successful launch? And what would we have wanted as D&D fans
If it had:
- implemented all the 2024 rules - have all the 2024 monsters as minis - directly sync from the game to dndbeyond and back - enough assets to create a myriad of adventures
The reality, it is really missing a ton of features, like a massive ton of features, to be a viable product. I don't even think they had the right team working on it. Pretty sure I could have 3 developers and have built what they produced in 1 year. The speed they were going it would be years before it was finished.
Judging by the number of people on the Discord, there is absolutely no interest, wrong product, wrong decade.
I don't expect nor foresee Wizbro allowing or enabling "any rule set" on this site,
I’d actually heard the opposite. They were going to make sigil rules neutral. For one, they’d gotten feedback that the more tightly they tied it to the RAW, the less people liked it. Considering that pretty much every table has house rules, they found people wanted flexibility more than automation. And then they realized if it is rules neutral, and you’re just building, basically, a digital dwarven forge, that could make it attractive to pathfinder and other game systems. Selling access to people who don’t even play D&D. Could be (pure speculation here on my part) that was one of the internal conflicts they were having.
One thing that I don't think WotC and customers would have seen eye-to-eye is cost. To really compete, I think it would have to have been freemium. The basics are free, then you spend money to get extras, like you do on Roll20. I felt the entire time that WotC was going to expect a rather hefty subscription in order to play it (either a costly sub for the DM like a Super-Master Tier or cheaper ones from every player). I don't see them making such powerful graphics engine, especially with Maps being run, and not asking for that.
The problem is that I think customers would prefer free/cheaper and be happy with the lower graphics. There's a reason why Roll20 is pretty much dominant compared to Foundry.
So in that way, I'm glad they pulled out. At least they didn't sink massive capital into something that was never going to be viable. The only thing is that I wish that instead of going for this boondoggle, they'd invested that money on keeping on some of those laid off staff from a year or so ago and gotten an adventure or two out instead.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
Said it before and I'll say it again: If WotC had been smart they would have forked over like 10 million and just bought Roll20 followed by them tinkering to make the system more stable.
As a bonus they'd get a cut of other company's pies by continuing to host other systems.
Just out of curiosity, what would we have considered a successful launch? And what would we have wanted as D&D fans
Personally would be happy with:
The species found in the 2024 phb (others to be added over time)
More assets and perhaps a pre-built adventure per book purchased (added over time)
Ignore everything from books made before 2024 (work on at later date during spare time)
An unarmed and improvised attack options added to each character (haven't found yet)
An updated sigil clip addressing people's concerns and expectations (there's alot of outdated/misinformation clips out there deterring potential users)
Eventually work on partnerships and support for importing custom assets (rule modules, assets, etc)
Sigil doesn't need to do everything straight out of the gate with all the bells and whistles and could instead be grown over time into quite the formidable vtt.
If they ignored everything prior to 2024 then they would never find time to develop the prior versions for inclusion because they would find excuses not too.
The fact that currently the program barely supports 2024 or 2014 and is not even close to full support means it would be D.O.A. Before it even left Beta if it focused solely on the 2024 rules set.
Wizbro wanted a new BG game but got a VTT that wasn’t going to rake in a billion a year. Project called on accounting going loss till time X, unprofitable.
If they had started small and simple, it had a chance, but gluttony has lead to starvation. Feast well, for the next meal might be nothing more than the scraps of a long dead carcass, beaten to death by neglect and malice.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
" Darkvision doesn’t work in Magical darkness, and if something is magical, Never Trust it acts the same way as a non-magical version of that same thing!”- Discotech Mage over a cup of joe.
Small and simple is less of an option for a major company than an indie, as I believe had already been mentioned. Particularly since they're so late to the VTT field that if they're just doing what places like Roll20 already do, there's little incentive for all the people who already use the existing options to leave their initial investments and move to D&D's offering. They swung for the fences and struck out, which has happened to plenty of software projects before now and will continue to happen to many more down the line.
It's important to realize that just because something failed doesn't mean it wasn't worth trying; we don't know enough about the original pitch to guess how realistic it was.
A new product in the VTT space would need something to distinguish it from competitors, and it's going to be hard to do much to break into the 2d VTT field -- too much established competition, without glaring weaknesses -- so 3d was probably a good choice, though I can imagine a space for 2.5d (isometric). 3d options do exist (talespire, tabletop simulator) but have much more notable weaknesses. At a guess, they got too caught up in adding graphical bells and whistles that people will go "that's cool", use three times, and forget about, rather than focusing on performance and core functionality.
Small and simple is less of an option for a major company than an indie, as I believe had already been mentioned. Particularly since they're so late to the VTT field that if they're just doing what places like Roll20 already do, there's little incentive for all the people who already use the existing options to leave their initial investments and move to D&D's offering. They swung for the fences and struck out, which has happened to plenty of software projects before now and will continue to happen to many more down the line.
Not to mention Roll20 allows you to pick which ruleset you want to use where as here on DDB you have to parse the 24 stuff whether your using it or not .
Not exactly sure what differences would meaningfully impact a VTT there; last I checked it's not like Sigil was supposed to actively run things like status conditions and abstract spell effects, so there'd be what- half a minute to a minute of extra time looking up some text that got changed, less for things like conditions that come up frequently enough people would remember their effects?
Also, I'm not sure why exactly the people who are making a point of not spending further money on D&D are surprised that D&D isn't spending money on them.
DDBeyond was bought for 150Million, and look at what it has become. Sigil reportedly had only 30million invested and is nearly useless to a significant number of the brands base.
Roll20 made more than 20Million just hosting what DDbeyond should be doing, hosting various versions of the different editions of the game, and now sits in a position far better than what we the community have seen from Wizbro and this site since that purchase of the platform.
Sigil would need to be redesigned to allow use by a larger audience, and the lackluster tools within configured to allow adaptive rules customization.
I personally don’t see that happening, and it’s a shame.
The biggest issue with Sigil as I understand it was that on a technical/performance level it was an absolute unit of system requirements; PC's that could happily run BG3 or Doom would absolutely chug trying to operate this VTT and even when you could there was simply too many issues with classes just not working.
The system requirements seem pretty average in my opinion...
The thing with the system requirements is, if one person in the group doesn’t have them, then the whole group will most likely go to a different VTT (as others have observed) rather than cut that person out of the group. So they really need something that can run on a potato.
We haven't seen any major efforts to collect data about player preferences so far as VTT's go that would suggest anything conclusive about what people look for in a VTT. It's not like there is some universal answer that says, "ok if you build a VTT this way, you will capture the bulk of the market".
What we do know is that the range of available VTT goes pretty wide, from stuff like Talespire (Full 3d with little automation), Owl Rodeo (Minimalist), Fantasy Grounds (full automation), and everything in between. Take any VTT, and there is a following with people swearing by it, but all of them have a wide range of features and they aren't all the same.
It's a bit of a murky areas as to what people need and as most VTT's are for different RPG's not just D&D, when you think about it from the perspective of a D&D players needs, the absence of any real hard data is even more pronounced.
There are three ways VTT's do differ on a core level
1. Full automation vs. no automation: The assumption by many here might be that the more automation the better, but there is a lot of pushback on that. Many people prefer to run their online session the same as they run their table games, they don't want automation at all. A tool like Sigil almost forces automation and makes a lot of assumption about "how you play D&D". Again we don't have any numbers on how this splits up the desires of players, but it's certainly something WotC should know and not assume about their player base.
2. Campagin Management vs. No Campaign Management: Its clear from the various types of VTT's available out there that some players want to do all of their campaign creation (story writing, campaign settings etc..) in the tool, while others don't want to take the time to transfer over their creations or "buy" official conversions etc..
3. Prep Time: I think a general consideration is, how much prep time does using a VTT add and I think this should be a big topic of conversation. Preparing a 3d environment is a HUGE effort, speaking from experience using Talespire, it increases how much you have to do before a session considerably. I would argue you at least 6x to 7x times as much effort here beyond what you would normally do. I know Sigil tries to address this but there is no getting around the fact that 3d level building is a time-consuming process.
My point here is that despite all the VTT's we have and so many examples in the different ways they work and are used, there is shockingly little hard data about what the preferences and routines of D&D players and communities specifically are. There is just a lot of assumption and I think a big part of Sigils failure is that it's basically almost entirely based on assumptions like players won't mind building 3d environments or buying them from us? Are you sure about that? My observation is that 99% of DM's do not want to fuss about with a lot of "tool driven" prep. Are you sure people want to do their campaign prep in a VTT? Many people use VTT's as a supplement to their table sessions, playing some games online and some offline so they will want their material printable and accessible in the real world. And don't get me started on automation. It is definitely very misguided to assume that everyone wants their VTT to automate gameplay, there is a lot of evidence out there to the contrary.
For how expensive Sigil is, WotC went into it pretty blind and it shows. From what I can tell the entire tool was designed with little player and DM input.
We haven't seen any major efforts to collect data about player preferences so far as VTT's go that would suggest anything conclusive about what people look for in a VTT. It's not like there is some universal answer that says, "ok if you build a VTT this way, you will capture the bulk of the market".
What we do know is that the range of available VTT goes pretty wide, from stuff like Talespire (Full 3d with little automation), Owl Rodeo (Minimalist), Fantasy Grounds (full automation), and everything in between. Take any VTT, and there is a following with people swearing by it, but all of them have a wide range of features and they aren't all the same.
It's a bit of a murky areas as to what people need and as most VTT's are for different RPG's not just D&D, when you think about it from the perspective of a D&D players needs, the absence of any real hard data is even more pronounced.
There are three ways VTT's do differ on a core level
1. Full automation vs. no automation: The assumption by many here might be that the more automation the better, but there is a lot of pushback on that. Many people prefer to run their online session the same as they run their table games, they don't want automation at all. A tool like Sigil almost forces automation and makes a lot of assumption about "how you play D&D". Again we don't have any numbers on how this splits up the desires of players, but it's certainly something WotC should know and not assume about their player base.
2. Campagin Management vs. No Campaign Management: Its clear from the various types of VTT's available out there that some players want to do all of their campaign creation (story writing, campaign settings etc..) in the tool, while others don't want to take the time to transfer over their creations or "buy" official conversions etc..
3. Prep Time: I think a general consideration is, how much prep time does using a VTT add and I think this should be a big topic of conversation. Preparing a 3d environment is a HUGE effort, speaking from experience using Talespire, it increases how much you have to do before a session considerably. I would argue you at least 6x to 7x times as much effort here beyond what you would normally do. I know Sigil tries to address this but there is no getting around the fact that 3d level building is a time-consuming process.
My point here is that despite all the VTT's we have and so many examples in the different ways they work and are used, there is shockingly little hard data about what the preferences and routines of D&D players and communities specifically are. There is just a lot of assumption and I think a big part of Sigils failure is that it's basically almost entirely based on assumptions like players won't mind building 3d environments or buying them from us? Are you sure about that? My observation is that 99% of DM's do not want to fuss about with a lot of "tool driven" prep. Are you sure people want to do their campaign prep in a VTT? Many people use VTT's as a supplement to their table sessions, playing some games online and some offline so they will want their material printable and accessible in the real world. And don't get me started on automation. It is definitely very misguided to assume that everyone wants their VTT to automate gameplay, there is a lot of evidence out there to the contrary.
For how expensive Sigil is, WotC went into it pretty blind and it shows. From what I can tell the entire tool was designed with little player and DM input.
They went into it with suits in mind rather than the game & the designers of such.
I can't see anyone other than executives, accountants & investors wanting this whole shebang.
Lord knows where all of those allocated funds are going to now that this is all but toast.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
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.
We haven't seen any major efforts to collect data about player preferences so far as VTT's go that would suggest anything conclusive about what people look for in a VTT. It's not like there is some universal answer that says, "ok if you build a VTT this way, you will capture the bulk of the market".
Surveys would probably fail to tell you anyway, as what people think they want and what they'll actually buy are pretty different, but I'm pretty sure the market leader, by a significant margin, is roll20, and its biggest selling point is ease of use (it's otherwise clunky in a whole lot of ways).
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
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In general the options are competing with custom build RPG VTTs like Talespire, and competing with something general purpose like Tabletop Simulator. The first would be better for D&D, the second would have general utility for all of Hasbro's games. Both would be hard but not impossible -- I wouldn't give them no chance of succeeding, but I also wouldn't give them a high chance. It sounds like the Sigil team wasn't entirely sure which lane they were actually taking, which wouldn't have helped either path.
Just out of curiosity, what would we have considered a successful launch? And what would we have wanted as D&D fans
A fully flushed out level builder, integration with the site for official content, the ability to run any ruleset I want via homebrew, custom stat blocks if desired for homebrew, custom model builder for PCs/NPCs, and the ability to run on a server so players could access the game from any device. Anything less and there are already better options available.
I don't expect nor foresee Wizbro allowing or enabling "any rule set" on this site, Heck they won't even fix things that make using their rule set work on the site. Sigil seems cool if you have the hardware to run it, but with them giving away things that could be monetized coupled with the subtle release and dumping 90% of the devs the writing is on the wall for Sigil, and DDB is getting so convoluted to use that it is not the new player onboarding tool it once was. All of this leave the D&D official digital (DDB) experience lacking in many of the areas it excelled at just before Wizbro bought it. DDB was far from perfect pre Wizbro, but now in most cases it is just as easy if not easier (especially in the long run if the player stays at the table) to onboard them with physical books, a pencil and a decent character sheet. The marketing department has ruined the character generation tools in the sense of onboarding new users to D&D.
If it had:
- implemented all the 2024 rules
- have all the 2024 monsters as minis
- directly sync from the game to dndbeyond and back
- enough assets to create a myriad of adventures
The reality, it is really missing a ton of features, like a massive ton of features, to be a viable product.
I don't even think they had the right team working on it. Pretty sure I could have 3 developers and have built what they produced in 1 year.
The speed they were going it would be years before it was finished.
Judging by the number of people on the Discord, there is absolutely no interest, wrong product, wrong decade.
I’d actually heard the opposite. They were going to make sigil rules neutral. For one, they’d gotten feedback that the more tightly they tied it to the RAW, the less people liked it. Considering that pretty much every table has house rules, they found people wanted flexibility more than automation.
And then they realized if it is rules neutral, and you’re just building, basically, a digital dwarven forge, that could make it attractive to pathfinder and other game systems. Selling access to people who don’t even play D&D.
Could be (pure speculation here on my part) that was one of the internal conflicts they were having.
One thing that I don't think WotC and customers would have seen eye-to-eye is cost. To really compete, I think it would have to have been freemium. The basics are free, then you spend money to get extras, like you do on Roll20. I felt the entire time that WotC was going to expect a rather hefty subscription in order to play it (either a costly sub for the DM like a Super-Master Tier or cheaper ones from every player). I don't see them making such powerful graphics engine, especially with Maps being run, and not asking for that.
The problem is that I think customers would prefer free/cheaper and be happy with the lower graphics. There's a reason why Roll20 is pretty much dominant compared to Foundry.
So in that way, I'm glad they pulled out. At least they didn't sink massive capital into something that was never going to be viable. The only thing is that I wish that instead of going for this boondoggle, they'd invested that money on keeping on some of those laid off staff from a year or so ago and gotten an adventure or two out instead.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
Said it before and I'll say it again: If WotC had been smart they would have forked over like 10 million and just bought Roll20 followed by them tinkering to make the system more stable.
As a bonus they'd get a cut of other company's pies by continuing to host other systems.
Personally would be happy with:
Sigil doesn't need to do everything straight out of the gate with all the bells and whistles and could instead be grown over time into quite the formidable vtt.
If they ignored everything prior to 2024 then they would never find time to develop the prior versions for inclusion because they would find excuses not too.
The fact that currently the program barely supports 2024 or 2014 and is not even close to full support means it would be D.O.A. Before it even left Beta if it focused solely on the 2024 rules set.
Wizbro wanted a new BG game but got a VTT that wasn’t going to rake in a billion a year. Project called on accounting going loss till time X, unprofitable.
If they had started small and simple, it had a chance, but gluttony has lead to starvation.
Feast well, for the next meal might be nothing more than the scraps of a long dead carcass, beaten to death by neglect and malice.
" Darkvision doesn’t work in Magical darkness, and if something is magical, Never Trust it acts the same way as a non-magical version of that same thing!”- Discotech Mage over a cup of joe.
Small and simple is less of an option for a major company than an indie, as I believe had already been mentioned. Particularly since they're so late to the VTT field that if they're just doing what places like Roll20 already do, there's little incentive for all the people who already use the existing options to leave their initial investments and move to D&D's offering. They swung for the fences and struck out, which has happened to plenty of software projects before now and will continue to happen to many more down the line.
Unsure if that would be the case..
It's alot easier and quicker to code 1yrs worth of consistent information compared to 10yrs worth with contradicting information - just a thought
It's important to realize that just because something failed doesn't mean it wasn't worth trying; we don't know enough about the original pitch to guess how realistic it was.
A new product in the VTT space would need something to distinguish it from competitors, and it's going to be hard to do much to break into the 2d VTT field -- too much established competition, without glaring weaknesses -- so 3d was probably a good choice, though I can imagine a space for 2.5d (isometric). 3d options do exist (talespire, tabletop simulator) but have much more notable weaknesses. At a guess, they got too caught up in adding graphical bells and whistles that people will go "that's cool", use three times, and forget about, rather than focusing on performance and core functionality.
Not exactly sure what differences would meaningfully impact a VTT there; last I checked it's not like Sigil was supposed to actively run things like status conditions and abstract spell effects, so there'd be what- half a minute to a minute of extra time looking up some text that got changed, less for things like conditions that come up frequently enough people would remember their effects?
Also, I'm not sure why exactly the people who are making a point of not spending further money on D&D are surprised that D&D isn't spending money on them.
The biggest issue with Sigil as I understand it was that on a technical/performance level it was an absolute unit of system requirements; PC's that could happily run BG3 or Doom would absolutely chug trying to operate this VTT and even when you could there was simply too many issues with classes just not working.
The system requirements seem pretty average in my opinion...
The thing with the system requirements is, if one person in the group doesn’t have them, then the whole group will most likely go to a different VTT (as others have observed) rather than cut that person out of the group. So they really need something that can run on a potato.
We haven't seen any major efforts to collect data about player preferences so far as VTT's go that would suggest anything conclusive about what people look for in a VTT. It's not like there is some universal answer that says, "ok if you build a VTT this way, you will capture the bulk of the market".
What we do know is that the range of available VTT goes pretty wide, from stuff like Talespire (Full 3d with little automation), Owl Rodeo (Minimalist), Fantasy Grounds (full automation), and everything in between. Take any VTT, and there is a following with people swearing by it, but all of them have a wide range of features and they aren't all the same.
It's a bit of a murky areas as to what people need and as most VTT's are for different RPG's not just D&D, when you think about it from the perspective of a D&D players needs, the absence of any real hard data is even more pronounced.
There are three ways VTT's do differ on a core level
1. Full automation vs. no automation: The assumption by many here might be that the more automation the better, but there is a lot of pushback on that. Many people prefer to run their online session the same as they run their table games, they don't want automation at all. A tool like Sigil almost forces automation and makes a lot of assumption about "how you play D&D". Again we don't have any numbers on how this splits up the desires of players, but it's certainly something WotC should know and not assume about their player base.
2. Campagin Management vs. No Campaign Management: Its clear from the various types of VTT's available out there that some players want to do all of their campaign creation (story writing, campaign settings etc..) in the tool, while others don't want to take the time to transfer over their creations or "buy" official conversions etc..
3. Prep Time: I think a general consideration is, how much prep time does using a VTT add and I think this should be a big topic of conversation. Preparing a 3d environment is a HUGE effort, speaking from experience using Talespire, it increases how much you have to do before a session considerably. I would argue you at least 6x to 7x times as much effort here beyond what you would normally do. I know Sigil tries to address this but there is no getting around the fact that 3d level building is a time-consuming process.
My point here is that despite all the VTT's we have and so many examples in the different ways they work and are used, there is shockingly little hard data about what the preferences and routines of D&D players and communities specifically are. There is just a lot of assumption and I think a big part of Sigils failure is that it's basically almost entirely based on assumptions like players won't mind building 3d environments or buying them from us? Are you sure about that? My observation is that 99% of DM's do not want to fuss about with a lot of "tool driven" prep. Are you sure people want to do their campaign prep in a VTT? Many people use VTT's as a supplement to their table sessions, playing some games online and some offline so they will want their material printable and accessible in the real world. And don't get me started on automation. It is definitely very misguided to assume that everyone wants their VTT to automate gameplay, there is a lot of evidence out there to the contrary.
For how expensive Sigil is, WotC went into it pretty blind and it shows. From what I can tell the entire tool was designed with little player and DM input.
They went into it with suits in mind rather than the game & the designers of such.
I can't see anyone other than executives, accountants & investors wanting this whole shebang.
Lord knows where all of those allocated funds are going to now that this is all but toast.
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.
Surveys would probably fail to tell you anyway, as what people think they want and what they'll actually buy are pretty different, but I'm pretty sure the market leader, by a significant margin, is roll20, and its biggest selling point is ease of use (it's otherwise clunky in a whole lot of ways).