The TLDR of the drawbacks to the "Wizards could specifically implement some special system for generating codes" suggestion is that it would be messy and unwieldy to implement, and in all likelihood the expenses in setting up and maintaining this would outweigh the additional sales, setting aside the obvious point that it's simply more profitable for them to have the monopoly on physical/digital bundles. And yes, imo they're allowed to make decisions based on that. This is a disposable income industry, I think we can save the righteous outrage over their profit seeking for after we've managed to get the food, housing, medicine, transportation, and power industries tooled to an equitable and enlightened utopian post-capitalism state.

Hint:  You don't actually need the DMG to play or run D&D. There is very little useful in there that you cannot find using by these forums and asking questions.  Saves you 50 Euros.

Quote from The_Ace_of_Rogues >>

Quote from OSR4Ever >>

The problem with DnDBeyond content is that you do not buy anything here, everything you pay for you are renting for an unspecified amount of time and you have absolutely no rights of any kind whatsoever to it.  It's not like you're buying the digital book you can download and keep in a Google Drive, you don't get a PDF of the Players Manual if you bought it here. 

What you buy at DnDBeyond, you do not own.  I find it strange that people make these analogies like "well when you buy a CD, where is my Vinyl cut?".. It's not the same thing.  When you buy DnDBeyond content, you quite literally have acquired absolutely nothing.  You have been granted temporary access to something.  It's like buying CD and then one day, at some point this company is going to come to your house and take back the entire collection you have.

This is why when you buy a physical book, the content on DnDBeyond for that book should be free.  You have already paid for an actual product.  DnDbeyond digital content is not a product, you own nothing, its a rental service.  

There was a reasonable disconnect when DnDBeyond was a third party, but it is now a Wizards of the Coast company.  That excuse is kind of bs today.  

 

 

 
So, let’s address the reality behind this “books last forever, electronic access can be revoked at any time” rhetoric. I’ve had my account for a little over 4 years, had the ‘14 PHB, XGtE, and TCoE for most of that time, along with several others I’ve purchased since. I’ve been in at least 4 campaigns in that period, and spent a lot of time looking through those books. Now, maybe I’m just particularly hard on them, but in my experience 4 years of active duty tends to wear out books, and I’ve got no plans to slow down on D&D anytime soon. On the other hand, every book offered on Beyond remains accessible- even the two they stopped selling, assuming you own them or they’ve been shared with you. The old Core 3 are even still on the marketplace last I knew. It’s all there, with no wear or tear to speak of, and despite the doomsaying of “what if they decide to pull the plug tomorrow”, the reality is that WotC has given every indication that Beyond is a cornerstone of their ongoing business model, and they intend to carry this iteration of D&D forward for the foreseeable future. Call that 5 years conservatively, more likely 10+. And no, this is not just “what they say now”, it’s what the heads of a publicly traded company have openly said to their investors. That’s not a course you change on a whim if you like having capital in the bank.

So, we’re looking at probably another decade of service on our purchases at this point, barring a radical upset to the market/company. Out of curiosity, how many people here have a book that they regularly take down and page through that’s more than a decade old and in good condition? I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess “not many”; paper and glue only hold up so well. Whereas not only has this site held up for a good stretch, but it’s the stated intent of the company to keep the site going for at least that much longer. And, additionally, if you’re really that scared of losing content you paid for, you can take maybe half an hour at the outside to use any browser’s print function to save a PDF copy of that content. By any realistic measurement of the performance we’ve seen and the options available, if you’re actively using your books you can get at least as much of a lifetime from this “rental service” as you will from a hard copy.

       While I see your point, OSR4Ever's intent, I think, based on their username, is also to be able to preserve the integrity of rules. What's the point of paying for content sharing service if that content is now marked as Legacy and therefore is no longer supported by the service itself?  Homebrewing everything is possible, but then we're sinking time into what we presumably already paid to help us SAVE time in the first place.  Main selling point of a subscription for an online digital service is to save time and labor, including being able to access said materials for lower prices (since digital copies of books don't involve shipping costs, they are often cheaper than the physical volumes). But then you wind up spending significantly more time down the line to copy, paste, print, highlight, underline, etc. to get access to Legacy content you already paid for. That's why is they should just make PDFs of Legacy books available for sale. At least then we could use out own PDF-editing programs to markup what we want, when we want without going through the hassle of printing stuff.