Watching Sigil and Maps develop, side by side, made me very skeptical. Having two products "compete" for a captured audience made no business sense. They cannibalize each other and increase costs without really leaning into more revenue. Sure, you could argue that it's two revenue streams, each targeting a different core customer - but... the market opportunity didn't feel big enough from the first mention.
In the last year, Maps went through a LOT of rapid advances and feature gains. As recent as last month for me, Sigil felt like anything but a D&D tool for me as a DM and my players.
You don't spend like a drunken sailor in port after months at sea if you are running a smart business. In this case, you pick a winner and put the focus on that. I'd sunset Sigil and redirect the staff that's still there onto Maps.
That's why it's good news to me. Cutting losses protects the rest of the business vs. Sigil being a drag.
Yeah, having two VTT competing with each other seemed strange to me.
Another copy and paste, sadly I don't have the source as I scraped it from another site with no source given other than "discord" not even the name of the dev, but it is positive and I thought it worth sharing.
"Here is what one Dev just posted on Discord:
As mentioned before, Sigil is not shutting down. I just now have more work to do. Hopefully with less meetings I can actually get more work done"
Not to derail, just thinking on the actual layoffs, I wish they had kept a handful of those people and dedicated them to improving the truly awful search feature on the main site.
I’ll be honest, I am not really sure who Sigil is for - and I am not really sure Wizards is either. They clearly put a lot of effort into making the potentially most visually appealing VTT out there… and, in the process… made a VTT that can only run on computers with dedicated gaming graphics cards. Sure, you don’t need the best graphics card to run it, but the integrated cards on most folks’ computers simply are not up to snuff and will suffer extreme performance issues.
Just looking at my own online playgroup (we presently use an overhead camera and miniatures, but when this campaign ends, someone else volunteered to DM and was interested in Sigil), we have two players who play on their dedicated gaming computers, one who owns a dedicated gaming desktop, but would want to play on their non-gaming laptop for comfort and convenience sake, and two players who I believe would be shut out completely from playing, since they don’t use or have need for a gaming computer.
Recognizing that is anecdotal, it still illustrates Sigil’s problem. Sigil was not designed to go after the VTT community - a community large enough that Wizards could make a splash here, particularly if they released a superior product. Instead, it put further technological constraints, further reducing the potential user base.
And, by the nature of D&D, one member of a party being excluded means the entire party is going to turn elsewhere. Two of our five members cannot use it - that doesn’t mean Wizards misses out on two customers, it means it misses out on all five of us.
For those who would use it, fingers crossed this is normal staff reduction when digital products near their release date, and not the first signs of the system dying. But, for my own purposes, and the purposes of my online group, the state it is in right now is completely unusable for our way of playing - and I am not sure that can be fixed with just a maintenance and support sized team.
This whole thing has been bizarre. I had no idea it was "live" at all. I didn't see any announcement or anything, and I didn't even know how to find it (it's under "Tools," which, sure? But like put a banner or something!). I guess they wouldn't have kept the full team regardless, but it really feels like they've already cut the cord on this project.
I’ll be honest, I am not really sure who Sigil is for - and I am not really sure Wizards is either. They clearly put a lot of effort into making the potentially most visually appealing VTT out there… and, in the process… made a VTT that can only run on computers with dedicated gaming graphics cards. Sure, you don’t need the best graphics card to run it, but the integrated cards on most folks’ computers simply are not up to snuff and will suffer extreme performance issues.
Just looking at my own online playgroup (we presently use an overhead camera and miniatures, but when this campaign ends, someone else volunteered to DM and was interested in Sigil), we have two players who play on their dedicated gaming computers, one who owns a dedicated gaming desktop, but would want to play on their non-gaming laptop for comfort and convenience sake, and two players who I believe would be shut out completely from playing, since they don’t use or have need for a gaming computer.
Recognizing that is anecdotal, it still illustrates Sigil’s problem. Sigil was not designed to go after the VTT community - a community large enough that Wizards could make a splash here, particularly if they released a superior product. Instead, it put further technological constraints, further reducing the potential user base.
And, by the nature of D&D, one member of a party being excluded means the entire party is going to turn elsewhere. Two of our five members cannot use it - that doesn’t mean Wizards misses out on two customers, it means it misses out on all five of us.
For those who would use it, fingers crossed this is normal staff reduction when digital products near their release date, and not the first signs of the system dying. But, for my own purposes, and the purposes of my online group, the state it is in right now is completely unusable for our way of playing - and I am not sure that can be fixed with just a maintenance and support sized team.
If I were to guess, I would say it is largely intended for the younger, Dimension 20 viewers, which used a mix of physical maps and TaleSpire. A smaller population, but one that is also more technologically inclined, with generally fewer demands on their income (house, children, etc).
Another copy and paste, sadly I don't have the source as I scraped it from another site with no source given other than "discord" not even the name of the dev, but it is positive and I thought it worth sharing.
"Here is what one Dev just posted on Discord:
As mentioned before, Sigil is not shutting down. I just now have more work to do. Hopefully with less meetings I can actually get more work done"
To this same dev: Why were personnel not redirected to fix DNDBeyond's numerous coding issues/make said coding more flexible/compatible with more broad content/finish all pre-buyout promises?
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.
Not to derail, just thinking on the actual layoffs, I wish they had kept a handful of those people and dedicated them to improving the truly awful search feature on the main site.
Given how different products they are, it's unlikely that switching staff would produce results significantly better than just hiring new. You can, of course, still complain about them not putting more into making DDB better, but other than competing for budget, it doesn't have much to do with Sigil.
I'll start by saying Sigil does make business sense to create. Maps works as a no-frills, Owlbear Rodeo type deal that just gives you and your friends a fast way to pick up and play that shiny new module you just bought, and in fact it works better than OR because you don't have to host any assets locally or download any maps/tokens/modules of your own. But the monetization opportunities for the platform are slim. Sigil meanwhile can have an entire store full of minis, animations, 3D renders of those cool dice DDB keeps giving away and so on.
But by the same token, I agree with Caerwyn that a platform that needs an entire gaming rig to run is not the best fit for tabletop D&D. Even those of us who want digital D&D in the first place want to be able to do it with phones and tablets and netbooks, and with Sigil that just isn't an option. Sigil's minimum requirements are only slightly lower than those for Baldur's Gate 3! They should have continued to optimize it until being able to run on mobile was an option; I'm pretty sure all the assets are stored on the server anyway. And it's not like the minis have thousands of animations each either.
Reading some of the information that is coming out right now about Sigil, it's quite clear that there were a number of major missteps leading up to this release. The first and most obvious one is that the amount of people from the D&D community that play D&D online at all, is already a fraction of the game's audience. That is further reduced by the amount of people who pay for and use DnDBeyond which is then further reduced by the amount of people who care to make preparing to play D&D this massive undertaking of building 3d environments.
You don't have to look further than Talespire to understand how small the actual market is for this sort of thing. The average user base for Talespire based on Steam statistics is about 300 people per month. Grant it you can imagine the number of potential users who might consider it from the D&D community given the DnDBeyond integration is certainly going to be larger than that, but what can you really expect?
The next few weeks are going to be interesting to see how WotC handles this latest setback.
Curious, might check out sigil later since the tool doesn't seem to be labelled as "beta" anymore and if it's no longer in a "beta" phase then I assume it's somewhat stable and finished.
Could the people of been let go due to completing what they were hired to do??
It’s an interesting read, particularly about the internal arguments between the Sigil developers and DDB. Reminds me of rumours a couple of years ago that WotC VP of Digital Chris Cao wasn’t happy with the DDB acquisition and really hated the platform. His background was in computer gaming not TTRPG so I wonder if that’s the reason for some of the aimlessness there feels like there’s been with Sigil and whether his grudge, if true, led to the DDB clashes
It’s an interesting read, particularly about the internal arguments between the Sigil developers and DDB. Reminds me of rumours a couple of years ago that WotC VP of Digital Chris Cao wasn’t happy with the DDB acquisition and really hated the platform. His background was in computer gaming not TTRPG so I wonder if that’s the reason for some of the aimlessness there feels like there’s been with Sigil and whether his grudge, if true, led to the DDB clashes
Project Sigil always looked like the overly ambitious project of someone who's more a video game developer than a TTRPG developer, and the stealth launch last month was obviously a mess, so I can't say I'm surprised that it failed. At this point I think the main question is whether there's anything worth salvaging. Do people who have actually tried it out think there's some good stuff there? My guess, if there's anything, is that some of its tools can be used to produce STLs that there might be a real (if fairly small) market for.
A lot if it was its execution- I got into the closed beta and after some issues got it launched- and it barely ran on my computer. I have a 3080 graphics card.
It's ok...not entirely sure it was particularly needed. It wasn't working particularly well and, to be honest, the increased graphics (being 3d) gave me the feel that it would be much harder to set up. On Roll20, I could just find a map, set up the walls etc (if I wanted to)and I'm done. With this, it was more like setting up terrain for my minis on a real table...a lot more finicky and laborious.
I'm a bit dubious in part because I've always felt that graphics beyond simple and representative start to distract from the game itself, so maybe I'm a bit too critical of it.
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.
Curious, might check out sigil later since the tool doesn't seem to be labelled as "beta" anymore and if it's no longer in a "beta" phase then I assume it's somewhat stable and finished.
Could the people of been let go due to completing what they were hired to do??
I used Talespire for the better part of a year so I had a point of reference when I tried Sigil, but I have to second what was already said. The tool was not usable to run a game session. It was full of incomplete features and half-implemented 3d assets, there were just way too many elements missing to be functional as a VTT.
It's not unusual to let a large chunk of the dev team go when a product reaches completion and goes into a kind of standard operating model, but given the nature of the lay-off this looks to be more of a general cancellation of the product. From the first-hand accounts, it sounds like they are going to try to salvage some of what they made and recoup some of their costs and I guess we'll find out at some point in the future what that entails. From the looks of it though, Sigil is not going to be a thing.
Maybe "ai" is finishing the project up, and that is how wotc is using "ai" for D&D!
Yeah, having two VTT competing with each other seemed strange to me.
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
Another copy and paste, sadly I don't have the source as I scraped it from another site with no source given other than "discord" not even the name of the dev, but it is positive and I thought it worth sharing.
"Here is what one Dev just posted on Discord:
As mentioned before, Sigil is not shutting down. I just now have more work to do. Hopefully with less meetings I can actually get more work done"
Not to derail, just thinking on the actual layoffs, I wish they had kept a handful of those people and dedicated them to improving the truly awful search feature on the main site.
I’ll be honest, I am not really sure who Sigil is for - and I am not really sure Wizards is either. They clearly put a lot of effort into making the potentially most visually appealing VTT out there… and, in the process… made a VTT that can only run on computers with dedicated gaming graphics cards. Sure, you don’t need the best graphics card to run it, but the integrated cards on most folks’ computers simply are not up to snuff and will suffer extreme performance issues.
Just looking at my own online playgroup (we presently use an overhead camera and miniatures, but when this campaign ends, someone else volunteered to DM and was interested in Sigil), we have two players who play on their dedicated gaming computers, one who owns a dedicated gaming desktop, but would want to play on their non-gaming laptop for comfort and convenience sake, and two players who I believe would be shut out completely from playing, since they don’t use or have need for a gaming computer.
Recognizing that is anecdotal, it still illustrates Sigil’s problem. Sigil was not designed to go after the VTT community - a community large enough that Wizards could make a splash here, particularly if they released a superior product. Instead, it put further technological constraints, further reducing the potential user base.
And, by the nature of D&D, one member of a party being excluded means the entire party is going to turn elsewhere. Two of our five members cannot use it - that doesn’t mean Wizards misses out on two customers, it means it misses out on all five of us.
For those who would use it, fingers crossed this is normal staff reduction when digital products near their release date, and not the first signs of the system dying. But, for my own purposes, and the purposes of my online group, the state it is in right now is completely unusable for our way of playing - and I am not sure that can be fixed with just a maintenance and support sized team.
This whole thing has been bizarre. I had no idea it was "live" at all. I didn't see any announcement or anything, and I didn't even know how to find it (it's under "Tools," which, sure? But like put a banner or something!). I guess they wouldn't have kept the full team regardless, but it really feels like they've already cut the cord on this project.
If I were to guess, I would say it is largely intended for the younger, Dimension 20 viewers, which used a mix of physical maps and TaleSpire. A smaller population, but one that is also more technologically inclined, with generally fewer demands on their income (house, children, etc).
DM mostly, Player occasionally | Session 0 form | He/Him/They/Them
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To this same dev:
Why were personnel not redirected to fix DNDBeyond's numerous coding issues/make said coding more flexible/compatible with more broad content/finish all pre-buyout promises?
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.
Given how different products they are, it's unlikely that switching staff would produce results significantly better than just hiring new. You can, of course, still complain about them not putting more into making DDB better, but other than competing for budget, it doesn't have much to do with Sigil.
I'll start by saying Sigil does make business sense to create. Maps works as a no-frills, Owlbear Rodeo type deal that just gives you and your friends a fast way to pick up and play that shiny new module you just bought, and in fact it works better than OR because you don't have to host any assets locally or download any maps/tokens/modules of your own. But the monetization opportunities for the platform are slim. Sigil meanwhile can have an entire store full of minis, animations, 3D renders of those cool dice DDB keeps giving away and so on.
But by the same token, I agree with Caerwyn that a platform that needs an entire gaming rig to run is not the best fit for tabletop D&D. Even those of us who want digital D&D in the first place want to be able to do it with phones and tablets and netbooks, and with Sigil that just isn't an option. Sigil's minimum requirements are only slightly lower than those for Baldur's Gate 3! They should have continued to optimize it until being able to run on mobile was an option; I'm pretty sure all the assets are stored on the server anyway. And it's not like the minis have thousands of animations each either.
The next few weeks are going to be interesting to see how WotC handles this latest setback.
Curious, might check out sigil later since the tool doesn't seem to be labelled as "beta" anymore and if it's no longer in a "beta" phase then I assume it's somewhat stable and finished.
Could the people of been let go due to completing what they were hired to do??
maybe slighty better article: https://gizmodo.com/dnd-sigil-vtt-canceled-hasbro-wizards-of-the-coast-2000578128
Yeah that one is much better so I deleted mine.
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
It’s an interesting read, particularly about the internal arguments between the Sigil developers and DDB. Reminds me of rumours a couple of years ago that WotC VP of Digital Chris Cao wasn’t happy with the DDB acquisition and really hated the platform. His background was in computer gaming not TTRPG so I wonder if that’s the reason for some of the aimlessness there feels like there’s been with Sigil and whether his grudge, if true, led to the DDB clashes
Project Sigil always looked like the overly ambitious project of someone who's more a video game developer than a TTRPG developer, and the stealth launch last month was obviously a mess, so I can't say I'm surprised that it failed. At this point I think the main question is whether there's anything worth salvaging. Do people who have actually tried it out think there's some good stuff there? My guess, if there's anything, is that some of its tools can be used to produce STLs that there might be a real (if fairly small) market for.
A lot if it was its execution- I got into the closed beta and after some issues got it launched- and it barely ran on my computer. I have a 3080 graphics card.
I got frustrated and forgot about it.
It needed to be seamless and easy.
Polygon has what they claim is the layoff email (from a SVP, not unnamed sources), and it looks believable.
https://www.polygon.com/dnd-dungeons-dragons/542716/wizards-sigil-vtt-layoffs
It's ok...not entirely sure it was particularly needed. It wasn't working particularly well and, to be honest, the increased graphics (being 3d) gave me the feel that it would be much harder to set up. On Roll20, I could just find a map, set up the walls etc (if I wanted to)and I'm done. With this, it was more like setting up terrain for my minis on a real table...a lot more finicky and laborious.
I'm a bit dubious in part because I've always felt that graphics beyond simple and representative start to distract from the game itself, so maybe I'm a bit too critical of it.
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.
I used Talespire for the better part of a year so I had a point of reference when I tried Sigil, but I have to second what was already said. The tool was not usable to run a game session. It was full of incomplete features and half-implemented 3d assets, there were just way too many elements missing to be functional as a VTT.
It's not unusual to let a large chunk of the dev team go when a product reaches completion and goes into a kind of standard operating model, but given the nature of the lay-off this looks to be more of a general cancellation of the product. From the first-hand accounts, it sounds like they are going to try to salvage some of what they made and recoup some of their costs and I guess we'll find out at some point in the future what that entails. From the looks of it though, Sigil is not going to be a thing.