"We are Wizards of the Coast. Existence, as you know it, is over. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Resistance is futile." RIP E. Gary....

OMG OMG OMG OMG!!!!! Imagine if now WOTC can put QR codes in their books, so that you can scan it and get the book on dnd beyond!!!!!! The only argument I’ve heard against it was that they don’t work in conjunction, but now they do!!!!

this!!! this is what we all want to know

Quote from SordidEuphemism >>

Does this mean we'll see hardcovers with discount codes for the online books? It'd go a long way!

 Maybe.

I feel like that even though that is a possibility it won't happen.

Another argument is DDBeyond has workers that need get paid too..   

Does this mean we could eventually claim IRL books online instead of having to buy them twice?

Time for Beyond to enter the VTT market......

Oh shit. Now were tking. Because now that both beyond and wotc are 1 company we might get package deals like never before.

It also means faster development of products since you are now part of the loop and will get info way ahead of time. Thats awesome news not just for beyond but for us consumers as well !!! This means wotc is ready to make the big jump into digital domain.

Congratulation !!!

Quote from _mrfuller82003_ >>

WOTC just paid out $146 million and took on DDB's 80 employees. After doing this, you guys think that Hasbro (a FOR PROFIT company) will now start giving away all of the digital content for free? LOL.  

It's not about "giving away all of the digital for free"; giving new owners of physical books unlock or discount codes is about goodwill, and getting them onto a digital platform where it's even easier to buy more existing and new content, as well as getting them to subscribe.

I can only speak from personal experience, but I own six physical D&D books; I've only repurchased three of those (Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide and Xanathar's Guide to Everything) and did that during a black friday sale (after already buying basics like sub-classes, spells etc.). I've digitally bought a further 9 full books by this point, more than I'd ever have bought physically. And I've done that because it gives my group's DMs access to monsters for the encounter builder, it gives the group access to spells on their character sheets and so-on.

It's a whole extra marketplace, and it'll be easier to get physical book owners onto it by enticing them rather than making them feel like they're being fleeced for something they already own, which has been a problem with DDB since its creation.

And looking towards the future, it's about getting them access to things that you don't have outside of DDB. There's very clearly progress being made towards developing a full virtual tabletop type system for running games online, which means added value for subscribers, who are monthly revenue (not merely book sales). There's plenty of value in that, especially if WotC can get more of a focus on development work going forward (as a lot of it has felt sluggish recently).

Phenomenal news! Can't wait to see how much D&D Beyond is going to develop from here on out. Though I don't think it's likely that the physical books will contain a code that will allow you to acquire the equivalent digital content for free.

It's more likely that you might unlock bonus content, like specific dice sets, backgrounds, character sheet themes, a discount or maybe even bonus content (similar to what DMs Guild Adept publishes).

What I'm more interested in, is what this means for WotC going forward. There have been rumors that they're tinkering with an own digital TTRPG-platform (akin to Roll20) for a while. Because at this point if you want to play an official adventure on R20 (or other platforms), you have to purchase the adventure there in order to gain access to maps, tokens and the like. I think WotC might want to tap into that.

It could also be that buying D&D Beyond content (since it is now part of WotC) will provide you with discounts to buy the equivalent physical publications. I honestly think this is more likely since these "coupons" cannot be stolen from the physical books – though I could be wrong.

I could see WotC "abandoning" the DM's Guild Adept content to instead publish exclusive digital content for D&D Beyond instead. Additional adventures, creatures, items, potentially even classes and races. I mean they've barely published any Guild Adept content in the last year and it has always been very popular.

All of you who are saying you can't get a digital copy of a tabletop game for free just because you bought the physical copy need to *look up* from D&D once in a while.  A PDF with physical purchase has been common in the industry for 20 years among publishers who actually give a damn about their consumers.

The full rules of Pathfinder and Pathfinder 2nd Edition are both open source, are available completely free online, and have been since the games launched.  Paizo is somehow still in business.

You should value your money more, and expect greater things of the people you give it to.

Congratulations. Hope this works well for all of you, but mostly for The Game. I there is no financial incentive for WOTC to make homebrew functions less functional in order to increase demand for official content. 

It's not a PDF, its all the development time and money that goes into enacting the changes that book includes into the platform.  This includes every new item, monster, map, race, subclass and sometimes some completely new ways that the platform has to behave (which is why some items in the books were never delivered fully on the platform).  

I'm in the camp that would consider it nice to get a discount code for Beyond when buying a physical book because the physical books dont serve a purpose in our group anymore other than that they're just fun to have.  However, I don't think it's reasonable to think we can spend the same amount and get two books because there was completely unique effort and cost to produce both.

Quote from DragonbornDM23 >>

OMG OMG OMG OMG!!!!! Imagine if now WOTC can put QR codes in their books, so that you can scan it and get the book on dnd beyond!!!!!! The only argument I’ve heard against it was that they don’t work in conjunction, but now they do!!!!

 Not without raising the prices.  The hardcover price gets you a hardcover.  The digital content requires a separate purchase to pay all the people writing code, web development, whatever else.  I don't know anything about that stuff but I know that it's not done cheaply.  Maybe it will be cheaper than buying both separately before but there's no way they can afford to give you both for the price of one.

Maybe now we well get TONS of the content that WotC has as official adventures, and rule books. for example The Young Adventures Collection, or the monsters we don't have access to like The False hydra, or someof the gods like Vecna, or Loth?

Fantastic news! Congrats guys, looking forward to what the future has in store for DnD... Beyond!

Hopefully now we finally get free or deeply discounted digital unlocks for the physical books we purchase going forward.

I think some people are really setting themselves up for disappointment, especially those who hope to get the digital version of books they already purchased. People who are hoping to get the digital version for free should temper their expectations now.

This is something that would really only work with like a kindle version or a pdf version (which both seem unlikely). When you are paying for a book on Beyond you aren't just paying for the book but the site integration and all of the tools that come with it. WOTC is a business, and they are not just going to start handing out free copies for a product just because you claim to have purchased the physical version.

What will likely occur is that physical purchases will now include a one-time use coupon for a digital copy on the site.

Or, even more logically, that the integration be included in a recurring membership fee. This is the point I (and many others) have tried to make before that some people couldn't wrap their heads around. Producing a digital copy of a book that already exists is a negligible, one-time expense, as is making it searchable and cross-linking to other content. Incorporating it into an integrated, digital toolset with other content and tools is cool - and definitely not a negligible, one-time expense - but it also shouldn't mean paying for the books all over again. Since that toolset requires consistent maintenance and updating, it makes sense that it would be included in membership fees. People who already bought the books should just have access to the digital copies for purposes of utilizing the site, and regardless of whether you bought the books or not, you should pay for the tools on the site, since that is what drives site operating costs.

The acquisition may indeed be good news - Hopefully WoC/Hasbro recognizes the real value proposition and fixes this mismatch issue, instead of continuing the site as it is now - basically a marketing funnel to encourage new users to buy overpriced digital texts. It's pretty transparent - when you search for something, it doesn't even prioritize results from content that is free or already owned, but instead the top results are often content from sources you would have to buy in order to gain access, even though there are many relevant results in your library. If the tools were truly focused on utility, they would eliminate references that require additional purchases from the main entry, and consolidate them at the end of the entry in a "Want even more? Check this out!" sort of fashion. That would be a toolset first, and a content marketing engine second, which would potentially make the site useful to experienced players, rather than an overpriced e-bookstore for newbies.

Shall we take bets on how long it takes someone with 5-digits+ of forum posts and no life offline to jump in on this comment to explain to me how wrong I am, how magical the site is, and why the team should be paid for aggressively marketing e-books rather than building and maintaining excellent digital toolsets? X-D I'm more than happy to pay for the second, but they really want to force you to pay for the first... as many have noted before, your membership money basically goes nowhere without re-buying content at prices beyond the print versions.

NICE! But does this mean we can now expect an access code in the physical copy to use with DDB? That would be the dream!