Fantasy Grounds and One D&D - predictions for the future
Hey friends, I wanted to take a bit of time to think over my response to this and to post something here. There were a lot of new announcements to unpack with Wizards Presents. Some of them are good for our business and others may present a few challenges. It is my job to navigate those in a way that satisfies our customers, offers something unique, and allows the business to continue and even grow.
1. One D&D - the new version of D&D
This will supposedly be backward compatible with existing 5th edition content. In addition, there are playtest materials that are available to the public. We will need to look at these on a case-by-case basis to see to what degree we will implement these playtest features. Will they be campaign options? Will we wait until closer to release? It is all still unknown at this time, but we have some experience with D&D Next and the eventual transition to the final form of D&D fifth edition, along with the updates for Tasha's, Monsters of the Multiverse, etc. We think that FGU will be a great platform to help test out playtest material more fully than on any other platform.
2. Release schedule for the rest of 2022 and 2023 and physical product bundling
We are already working on the Dragonlance content, and we have had that in-house for a while already. It looks very cool, but we won't be able to share much about it, other than we are working on it.
Here is our placeholder for its release scheduled for December 6, 2022.
https://www.fantasygrounds.com/store...=WOTC5EDLSOTDQ
There are numerous other titles in the pipeline as well and we will plan to have these all out and available as soon as we are able to release them. It looks like D&D Beyond's physical bundles that pair with a digital version on D&D Beyond, along with early access to parts of it, will make D&D Beyond the primary place where people will go to get the first copy of these new products. In a direct competitive nature, this means that people deciding between the two will be encouraged to go with DDB instead of FG; however, this may actually help us move more units if this reduces the overall costs for people who buy on multiple platforms already.
The new schedule shows that there are even more D&D titles coming out. As long as we continue to be able to release these, we should be okay. I'm not 100% sure, but I believe that every sale we make for a D&D title produces more revenue for WOTC than a game store, bookstore, or Amazon sale would.
D&D makes up a large part of our offerings, but we have many other licenses.
3. Official D&D VTT releasing some time in 2024
I think the alpha footage they showed looks very slick and I have been monitoring their recent hires for video game developers over the last few years. WOTC has invested a lot of time, energy, and money into that VTT and it looks very nice. We have discussed 3D environments internally and Carl Pinder actually had a VTT in development that had 3D interfaces that were very similar to what was shown in the alpha footage. He brought that with him when he joined the company. The big problem we see with this approach is how can we consistently create and release all the necessary 3D assets to coincide with new product releases. If we received 5 different WOTC releases each year and we had 2-3 months advanced notice of the content for each of those, there would be no way for us to produce those assets in a timely fashion and at a cost that would make it viable financially. If WOTC does it internally, they have a much better chance at being able to do that.
Will people want to play in this 3D VTT space exclusively?
I believe some will and some won't. We have 2D maps with LOS and lighting and if I look at games run on Twitch and YouTube, the vast majority of them just run theater of the mind style games. No matter how good the UI for the WOTC 3D VTT is, I can't imagine it will be any easier to run than a top-down 2D map. I have a slightly different vision for what I think people will want to use. Again, it won't satisfy everyone or even be used by everyone. Our goal is to simply create options and have those options be useable in D&D and all the other games we support.
With that in mind, here is an early peek at what we are envisioning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bDE76MMZ7o