D&D acquires D&D Beyond

Hasbro / Wizards of the Coast, makers of Dungeons & Dragons, are buying D&D Beyond, a large online D&D digital toolset and library. And the first thing they had to do was a press release that this was not done to shut the site down. Dungeons & Dragons has a terrible history with the internet in general, and digital D&D toolsets in particular. For decades the company tried to keep their content off the internet, for fear of piracy, but of course that only hurt themselves. And repeated attempts to make digital toolsets for various D&D editions were all deeply flawed and frequently abandoned after a short while. It was only with 5th edition that D&D finally seemed to embrace the internet. And that turned out to be a huge success: Videos of people playing D&D on YouTube get millions of viewers, and catapulted D&D back to the top of the pen-and-paper RPG market, having previously lost that spot to Pathfinder.

Now, a Dungeons & Dragons game ideally has 4 to 5 players plus a Dungeon Master sitting around a table. Which is a bit of a problem if a pandemic prohibits you from gathering 5 to 6 people around a table. But just like business meetings moved to Teams or Zoom, so did a lot of D&D games move to virtual tabletop platforms like Roll20. Now I use both Roll20 and D&D Beyond. Roll20 to actually play D&D, and D&D Beyond as a database and library for rules, items, monsters, and the like.

But D&D Beyond isn't all that clear about what it actually wants to be. It continues to add features that push it closer towards a virtual tabletop platform, without ever really getting close. You can make character sheets, roll dice, and run a bot on Discord that provides macros that combine the dice rolling with the numbers on the character sheet. But D&D Beyond does not provide the most important part of virtual tabletop platforms: Battle maps and tokens. Yes, if you are running a "theater of the mind" style of D&D game and combine D&D Beyond with Discord, you can make that work somehow. But that is still a long shot from full virtual tabletop programs like Roll20, Fantasy Grounds, or Foundry.

So I am wondering what Wizards of the Coast wants to do with D&D Beyond. Just keep it as it is? Or turn it into a full VTT software? Given their track record, I am not overly hopeful.