And then Hasbro / WotC promised a bright new future for D&D. They were going to make another edition of D&D, *not* called 6th edition, and they were going to create the mother of all virtual tabletop programs for that, called Sigil. Instead of having a tabletop software that moved tokens over flat maps, Sigil would be fully 3D, run with the Unreal engine, and provide a spectacular game with 3D miniatures in 3D dungeons and landscapes. So at some point I was thinking that I'll wait for that, and then when a lot of new people would be attracted to D&D by that software, I could find new groups to play with.

Sigil launched this month. The launch was so successful that Hasbro fired 90% of the development team two weeks later and basically abandoned the project, just keeping it on life support as an addon for D&D Beyond. It wasn't just that the software wasn't running very well. It also turned out that Hasbro hadn't had a clue what their customers wanted, and how they played Dungeons & Dragons. D&D is a game of infinite creativity, and every table has its own house rules or homebrew creative additions. But the goal of Hasbro for Sigil was to maximize monetization, which meant that everything cool should be created by Hasbro and then sold to the players for extra money. There is no room for creativity from third parties or players in such a monetization scheme, you can't allow a DM to create something really cool, because you can't charge him for that. As one of the vice presidents of Hasbro announced: "After several months of alpha testing, we’ve concluded that our aspirations for Sigil as a large, standalone game with a distinct monetization path will not be realized. As such, we cannot maintain a large development effort and most of the Sigil team will be separated from the company this week."

The inconveniently named "Dungeons & Dragons—5th Edition, 2024 version" didn't tempt me either. Not just that I don't have a group to play with; but I spent a huge pile of money on the 5th edition, 2014 version, and don't want to buy the whole bunch again, for just some minor changes. Hasbro tried in various ways to make the new edition necessary, for example on their D&D Beyond platform, by creating artificial incompatibilities between the 2014 and 2024 editions. That only led to them losing more customers, forcing them to backpedal. Personally I think that they should have made more changes and done a 6th edition, as their approach of simultaneously keeping the successful 5th edition *and* making people buy all the books again clearly didn't work.

If you look into the history of Dungeons & Dragons from a corporate point of view, you'll find 50 years rich in corporate mismanagement. D&D is a product that was successful *despite* the various companies making it and the various owners, not because of them. 5th edition was particularly successful due to the creativity of third parties, like Critical Role, or Larian Studios with their Baldur's Gate 3. And Hasbro managed to treat all of these creative people so badly, that none of them want to continue working with them. The fundamental truth is that the D&D intellectual property isn't necessary to achieve most of the fun of role-playing, and that excessive IP monetization only kills the product. Right now, the future of D&D doesn't look very bright. And that makes it difficult for people like me to find other new people to play with. It's a negative network effect.

As a result, I don't think there will be many more posts on this blog with the Dungeons & Dragons label. Sorry if you enjoyed those. But I can only write about what I live, and D&D just isn't part of my life anymore. Except for maybe having a look at patch 8 of Baldur's Gate 3, when it comes out.