There has been a fair bit of coverage, recently, of Wizards of the Coast's launch of the 4th Edition of the Dungeons and Dragons game. I've already had the chance to play my first couple of sessions of it, and the game itself is an imaginative reinvention of the old warhorse. It takes the existing mechanics of the third edition, but builds a smoother, faster, more varied (and more reusable) range of actions upon that mechanic.
The influence of MMOs from the last few years is particularly obvious, with "cooldown" timers on the re-use of actions (from every round to once a day), vastly more frequent use of spells, and language directly borrowed from the online genre: classes are defined as "tanks", "dps", "healer" and so on.
Clearly (and wisely), WotC have looked at the success of Blizzard's World of Warcraft game, and have asked themselves a few questions. One was probably "what are they doing right that has got people pretending to be swordsmen and sorceresses? Another was "how do we get us some of that there cash mountain?"
I think that the redesign has worked, and is as likely as anything at this stage to claw back some of the pen'n'paper market which - after boosts following the launches of Vampire: The Masquerade in the early 90s and D&D 3rd Edition earlier in this decade - has shrunk somewhat.
However, WotC had a further ace up their sleeve: a real humdinger of a feature which signalled a desire to step right into the online marketplace, and one which had substantial potential for revenue growth. And, so far, they are blowing it.
WotC, you see, announced that fourth edition would come with a ragne of online tools to enhance and facilitate gaeplay. Some of these were online versions of rulebooks, magazines, source material and so on. Fair enough, but it's been done. After all, anyone with access to the alt.binaries.ebooks newsgroup can (illegally) download versions of the entirety of the D&D canon, right back to the early 1970s, and for free. The 4th Edition rulebooks were there from before launch and, having already pre-ordered them myself, I felt little compunction about nabbing a sbeak preview for myself.
No, the exciting bit was the virtual gaming table: a suite of tools including "three-dimensional" representations of the players and their opponents, depicted as miniatures and in a rendered version of the environment that the DM had prepared in advance. So you and your friends, who used to play in university, could get together again for some games, using built in voice tools, dice-rolling and online games table to play, despite the fact that you're now living hundreds of miles apart. There was a real buzz after this announcement was made: people were talking about "getting the old gang together for one more job."
So how are WotC blowing it? Well, it's a heady mixture of greed and inexperience.
First off was the pricing. While looking at the online games space, Wizards of the Coast had clearly said to themselves "people pay fifteen bucks a month to play these?" and then gone on to multiply fifteen dollars by a substantial proportion of their millions of players and got the answer "money hats". They seem to have been surprised when they announced their price to their anticipatory playerbase and got the answers "lawl", "wtf?" and "nope". Only louder, and massive length and multiplied by thousands.
The fact is that if I pay fifteen dollars to Blizzard (which I do not) to play World of Warcraft then I get a fully rounded, tested world, with literally hundreds of man-years' worth of content built in already. My fifteen bucks a month to WotC gets me a toolkit to create that content: the right to use their toolkit for a month to do the work myself, and which I will then have to continue to pay for in order to access in future.
Worse than that, the money just allows me as the Dungeon Master to create the stuff. If my group wish to play in the worlds I create then each of them will also have to shell out their own fifteen dollars per month. So the six of us will be paying seventy-five dollars a month, on top of the initial few hundred dollars' worth of investment in the rulebooks, just to use these tools.
And that's not the end of it. If you want to use additional features, such as more digital "miniatures" for the game table, it seems you'll be making smaller, additional payments to unlock each of those. WotC have made the mistake that SOE made, of trying to use micropayment and monthly payment models in the same game space, which leaves people asking "why do I pay for this when I already paid for it?"
Forget the fact that the dollar's parity with the potato on the world currency exchanges makes fifteen dollars cost about as much as a glossy magazine or a couple of video rentals. Forget the fact that what is being offered might actually be pretty fair value: these prices will not work. This is a hobby populated mainly by the young, the impecunious and the penurous. It is also a hobby where the payment model has been, largely, one of paying once for the book and being able to play for free after that, with additional sources also representing occasional investments of capital, not income. Just as Microsoft have failed to convert the consumer market to rental models, so will Wizards of the Coast unless they cut the price massively.
If Wizards want to succeed, they have to accept that they need to charge a minimal subscription of a few dollars a month at the very most: this in itself will be unpopular, but if it is low enough it will be swallowed as a service charge if the tools are good enough. Then, additional features should be capable of being cherry-picked by those that want them: a range of a dozen digital miniatures for two dollars; an online version of a module for nine dollars (but only three or so bucks if the paper version is bought). Get people using this and, before long, they will begin to use the service for additional features: buy in a proper miniatures wargame then use the virtual board and purchasable miniatures to build long-term revenue: here, gamers will still save money and time over buying lead minis, and will more easily find opponents.
The second problem for Wizards is that they dropped the ball in development. The tools were not ready for the launch of the game. Worse, they are still months away from being ready. It was utterly predictable that they would mess up like this, by underestimating the effort and cost of working in the commercial, online marketplace, but they did it nonetheless. They disappointed their customers, misled them with a fairly weasely announcement that nobody understood (but let them say that they had not lied about the service's availability at launch).
If WotC don't sieze the market then the open source community will. I suspect (and kinda hope) that they will, anyway: after all, primitive versions already exist, as with OpenRPG or Neverwinter Nights. In fact, I'd bet a chunk of cash that, by this time next year, I will be able to use free, open software to design a dungeon, place traps and miniatures, then allow my players to connect online and play through it with me as GM. Then WotC will have a real struggle to even charge for access, let alone to regain the initiative in a market they should dominate.