Chris Cocks isn’t shy about plans to move Dungeons & Dragons to a more live service model of gaming. In a recent interview with GamesRadar, Cocks explicitly said that “it makes sense” for players to shift their mindset towards a live service due to the high amount of players using digital services, but assured the interviewer that books will still be produced by Hasbro. When asked if Wizards was moving away from books in favor of a more piecemeal release schedule, following the announcement of D&D Beyond’s new Drops service. “Books will always be an important part of D&D,” Cocks said. “It will always be kind of like a special totem that you can collect. I have a big bookshelf of D&D books myself.”
“But we see what’s happening – almost everyone who plays D&D uses D&D Beyond, like a super high percentage uses it,” Cocks continued. “A very high percentage use Foundry VTT or Roll20, and so it just makes sense that you should start to migrate your thinking about the way you play to more of a live service where you don’t have to wait 18 months for us to build a book. We can start to release components or aspects of that book over time, and you don’t have to buy everything all at once. You can buy chapters or segments of it over time. That makes a ton of sense to me. That said we will still have big moments. We will still have like, ‘hey, ta da, here’s a huge campaign.’ You can expect there’ll be more around that, both from us and from all the creators in the world that can leverage a platform like D&D Beyond to share their content as well.”
Broadly speaking, Dungeons & Dragons has always been a “live service” game, as the game’s core business model involves continuously releasing new content in the form of new rulebooks or campaigns. However, it seems that Cocks is principally interested in shifting this model around more frequent releases. We’ll note that the business model suggested by Cocks was already rolled out in a manner of speaking. The Dhampir species rules were released as a “digital DLC” for D&D Beyond subscribers who digitally ordered a Forgotten Realms book bundle, but a physical version of the rules are being released via the upcoming Ravenloft: The Horrors Within book. However, a la carte purchases were removed from D&D Beyond several years ago in order to force users to purchase entire books instead.
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