A few days ago, we reported on Hasbro-owned Wizards of the Coast’s decision to change how content is dealt with via D&D Beyond.
These changes came as the 2024 version of the Player’s Handbook is rolled out, and would’ve seen a lot of content – which is currently automated on the digital platform – be rendered inaccessible to users unless they were to manually input it themselves.
As you can imagine, people who enjoy how things have been in Dungeons & Dragons for the last ten years weren’t too happy, and enough were displeased with the call that Wizards have changed their mind, announced in a post on D&D Beyond’s X profile:
It’s far from the first time that a questionable and business-threatening choice has been made by Hasbro since its acquisition of the iconic franchise, such as earlier this year when the company sought to privatise the system reference document (something that has been explicitly in the public domain since the game’s inception) and charge freelance creators a cut of the historical and current profits of their work if they had utilised the D&D system.
As always, it’s good that the company listens to its customers, but I can’t help but wonder how many bad-faith business decisions away from moving on to a different TTRPG most fans are.