Fanatical is a site where you get cheap computer games. The company strikes deals with publishers and buys a large number of keys at once, often Steam keys, and then sells them back to customers.
Frequently, Fanatical puts together bundle deals with even more attractive deals for customers but also the ability to shift even more keys at once. The site will also sell digital comics.
Today, Fanatical announced it has been bought by Fandom.
Fandom has various business models. Fandom runs lots of fan wikis which hover up traffic from geeks searching for superhero spoilers or computer game insights. Fanatical gives Fandom a way to turn those visits into cash by selling sequels and related games from those wikis.
However, Fandom also owns D&D Beyond which is also a retailer of digital downloads. Wizards of the Coast, though, presumably has some say in how D&D Beyond behaves, and we may not see the two sites cross-selling.
Fandom also bought Cortex, a tabletop game system which powers the Dragon Prince RPG Tales of Xadia, the forthcoming Legends of Grayskull and Into the Mother Lands.
Cortex Prime’s Kickstarter also set up the Cortex Creator Studio and a marketplace for third party designers to sell their tabletop RPGs.
Cortex RPG supplements could be made available from Fanatical. Non-Cortex RPGs could also be sold from the marketplace in a rival site to DriveThruRPG.
Alexa.com, a very rough guide to how popular a site is, currently ranks Fanatical as the 10,802nd most popular site on the web and in comparison DriveThruRPG is the 21,340th and the DMs Guild the 49,856th.
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