Wizards of the Coast released an official “shape the future of D&D” survey, and it all got a bit messy.
D&D gamers didn’t like the threatening language used by WotC to try and persuade qualifying participants from leaking secrets in the survey. Those secrets appear to be that Wizards of the Coast are working on a subscription model and a VTT.
In response, Geek Native opened a public survey with the headline “Would you buy your D&D books all over again for an official virtual tabletop?“.
New D&D books could carry one-time use activation codes in foil packets as Magic: The Gathering packs do. But what about your D&D back catalogue? How do we hook those rules, already bought and paid for, into the official VTT?
One of the questions in the Geek Native unofficial survey is a multiple-choice that asks D&D players to say who owns D&D Beyond. It’s relevant as D&D Beyond is the digital platform that Wizards of the Coast uses and promotes to distribute digital versions of the game (alongside Roll20 and Fantasy Ground’s approved VTT integrations).
If you want to take this as a quiz before you see the results, then take part in the unofficial survey first.
Who are the owners of D&D Beyond?
The correct answer is Fandom. They’re a company that owns lots of pop-culture wikis, the online marketplace Fanatical and the Cortex RPG system. The latter competes with D&D.
There have been over 100 responses in the Geek Native survey. At the time of writing, only 36% of the answers to the question “Who owns D&D Beyond?” correctly answers Fandom.
It’s not a huge sample, not yet, but it could grow in time. The pie-chart below updates every 10 minutes or so with the latest results. If there’s been a swing, then you’ll see it show here. Unfortunately, just asking the question will impact the results, and discussing it here certainly will.
When this post first went live, the data says that most D&D fans can’t correctly answer “Who owns D&D Beyond?”. Does it matter?
Creative Commons credit: Celestial Warrior by OhHeyItsKaylaK.
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