Dungeons & Dragons Insider Review
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The virtual tabletop is a product that has been offered before by various third-party companies, but never with this level of sophistication. It's also never been tied into the core game the way DDI is, nor coupled with the Dungeon and Dragon magazines -- respected publications with a long history of serving the D&D community. In short, DDI is a tremendous service.
The only problem is the price tag.
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For a hobby that has (despite the high prices of the actual D&D books) mostly been a fairly cheap pastime, DDI's pricing is tantamount to highway robbery. It may sound reasonable -- until you consider that in order to participate in an online event, each player will need to be paying this fee. For an average group of four players and a dungeon master, that's a monthly outlay of about $75. Even at the lowest price of $10 a month, that's roughly $50 a month just for that one group.
To be sure, it's a great value for the money -- when Dungeon and Dragon were print magazines, they each cost about this much. DDI offers both magazines in electronic format, plus the convenience of the virtual tabletop. In my eyes, though, this is a huge missed opportunity. Wizards of the Coast is mimicking the pricing schemes of massively multiplayer games like EverQuest and Ultima Online from 10 years ago , without considering the advances in player behavior (and business models) that have come since then.
What Wizards of the Coast has a chance to do here is nothing short of inspirational: Reintroduce an entire generation of online-gaming kids to D&D. Get them playing in that online mind-set, but with a whole layer of socialization and personal interaction that just isn't possible in a game like Counter-Strike or even most Massive titles. That monthly fee may look great to the accountants, but for a 12-year-old, that fee might as well be a giant Keep Out sign.
I'd have to agree. Charging for content or small additions to the core service seems like a much better idea than forcing anyone and everyone to pay a monthly fee.
