Wizards of the Coast has revealed a DLC-style pre-order chart for the video game, which explains what package options fans have when pre-ordering the new one. Dungeons and Dragons core books and highlight the “savings” to be had by purchasing larger packages. However, you need to go to the DnD Beyond store to find out the actual price of the packs.
This is going to be awkward, readers. While we eagerly await new DnD books in the DnD release schedule, seeing this kind of ranking immediately makes us skeptical of the value of pre-orders, both as consumer advocates and industry observers.
While tabletop RPGs are usually a refuge from the digital world, there’s no denying that digital DnD is a big part of the game for many players. In fact, Wargamer’s DnD expert Mollie Russell is increasingly optimistic about the official DnD virtual table being such a big part of One DnD. But it pisses us off that video game nonsense came with it.
The three pre-order levels are, in ascending order of content (and price), a digital-only version of the Player’s Handbook ($29.99), a digital and print bundle ($79.98), and a bundle of all three physical and digital books ($179.97 ). They all come with a number of digital doodads, such as digital DnD dice sets, frames and backgrounds, and early access to online content.
There’s a $20 discount between the digital-only and digital-and-print bundles — or looking at it another way, if you buy the print edition, you can pay the $10 extra and get the digital edition as well. We’re not going to argue that digital goods should be free – it takes effort to design, even if it’s almost freely reproducible – but it’s a bummer that fans who miss the pre-order window won’t get the same discount.
The bundle of all three core books and the digital editions is $60 off – so again you’re paying $10 for the digital edition in this bundle. For locking in the $180 pre-order, you’ll also receive three additional digital dice sets, 24 additional frames, 10 additional backgrounds, a “Dragons of D&D” digital artbook, and a digital mini gold dragon for the upcoming official DnD virtual board. .
If you were going to pre-order anyway, great, you’ll get some extra stuff. But is this supposed to be tempting? Would you buy these accessories separately? Or they’re more like digital gimmicks and cheap resin figurines bolted onto video games that partly increase the perceived value of the core product and partly ensure that the customer can’t tell what the core product actually is from a matrix of several different launch editions.
This DLC chart for the Player’s Handbook isn’t particularly unpleasant, but since DnD will only be more digital, we have to wonder – is this just the beginning? Will more editions and optional extras be expanding?
“Marketing” in a broad sense means identifying a market group of potential customers, producing something that meets their wants or needs, and getting them to buy it. It’s a long-term strategy that requires you to be clear about the value of the product, not to hide it, and to understand that a customer who buys something doesn’t stay a customer forever.
The digital shift can be a great thing. The feature in DnD Beyond that allowed you to purchase only those parts of the book that were relevant to your character’s DnD class or DnD race used digital technology to provide a unique consumer benefit. But since this feature was removed without explanation in a recent update, allow us to be a little skeptical about how it all turns out.