How Much Would We Spend On A VTT?

After the hoax '$30/month for the new D&D' screenshots went around I dug around to see if we have any indication of what the market might bear as a price point and I think it is ~$10/month.

Apparently the screenshots below are a hoax cooked up by someone long before the OGL fiasco but they did start an interesting conversation - people were outraged at $30/month but at the same time there was recognition that a bells-and-whistles VTT would have a cost and people would in theory be willing to pay for something they perceive as value. So what could people be convinced to pay?

I'm going to take the current DnDBeyond and Roll20 price points as a starter - $2.99 for basic DNDBeyond, $5.99 for all the bells and whistles, $4.17 monthly for Roll20 basic, $8.33 for everything. Imagining that the OneD&D VTT does provides a virtual tabletop like Roll20 and holds all your charactersheets, rulebooks etc. like DnDBeyond and charges you a combo price for it we can start by smushing both those services together and say basic would be ~$7, deluxe would be ~$14. Certainly those could be rounded down but we're trying to get a sense of how much could be pried from the hands of our fellow gamers on a monthly basis so we shall lean high.

Taking WotC's own estimate that 20% of players are the DM's who buy everything, then asking a standard table of DM + four to split that amongst them comes to a reasonable $1-2/month. I think they could get away with that as a low end. The rule of thumb I have heard bandied around is 'worth of a pint' so you can probable get $3-5 a head from people without them squealing much. This low end is equivalent to assuming you can sell every player a PHB a year - you got them to do it the first year they got in the game, why not every year?

All that takes no account of spending on books - what people are usually dropping on the hobby? Looking at the replica of the Dragon Magazine survey that Random Wizard reran in 2017 we get a sense of what that might be - a roughly equal spread across all the categories from nothing up to over $25/month.

I suspect that high tail is going to be pretty high - I could see it being $100/month for some - but let us assume that it is $25 for a low-ball estimate. Taking the mid point of all the brackets, we get an average spend per month of ~$20. I think that it is an optimistic upper limit - this assumes you can get $100/month from our table of DM+4, $1200/year. This maps onto the biggest book-bundles that DnDBeyond carries - the Legendary 'all books' bundle is $950 undiscounted. Though that is (in theory) a one-time purchase, take it as representative of the cash that can be shaken loose in a given year from the top bracket of spenders.

I am assuming here that most of the really high spenders at present are swivel-eyed book-goblins like myself and that this is not representative of the players at their table nor does it reflect an appetite for digital-only assets. Where I have seen people in close gaming groups that had lots of them buying books, they were buying different systems since if my buddy already bought it, why do I need to? Similarly, I'm not convinced the people putting the most hours in at table (the potential consumers of the OneDnD VTT) are the same people that are spending the most money on books.

To check this, we can compare to the Adventure Game Industry Market Research Summary written by Ryan Dancey when he was at WotC in 2000 which looked at how much people spend and might be willing to spend monthly and got to (in 2000) $21/month for a DM, $7/month for a player - and if you correct those for inflation to today you end up with $34 and $11. That $11 for a player looks like the number we are getting elsewhere. Interestingly, that report breaks out spend by time in the game and by age and none of those variations are as big as DM/non-DM. It is the DM's spending the money, as we knew.

As a benchmark, take World of Warcraft currently running at $13/month - I think that is a fair comparison as a lot of TTRPG folk I've played with went sideways into WoW in its heyday and since came back out. Lots of them play various other MMO's but WoW was the big subscription service people were willing to fork out for. Everyone involved had to pay that much to get involved in this online shared activity that allegedly hit the TTRPG space so hard, 4e was explicitly designed to try and lure folk back from it.

There is going to be a substantial portion of folk who will be 'not one red cent' for whom the low cost of D&D is a big part of the appeal. They are either going to stay pen-and-paper or play entirely with discord or on alternative VTTs or what have you. Those are not people WotC can win around with a reduced price so I guess they'll do a monster marketing push to get new folk onboard - heading back down the age-categories being one potential place to go.

I do think the micro-transaction, buy a certain rule, class, spell will work well so I think the play here is a lower monthly number to get people in - $5-10/month - then nickle and dime them with microtransactions to get those numbers up.

Myself, I am twitchy about digital subscription services - far too many of them from Netflix to Spotify to Blizzard randomly jack up their prices over time with nothing to compensate that. Far too many other similar products have steadily increasing digital barnacles that make things *worse* over time. I would be happy to sign up for a service that got me access to tools that I will be using on a steady basis - a quality, easy to use VTT that lets me host games for instance - but I would not be happy with my library of books being digital and online - pdf's are fine as long as they are not gated behind some barrier that I can get blocked from because of corporate shenanigans or EU/US digital tax fights or whatever.

So, tentatively count me in for a minimalist offer that I can trust to be delivered because its on a *this month* transactional basis and when it all goes wrong I'll halt my subscription with no regrets. For that I'll give you $10/month, more than that will take a demonstrated track record of quality delivery and in the meantime I'll buy books. Not all of it will go to WotC's pocket but for things like Planescape and Keys From the Golden Vault, I'll probably still buy.

Sources - you can find the Random Wizard recreated survey article on the Wayback machine but the forms are gone now. I pulled down copies and what you see above comes from those.

The Adventure Game Industry Market Research Summary can be found on the Escapist.