We have made the difficult decision to end development on Sigil. This was not a decision made lightly, and it followed months of reflection with all tea...
D&D isn’t like other RPGs, in that it’s owned by a mega-corp that treats it much more like a business first and foremost rather than as a work of art which just happens to be sold through a business. Only really White Wolf has anything close to the same sort of corporate structure and concomitant problems. So Hasbro sees the fact that playing D&D requires a Dungeon Master, and that finding a DM is often difficult as a Problem to be Solved in order to grow their Customer Acquisition.
To wit: they want(ed) to embrace AI as a way to remove the need for a human DM. Their hope was to leverage this VTT to become an all-in-one portal to playing D&D. That’s part of why the original attempt to change the OGL included heavy restrictions on how other VTTs could use D&D content. Obviously they’ve since backed down on this. Maybe because they realised it was far too expensive to actually build out the VTT. Maybe because they realised people don’t actually want AI DMs. Maybe a bit of both, or something else entirely.
TL;DR:
businesses are out of touch with both the users and the product
D&D isn’t like other RPGs, in that it’s owned by a mega-corp that treats it much more like a business first and foremost rather than as a work of art which just happens to be sold through a business. Only really White Wolf has anything close to the same sort of corporate structure and concomitant problems. So Hasbro sees the fact that playing D&D requires a Dungeon Master, and that finding a DM is often difficult as a Problem to be Solved in order to grow their Customer Acquisition.
To wit: they want(ed) to embrace AI as a way to remove the need for a human DM. Their hope was to leverage this VTT to become an all-in-one portal to playing D&D. That’s part of why the original attempt to change the OGL included heavy restrictions on how other VTTs could use D&D content. Obviously they’ve since backed down on this. Maybe because they realised it was far too expensive to actually build out the VTT. Maybe because they realised people don’t actually want AI DMs. Maybe a bit of both, or something else entirely.
TL;DR:
bingo.