by Mike Shea on 11 September 2025
D&D Beyond threatens to centralize the RPG hobby around a single tool run by a company that regularly removes access to the material they host.
Wizards of the Coast should offer PDFs of their products and third party products they sell on D&D Beyond. Selling PDFs doesn't solve all of D&D Beyond's issues as a fair platform, but it's probably the biggest thing they could do to make it a fair platform for customers.
We should own the products we buy.
This article is a summary of points I regularly make about D&D Beyond and why I don't think it's good for either publishers or customers regardless of its current popularity.
By my measure, DDB is currently in stage 2 – maybe stage 3 – of Cory Doctorow's Enshittification:
Platforms ripe for enshittification often
D&D Beyond isn't a fair platform for its customers. Here's how:
Don't take my word for it that D&D Beyond is an unfair platform for customers. Here's what WOTC says in their terms and conditions.
the acquisition of Digital Content does not give you ownership rights. Instead, you are granted a limited, non-exclusive, and non-transferable license to use the Digital Content for personal, non-commercial entertainment purposes only.
we reserve the right to revoke this license at any time, without prior notice or liability
We reserve the right to change Subscription terms with at least 30 days’ notice. You'll need to agree to these new terms in order to maintain your Subscription.
We reserve the right to edit our Subscription prices and tiers. By continuing to use Services after the change, you agree to the new price. If you don’t want to continue at the new price, you can cancel your Subscription before the announced date.
We reserve the right to discontinue or modify any part of our Service or Subscription options at any time, in our discretion.
We reserve the right to modify the availability, features, and prices of the content and items listed in the Marketplace, with no guarantee of future availability. We maintain the right to manage and adjust our offerings as needed, which includes changing fees or billing practices. Should any changes be unacceptable to you, your only recourse is to close your D&D Beyond account.
Your license to use Digital Content is defined by several key restrictions: it's non-exclusive, non-assignable, non-transferable, and can be revoked by us at any time if your account is terminated. We retain the full authority to manage, alter, or even remove Digital Content as deemed necessary, without owing you any compensation. By engaging with Digital Content, you acknowledge and accept that you hold no ownership or proprietary rights to any items you access, and we will not be held liable for any loss or changes made to these items, including their potential removal when your account is terminated.
Yes. They would. They have. They do it all the time.
WOTC removes content all the time.
The character builder.
There are few web-based and mobile-friendly 5e character builders and none, right now, come to the quality of the D&D Beyond character builder. The ability for GMs to share products with players is another huge bonus.
But this is beginning to erode. Stage 2 of enshittification began as WOTC shoehorned in new products into the character builder (both theirs and from other publishers) with significant issues.
Implementing Lord of the Rings brand on D&D Beyond is a huge joining of the two brands. But the implementation had significant features missing. The same thing happened with Grim Hollow Reborn and Obojima Tales from the Tall Grass. Both WOTC and the these publishers heavily marketed these partnerships but the actual implementation left much to be desired by the customers who purchased them.
Implementation issues don't just affect third party products either. Issues with D&D Beyond's integration of D&D 2024 and D&D 2014 material confuse players who can easily include material from the wrong sources in their character build. When D&D 2024 was first being implemented, WOTC considered and then walked back the idea of removing D&D 2014 material completely.
D&D Beyond also doesn't provide an equal partnership between WOTC and publishers. Instead, it offers a heavy advantage to WOTC over the publishers whose products they host. Wizards of the Coast isn't just the owner of D&D Beyond, they're also the publisher of the number one RPG on that platform (and everywhere else) by an order of magnitude. This puts WOTC at a big advantage over the other 5e publishers on that same platform:
So why do publishers publish on D&D Beyond?
Those are compelling enough advantages that I doubt any single publisher (including perhaps me) would not publish on D&D Beyond if offered the chance.
There are problems with this, however:
First, as D&D Beyond publishes more 5e third party products, it becomes a more dominant platform. As it becomes more dominant, a publisher's dependence on D&D Beyond grows. Like Amazon (a stage 4 enshittified platform), publishers can hate having to publish there but can't leave because of the gravity well of customers.
Second, publishers who publish on D&D Beyond change their schedules and their product design to support D&D Beyond. This can change the quality and innovation of the products they create – limiting their schedules and design work to make it as easy as possible to support D&D Beyond's limited architecture.
Third, as more publishers publish more products to D&D Beyond, each product has less visibility as D&D Beyond saturates with too many products. WOTC won't aim their tremendous marketing tools on new products like they did on the first products they advertised to build up their platform. The excellent money initial publishers received becomes less and less. Since no one can see how other products are doing, they could continue to draw in new publishers who find their results disappointing.
Not all hope is lost! There are things WOTC can do to improve its relationship with publishers and, more importantly, with customers.
Here are some options:
This post is all doom and gloom but we're in a really good state right now in the TTRPG hobby overall:
