I ask as currently the pricing strategy doesn’t encourage me to buy anything other than a physical book. If I buy digital access to the books on DND Beyond, it’s exclusive to DND Beyond. I’d have to buy access again (at full retail) on Roll 20… and then again (at full retail) for access in Fantasy Grounds.
mikemearls63 points19 days ago
Much of that comes down to the cost needed to implement content across different platforms. If we offered one product that gave access to all the platforms, its cost would look a lot like the prices added up across all of them.
Lower prices work for ebooks when you talk about novels and such. However, RPGs are a lot more costly to make due to art, layout, game design, and so on. Compared to a novel, a much smaller percentage of the product cost to us comes from the cost of printing.
For digital platforms, you then have to account for the coding, server maintenance, and so on, to keep everything running and updated. Comment
from discussion AMA: Mike Mearls, D&D Creative Director.