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D&D Sigil is done for. With 30 team members laid off leaving around three people to mop up what's left, Hasbro seems set to close the shutters on D&D Beyond's own virtual tabletop for one of the best tabletop RPGs around. Dungeons and Dragons fans are, understandably, feeling like they've just experienced the world's fastest rug-pull in D&D history. Those who were excited to see the direction that Hasbro – a large company that should have plenty of resources to dedicate to a project of this gravity – would take the much-anticipated software, and are now left wondering what could have been. In the community's musings, I've spotted a flicker of a memory from the year 2008 – a 16-year-old cockup that telegraphed Sigil's inevitable demise…see Gleemax et al.
With so much potential wasted as we witness D&D Beyond's Sigil software in its death throes, would-be fans are taking to forums across the web to discuss the VTT that might have been, since the software had a lot going for it despite its controversial subscription system.
Dropping into the EN World forums I spotted a thread that asks the question "What Does Your Dream VTT Do/Look Like?" The responses involve things like condition tracking, reliable handling of AOE spells and effects, rollable character sheets, and support for hex grids as well as square – all of which are things that Sigil VTT could well have pulled off in time. A bit of a deeper search to see what Dungeons & Dragons players were saying led me into a retro rabbit hole. In an anonymous tip-off, one employee told Rascal news that the shutdown was due in part to Hasbro's inexperience in video game development, coupled with a distinct lack of interest from Hasbro higher-ups. But this isn't the first time WotC killed a digital dream.
As user Jhamin1 comments on a Sigil-related post in the r/dndnext subreddit, Wizards of the Coast had "promised a VTT for 3rd, 4th, and now 5th edition that all sputtered." All this reminded me that Wizards of the Coast, if you weren't aware, has a bit of a spotted past around digital tools being unveiled and left by the wayside. One example they mention is a character generator released on CD alongside the original Player's Handbook for D&D 3.X, with later updates coming in the form of a name change (Character Generator to Tools Box), and a publisher switch when it was edited for D&D 3.5. The project was all but forgotten as the game rapidly evolved.
Then came Gleemax – heralded as the MySpace for gamers, it was a promise to bring us a digital space to congregate, share and play D&D, and other tabletop-related gubbins. It was meant to "give all gamers their own personal pages with tons of features that make it convenient to talk about games, find people to play games with, and get more out of the games they choose to play.”
As blogging functionality was added to the site in its early stages, so too did the login system change. It was this attempt to unify the Gleemax login system with that of the Wizards of the Coast forum that, alongside the lack of promised rolling updates, that's generally attributed to the site's downfall. Not to mention "the basic blogging functionality of Gleemax wouldn’t display posts correctly," notes Merric B on their blog, "nor would it allow people to post replies with things like, I don’t know, line breaks. Oh, and if a post scrolled off the first page, you couldn’t find it again."
In the comments section of a post around the proposed Moxfield MTG social media site (an example of a successful digital feat from Hasbro), user imbolcnight harkens back to the wonderful fudgery that was Gleemax. "The posts were structured like blog posts, so they all appeared in chronological order (whereas forums traditionally moved threads to the top whenever someone posted in them). So, there was no real way to follow or keep up with threads since you had to scroll back further and further just to check to see if anyone commented on that thread."
As much as we, as the little guys, expect big things from companies with their fingers in all the Dungeony and/or Dragony pies, sometimes things just don't go to plan. As Wizards of the Coast's Vice President of Digital Gaming Randy Buehler made clear when Gleemax went under: "The mistake that I made, however, was in trying to push us too far too fast. I still think the vision for Gleemax is awesome [...] But I've come to realize that the vision was too ambitious. We've made progress down about ten different paths over the past eighteen months, but we haven't been able to reach the end of any of them yet."
At the end of the day, it's that broadness that often sees projects like this losing their focus. The Sigil VTT suffered from the same issues of trying to be too many things at once, and ending up mediocre at all of them.
For more recommendations, why not check out the best D&D books, or read about some of Wizards of the Coast employees more heartwarming sentiments.
