Au revoir to a la carte purchases
Yesterday, D&D Beyond announced some updates to it’s marketplace and how purchases work. While some of these changes give some extra convenience, I can see others causing some frustration and disappointment among fans.
I’ve summarised the changes below so you know what’s changing:
A la carte purchases are gone
This is the change that is likely to ruffle feathers. Without warning, D&D Beyond has removed the ability to purchase options from a book (like a subclass option or a feat). Instead, you must now buy the whole book to access these options. This also means that there aren’t any playable character bundles available either. If you want access to an option, you have to buy the whole book it’s featured in.
While this won’t affect those who purchased whole books anyway, I can see a lot of frustrated users on Reddit who didn’t need the contents of whole books and instead bought the options they needed. This will no longer be an option for them. This obviously makes access to these options more expensive for gamers.
D&D Beyond have said that previous a la carte purchases will still be usable, but won’t be available to purchase moving forward.
I suspect that this a move to prepare for the revised rules coming out later this year to maximise profits from sales of those books (rather than have players buy just the parts of the books they need).
Discounted bundles
You can now purchase physical and digital copies of books together as a bundle and will get a discount when you do so. This is only available in the US though but outside the US, you can still purchase bundles through wizards.com.
Book previews
Before you make a purchase, you can now preview some of the artwork in the book and get more information about what your purchase will unlock.
Some features have moved
Be aware that some features have moved places. For example, if you want to purchase a bundle, you can simply add both products in the bundle to your shopping cart.
Your order history has now moved too.
You can see the full update from D&D Beyond here. How do you feel about these changes? Will it affect how you use D&D Beyond? Let me know in the survey above.