D&D Beyond’s Big Plans for Digital & Physical Bundles
One of the most-asked for changes in all D&D is coming at last. And D&D Beyond has big plans for digital & physical bundles.
Big changes are on the horizon for Dungeons & Dragons. And it’s not just a new generation of rules coming in 2024. Before that, players and DMs will get something they’ve been asking for since the release of 5th Edition: an easy way to get a digital copy of your book with a hard copy. In essence, a digital & physical bundle.
Now, this might not seem like a difficult thing to achieve. And you’re right. It isn’t. Pretty much every single other RPG publisher out there has got this figured out already. Many publishers will often release a .pdf of their core rulebooks before the physical book is finished, and when you buy a hard copy of the book you just get a .pdf.
Again, it isn’t hard. But WotC doesn’t do that. At least not until they acquired D&D Beyond. Although technically even then, they still don’t do that. Because you’ll get a “D&D Beyond digital copy” of the adventure. Which is hyperlinked and searchable, but harder to access offline.
Here are the details.
D&D Beyond Digital Bundles
First things first though, this is very much in the experimental phase. WotC and D&D Beyond are “in the test and learn phase.” This means that we probably won’t see every book getting a bundle, and it’s hard to imagine the back catalog getting retroactively digital-enabled.
But I’d be willing to bet we see the big ones, like the upcoming Planescape book get the treatment. As for what D&D Beyond is testing:
We are testing everything from distribution method and quantities to bundle contents. We thought it was important to call this out as a test because you should expect things to change over the next two years while we work on bringing more D&D in more ways to more people.
So you can expect it to change. But for now, when you purchase a digital & physical bundle on D&D Beyond, you’ll submit your email and eventually receive a key you can redeem for early access to the upcoming adventure.
That’s one of the exclusive perks of D&D Beyond’s digital & physical bundle for Shadow of the Dragon Queen.
At this time, WotC doesn’t have plans for players to get the bundle via your friendly local game store, but who knows what the future will hold? At any rate, with the divide between physical & digital books crumbling from one of the last remaining holdouts, the future is finally here.
Happy Adventuring
