Two of the largest companies in the virtual Dungeons & Dragons space are teaming up to make playing ... [+]
Roll20, the most popular virtual tabletop gaming platform and OneBookShelf, the premier online vendor for the tabletop gaming industry announced today that they are coming together in a joint venture. The collaboration creates an industry-leading platform for digital play, promising a seamless future of cross-platform PDF support and synchronized content libraries on the largest virtual tabletop. Members of the platform will have one stop to manage content for nearly any tabletop game, connect more easily with other players, and step into games immediately.
“Joining forces with OneBookShelf creates the best place to purchase, peruse, and play TTRPGs online, period,” said Ankit Lal, CEO of Roll20. “Since 2012, Roll20 has been the industry leader in virtual tabletop gaming, hosting content from some of the biggest publishers in the space, including Wizards of the Coast, Paizo, and Chaosium. With this deal, we gain significant progress on several of our user promises that dramatically improve the VTT, and will work together to continue adding new and exciting features to our already industry-leading platform.”
Roll20 allows players and Dungeon Masters to play games like Dungeons & Dragons in an online space. It allows for video chat and text for groups who find meeting virtually easier or a necessity. Roll20 also includes several tabletop focused features, such as searchable rules compendiums and a virtual battlemap feature that lets everyone see the battlefield during combat in real time.
“Our mission from the get-go has always been to make it easier for publishers and creators to reach a wider audience of roleplaying fans,” said Steve Wieck, CEO of OneBookShelf. “By combining forces with Roll20, we empower game makers to present content across a wider variety of formats, whether character creators, virtual tabletop, digital editions, or print. Customers will be able to support their favorite games, in any format they desire, with one economical purchase, and they will be able to use their content on roleplaying’s most trusted platform.”
OneBookShelf owns several companies that distribute digital content for smaller publishers, such as DriveThruRPG, DriveThru Fiction and DriveThruComics. They also have partnered with larger publishers to provide opportunities for fans to produce content for their favorite games. Roll20 recent announced a deal with Dungeon Masters Guild to intergrate purchased contant into games run on their site. The joint venture expands that idea to a much wider scope.
In the coming weeks, the new entity will add PDF support to Roll20’s virtual tabletop (VTT), giving GMs and players the ability to upload, read, share, and immediately play using any PDF in the VTT. At a later date, the companies will make OneBookShelf PDF libraries accessible within the Roll20 virtual tabletop experience, and are committing to ensure that OneBookShelf PDFs will not count toward Roll20 storage quotas.
The virtual tabletop space has been heating up ever since Hasbro, parent company of Wizards of the Coast, acquired the D&D Beyond virtual platform in April of 2022. Demiplane recently opened up early access to World of Darkness Nexus to give fans of Vampire: The Masquerade access to their own virtual set of play tools. Today’s announcement will raise the stakes for a growing sector of the tabletop industry.
