Roll20 And DriveThruRPG’s Melding Into One

Roll20 and OneBookShelf have announced plans to join forces, allowing tabletop role-playing players to manage their content across the platforms, connect with other players, and step into games immediately.

Bbringing together two of the world’s leading digital tabletop roleplaying (TTRPG) content platforms. Roll20 is already the world’s most popular virtual tabletop platform for roleplaying games, providing a digital space for over 10 million users to play TTRPGs daily. OneBookShelf manages eleven ecommerce marketplaces, most notably DriveThruRPG and Dungeon Masters Guild, and is the premier online vendor for the TTRPG industry. The deal empowers players to manage content across platforms for nearly any tabletop game, connect more easily with other players, and step into games immediately, all in one place.

This change forges an unprecedented alliance of industry experience in the TTRPG space, fusing more than a century of combined executive leadership with publisher and community relationships to create the best tabletop platform experience. TTRPG publishers and creators can now easily reach audiences in the virtual game space where they most often play, allowing customers to seamlessly find, share, and play their favorite games.

The joint venture brings together a party of 40 technical wizards dedicated to improving product, code, and user experience. 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 ensuring that OneBookShelf PDFs will not count toward Roll20 storage quotas.

 

“Joining forces with OneBookShelf creates the best place to purchase, peruse, and play TTRPGs online, period, 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.” Ankit Lal, CEO of Roll20

 

“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, 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.”  Steve Wieck, CEO of OneBookShelf.

Roll20 and OneBookShelf “will operate independently for a short while longer” but plan to “combine later this year into one joint venture led by Ankit Lal as CEO and Steve Wieck as President.” A timeline for this merger was not provided, and it’s not clear if both entities will keep their current branding going forward.

 

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