Wizards of the Coast Announces One D&D

[BarretWallace]

And here I thought WotC might have learned their lesson from the OGL debacle.

[Old Man]

They did.  But it was the wrong lesson.

[Opal]

On 4/24/2023 at 2:45 PM, Cygnia said:

Magic publishers sent Pinkerton agents to a YouTuber’s house to retrieve leaked cards

 How have they even kept the "Pinkerton" name all this time?

 

I mean, do they have a balance statement item for "Bad Will?"

Edited April 27, 2023 by Opal

[Sundog]

The Pinkerton Detective Agency actually has a very good name in business. They have a reputation for loyalty, integrity, confidentiality and security. And they don't give a darn about what people who don't hire them think.

[Cygnia]

And a reputation for strongarming & strikebreaking

 

https://theblast.com/48541/rockstar-games-red-dead-redemption-pinkerton-lawsuit/

[Old Man]

Yeah this thing with the Pinkertons bothers me even more than the OGL 2.0 thing, and that's saying something.  From what I've read of the incident, the Pinkertons and their employer would be liable for home invasion, fraud, and extortion, and possibly some stalking laws for good measure.  These aren't just contract shenanigans, they're full on crimes.  It doesn't help that there are WotC managers who were hired directly from the Pinkertons.  Why does Hasbro have a "Director of Global Investigations" anyway? 

Edited April 27, 2023 by Old Man

[Christopher R Taylor]

Yeah the Pinks have fallen a very long ways from what they once were.  They don't bust union heads these days but the work sickened Dashiell Hammett so much he left the agency.

[Trencher]

Pinkerton did a lot of union busting for Amazon and a lot of Hasbro suits are former Amazon guys. 

Hasbro is just a syndicate at this point. None of the leaders there have ever created anything. Just a bunch of goons buying up everything and then jacking up prices, cutting corners and trying to strong arm monopolies into place. 

I will never give Hasbro money ever again and dont come to me with "but the people who works at wizards are good guys". 

If you work for hasbro in any capacity now your just a scab. Get yourself a new job. 

[Scott Ruggels]

I've always thought of Magic The Gathering as a cancer on the TTRPG Hobby since it's debut in 1993 Worldcon. It's a curse, that crippled the hobby for about a decade, until Paizon figured out a formula to avoid it, but that caused a bump in CCG's that just sucked money out of the hobby.  MTG is Hasbro's  flagship at the moment, as it's on of the few activities they still sell that makes money, and does not require a screen to play. For what had been a toy company, that produced GI-Joe, and then later Transformers, the loss of Toys-R-Us, as well as a general shift to screens for kids, meant that their options had changed and CCGs were it.

[tkdguy]

On 4/26/2023 at 9:01 AM, Old Man said:

They did.  But it was the wrong lesson.

 

Apparently not!  

 

 

 

[Ninja-Bear]

I thought Professor DM already called it that the fans would just go back to D&D after the OGL debacle as if nothing ever happened.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Quote

I've always thought of Magic The Gathering as a cancer on the TTRPG Hobby since it's debut in 1993 Worldcon

 

I just finished selling all of my brother's old Magic the Gathering cards, which were... quite a bit more valuable than I had expected.  I watched their little upcoming events scroll board and there's no RPG playing going on.  Zero scheduled.  There's one Warhammer event and a ton of card games.  It breaks your heart.  Even the D&D section is a small corner of the shop.  They have zero Hero products on the shelf.  I almost wept.

 

I really enjoyed playing MTG in the past, but you're right, it destroyed my favorite hobby.

[Old Man]

WOTC has successful year, Hasbro promptly lays off nearly 2000 employees many of whom were working for WOTC, and also sells off entertainment division responsible for D&D movie so it seems unlikely that there will be a sequel

[Cygnia]

Baldur's Gate 3 Lead Says "There's Almost Nobody Left" On D&D Team From First Meetings

[Rich McGee]

 This article also raises some good points about the danger of WotC staff getting out while the getting is good, although it doesn't seem to understand how much the RPG industry has shifted toward independent (often creator-owned) publishing and direct sales these days.  Be willing to bet at least as many departing designers make a go of it on their own as try to get in at Paizo or Kobold.

[Scott Ruggels]

Ihavern't had pleasurable experiences with "Independent" TTRPGs, so I have been mostly ignoring it, and sticking with the old stuff that's in my bookshelf already. I never have been a fan of FIction Forward mechanics, or the thin slice limitations of a lot of these games, with their setting and mechanical specificity that make it suitable to only a narrow scope of play. No PBtA or BitD for me, thank you.

[Christopher R Taylor]

Hasbro has all but killed MTG with its idiotic stunts and D&D doesn't look all that healthy these days, either.  Role Playing Games will never really die, but they're entering Whist territory these days.

[Old Man]

1 hour ago, Scott Ruggels said:

Ihavern't had pleasurable experiences with "Independent" TTRPGs, so I have been mostly ignoring it, and sticking with the old stuff that's in my bookshelf already. I never have been a fan of FIction Forward mechanics, or the thin slice limitations of a lot of these games, with their setting and mechanical specificity that make it suitable to only a narrow scope of play. No PBtA or BitD for me, thank you.

 

As the RPG world becomes more fragmented, rules systems are going to trend lighter simply because players are going to have to learn new systems just to play anything.  It looks like only Paizo will have the critical mass to support a super complicated ruleset once Hasbro/WOTC are done self immolating.

[Rich McGee]

11 minutes ago, Old Man said:

As the RPG world becomes more fragmented, rules systems are going to trend lighter simply because players are going to have to learn new systems just to play anything. 

You're going to see more and more companies opening up their engines for third party publishing, which will reduce the number of completely new systems people will be learning.  When OGL was a safe bet (ie for almost 23 years) it was something of a go-to for 3PP to make d20 compatible stuff while other engines like Savage Worlds struggled to get the same attention.  Now that WotC can't be trusted, people are looking farther afield - and like them or not, PBtA and FitD have a lot of adopters.  Chaosium BRP/Mythras is also seeing more interest, as is the Year Zero Engine behind so many Free League games.

 

Still going to be lots of single-game systems out there of varying qualities, but that's just a reversion to the supposed golden age of RPGs before the OGL ever existed.  The market contraction's likely to be pretty bad, but it's also being offset by the ease of self-publishing and direct online sales (particularly pdf-only stuff) that didn't really exist in the 90s, much less in the 70s and 80s.  There will always be optimistic new designers who want to share their work, and they've got it easier than ever even if the vast majority will never make a living at it.   

[Scott Ruggels]

A relevant Reddit posting:

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/18ibj22/hasbros_struggle_with_monetization_and_the/

Hasbro's Struggle with Monetization and the Struggle for Stable Income in the RPG Industry

 

 

Discussion

We've been seeing reports coming out from Hasbro of their mass layoffs, but buried in all the financial data is the fact that Wizards of the Coast itself is seeing its revenue go up, but the revenue increases from Magic the Gathering (20%) are larger than the revenue increase from Wizards of the Coast as a whole (3%), suggesting that Dungeons and Dragons is, yet again, in a cycle of losing money.

Large layoffs have already happened and are occurring again.

It's long been a fact of life in the TTRPG industry that it is hard to make money as an independent TTRPG creator, but spoken less often is the fact that it is hard to make money in this industry period. The reason why Dungeons and Dragons belongs to WotC (and by extension, Hasbro) is because of their financial problems in the 1990s, and we seem to be seeing yet another cycle of financial problems today.

One obvious problem is that there is a poor model for recurring income in the industry - you sell your book or core books to people (a player's handbook for playing the game as a player, a gamemaster's guide for running the game as a GM, and maybe a bestiary or something similar to provide monsters to fight) and then... well, what else can you sell? Even amongst those core three, only the player's handbook is needed by most players, meaning that you're already looking at the situation where only maybe 1 in 4 people is buying 2/3rds of your "Core books".

Adding additional content is hit and miss, as not everyone is going to be interested in buying additional "splatbooks" - sure, a book expanding on magic casters is cool if you like playing casters, but if you are more of a martial leaning character, what are you getting? If you're playing a futuristic sci-fi game, maybe you have a book expanding on spaceships and space battles and whatnot - but how many people in a typical group needs that? One, probably (again, the GM most likely).

Selling adventures? Again, you're selling to GMs.

Selling books about new races? Not everyone feels the need to even have those, and even if they want it, again, you can generally get away with one person in the group buying the book.

And this is ignoring the fact that piracy is a common thing in the TTRPG fanbase, with people downloading books from the Internet rather than actually buying them, further dampening sales.

The result is that, after your initial set of sales, it becomes increasingly difficult to sustain your game, and selling to an ever larger audience is not really a plausible business model - sure, you can expand your audience (D&D has!) but there's a limit on how many people actually want to play these kinds of games.

So what is the solution for having some sort of stable income in this industry?

We've seen WotC try the subscription model in the past - Dungeons and Dragon 4th edition did the whole D&D insider thing where DUngeon and Dragon magazine were rolled in with a bunch of virtual tabletop tools - and it worked well enough (they had hundreds of thousands of subscribers) but it also required an insane amount of content (almost a book's worth of adventures + articles every month) and it also caused 4E to become progressively more bloated and complicated - playing a character out of just the core 4E PHB is way simpler than building a character is now, because there were far fewer options.

And not every game even works like D&D, with many more narrative-focused games not having very complex character creation rules, further stymying the ability to sell content to people.

So what's the solution to this problem? How is it that a company can set itself up to be a stable entity in the RPG ecosystem, without cycles of boom and bust? Is it simply having a small team that you can afford when times are tight, and not expanding it when times are good, so as to avoid having to fire everyone again in three years when sales are back down? Is there some way of getting people to buy into a subscription system that doesn't result in the necessary output stream corroding the game you're working on?

[Christopher R Taylor]

Plus, the MTG earnings are largely propped up by the speculative buying of the latest Lord of the Rings set which had a one ring card... one of them ... buried in a zillion packs.  So speculators bought mountains of cards hoping to get the ring, driving up sales.  Now that the ring has been found, the sales have dropped off significantly, and the entire controversy has driven players and buyers away.  So you get maybe one year of sales that way then what?

[Scott Ruggels]

All in all, I think that D&D wil survive but this will delay ONE D&D probably about a year or so, as the personnel will be shuffled around. D&D has been an artistically pretty publication. THe VTT They were working on will be mostly the reason for the delay, But there would be a lot of opportunities for rules rewrites.  D&D's Market share my shrinke a bit, especially in comparison to Paizo's work, but D&D will still be dominant in the hobby, especialy if the rules revisions are lightly handled.

 

On the other hand, Yellow Flash has an alternate heory:

 

 

Edited December 16, 2023 by Scott Ruggels

[Christopher R Taylor]

Quote

Selling adventures? Again, you're selling to GMs.

 

This is of course the dilemma all writers face: eventually everyone who wants to has bought your book.  Sure every year a few people age in that will be interested and maybe pick up a copy, but the initial flood tapers off rapidly.  So you write more books, and people buy them, but for a game company the hard truth is that you have an absolute limit of how many books will sell.

 

Hasbro's answer to that was to try the Microsoft model of renting books, thus ensuring ongoing profits, but absolutely everyone hates that and stomped all over it.  Their previous answer was to keep putting out books, even if they were pointless or damaging to the game, just to get sales.  And of course, new editions.  Hero has resisted this: they put out a new edition when a new edition is called for, not just to mine sales.  Game Designer's Workshop is based entirely around the "put out new versions" model.

 

But the truth is, if you're only after profits, gaming is a terrible way to go about it.  Put out stuff as a fan who wants to support the hobby, not as a businessman trying to make money.

[Rich McGee]

1 hour ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

Game Designer's Workshop is based entirely around the "put out new versions" model.

It has been, but they're currently transitioning to becoming an IP licensing farm rather than maintain their core focus on producing minis and games using them.  The steady improvements in 3D printing (both at home and available services) have destabilized the miniatures industry, and will probably see it become something unrecognizable within another ten years at the outside.  Even with the rise of high-quality modular bargain plastic kits from Wargames Atlantic and Northstar home printing just has too much of a price edge for traditional or injection-molded industrial casting to compete much longer.

 

There are some obvious parallels between the minis situation and the plight of traditional publishing versus POD and e-reader book sales.  Despite being very different industries production technology and preferred formats are changing fast.

2 hours ago, Scott Ruggels said:

Selling adventures? Again, you're selling to GMs.

There's a reason beyond just the COVID shutdown that solo-friendly RPGs and modules have been quietly booming, as well as their miniatures-campaign-light-RP cousins like Five Parsecs From Home and its many peers.  It's not a new concept - Tunnels & Trolls was doing solo adventures in the 70s, and I can remember having fun with Car Wars solos back in the days when Autoduel Champions was still on store shelves - but the lockdown gave solo TT gaming a real shot in the arm that seems to be lingering.

 

And that's not even mentioning the "journaling game" craze lately, which I confess I don't grok but clearly appeals to some folks.

Edited December 16, 2023 by Rich McGee

[Doc Democracy]

In my teens and early 20s, I subscribed to White Dwarf.  It was brilliant.  I anticipated the envelope coming through the door and read it from cover to cover. I unsubscribed when it changed from being a doorway to the community to a doorway to the GW saleroom.

 

I have nothing like that today.  In my experience, gamers like racking gaming as much, if not more than actually gaming. I think the rise of actual play streaming and stuff comes from that place.

 

I think therefore that game companies took a wrong turn in thinking more books drive more revenue.  Instead they needed to be thinking that more community drives more revenue.  I bought White Dwarf every month for years,  absolutely there was content in there, I used a chunk of it and read the rest.  It created personalities for me (Lew Pulsipher, Phil Masters and Marcus Rowland were my celebrities).

 

There is some of this in the industry but the companies themselves are pretty poor at it.  I think Wizards could make money by giving the community space and they would get the "rent" they need that way, while using that to drive consumption of good quality product (from which artists and writers got paid living wages). 

 

I think the patron model comes close to this but it still feels a little bit soulless.  I would be happier with a patreon that fed my need to connect with my tribe than one that just feeds me product.

 

Doc