How can their board games etc. be losing money? It seems like they shouldn’t cost much to produce.
Hasbro laying off Wizards of the Coast staff is baffling
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Re: Hasbro laying off Wizards of the Coast staff is baffling
#242It's not baffling, it's the latest in business lemmings' theater: when profits are at record levels, squeeze out even more money by suppressing wages with a good round or 3 of layoffs. That'll teach those corporate employees to stay hungry and not to earn too much because the CEO and investors needs those profits.
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Re: Hasbro laying off Wizards of the Coast staff is baffling
#243I really wish I could sit on one of these decision meetings just so I could understand how the sausage is made. There's an entire class of people out there running the world yet operating in their own universe completely removed from the consensus reality we live in. "Ok we have this cash cow..." "Shoot it" "But..." "Shoot it, the cow accepted an open license" "That doesn't make any..." "I don't care, shoot the cow"
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Re: Hasbro laying off Wizards of the Coast staff is baffling
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
> getting your app to run on other platforms is as simple as embedding your operating system into WASM and putting it in their browser ???
I'm kidding, but sometimes it feels like that. Javascript is never just Javascript. It depends on whether you use Typescript (with tsc or tsx or esrun?). It depends whether you use V8 or Node or Deno or Bun. It depends whether you're using AWS Lambda or the Serverless framework or a Cloudflare Worker or a Vercel or Fastly edge function. It depends whether you use vanilla or HTMX or React or Next or Vue or Nuxt or Sve…
that's why JS/TS is to easy to hate: it's got a lot of surface area.
Re: Hasbro laying off Wizards of the Coast staff is baffling
#245thinly related but i could really use some advice. There's a board game called "quoridor" that I've been playing a lot lately. I found 2 platforms where u can play this online, major one being BGA (boardgamearena). It was kinda sad to see a game on par with chess in terms of simplicity and strategy, being lumped into the same group as kids games. So, I started building a platform for it myself in my free time. Still…
It's categorized as a "Children's Game" on Board Game Geek [1]. BGA is probably just using the same categories.
Re: Hasbro laying off Wizards of the Coast staff is baffling
#246I've been playing ttrpgs for over 25 years now and have a substantial library around 500 books, mostly rulebooks, but also plenty of dnd supplements.
Overall I can say, the quality of WotC material has never been particularly good, but in recent years has fallen even below its old mediocrity, especially compared to their much smaller competition (not that it matters for the market share). Sure, 5e is pretty much late-stage dnd and splatbooks have always been rather questionable at the end of an edition. But the quasi monopoly of dnd and its success is also its greatest problem. They remember the reactions of the community towards 4th edition, as well as the ogl disaster earlier this year and they probably know that they cannot simply push "new product" to replace the current material people have purchased. They can only extend it or make slight improvements that don't disturb the average player who already spend money on something they like and plays "fine" (i.e. an inoffensive, acceptable and conventional fantasy experience). "one d&d" playtest material, anyone? d&d players are a rather conservative bunch of weirdos, why else would they cling to such a dusty system? So, what's there to promise the shareholders? A successful new edition? Unlikely. Maybe digital products? But you hardly need the old staff for that. We'll see, I guess.
On a personal note, I've all the dnd I ever need and I've been rather bored with it. For my ttrpg future it's currently at the bottom of my list of things I want to play. The market of ttrpgs is generally pretty over-saturated and while the last years have been great as far as products by small publishers go, there's been less and less interesting material, e.g. even reputable publishers are desperately picking up tv and movie franchises to turn into rpg books. The hobby has had ups and downs, the early 80s, the late 90s, and the last few years were high points, now expect a downturn. Don't get me wrong, it will remain popular, but there will be less money in it for conventional material. And I guess WotC knows it, too.
Re: Hasbro laying off Wizards of the Coast staff is baffling
#247This is the same Hasbro that tried to retroactively close off the D&D Open Game License (and thus the third party ecosystem). It was a massive betrayal that caused a ton of pushback: https://www.theguardian.com/games/2023/jan/12/dungeons-and-d... They also sell so many overpriced kits with not much going on in them (just a few pieces of paper, not enough dice, sub par instructions ). Or really expensive character toy…
If people are still going to pay money for D&D then they truly do not care about the hobby. I must admit before the OGL fiasco I didn't see much of the allure of other systems, but that really pushed me away and the world of TTRPGs is so much brighter and better than crappy D&D. I still play in one D&D campaign, but it was started before the fiasco, but I have already decided that at least I won't be running another…
What system would you recommend?
Re: Hasbro laying off Wizards of the Coast staff is baffling
#248Reminds of when Rockstar laid off Red Dead Redemption staff despite great sales figures.
Re: Hasbro laying off Wizards of the Coast staff is baffling
#249This is the same Hasbro that tried to retroactively close off the D&D Open Game License (and thus the third party ecosystem). It was a massive betrayal that caused a ton of pushback: https://www.theguardian.com/games/2023/jan/12/dungeons-and-d... They also sell so many overpriced kits with not much going on in them (just a few pieces of paper, not enough dice, sub par instructions ). Or really expensive character toy…
> They also sell so many overpriced kits with not much going on in them (just a few pieces of paper, not enough dice, sub par instructions ). Or really expensive character toys. For me this is the most telling part that Hasbro doesn't quite get what you're actually selling if you have a tabletop company; it's not the ruleset, that will be leaked as soon as you sell a single copy and people actually play the game. It'…
For me the naive part is focussing on player options.
I understand that groups generally have one DM and 4 players, do if you include player options you might sell 5 books instead of one. But that's the shallow, cash-in-now-fuck-next-decade mentality.
Meanwhile they haven't put out a decent adventure in a decade. The internet is awash with people trying to glue their ramblings back into coherent campaigns and running D&D (always a huge time sink) is becoming a worse experience every year as they keep flooding the market with crap.
I love running games but I've come to the point where I'm not really interested in starting a D&D group anymore because of all the bullshit.
WOTC: support your DMs or die.
Re: Hasbro laying off Wizards of the Coast staff is baffling
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh man it was super-disappointing and the end of my willingness to buy WoTC 5E. You'd be better off with the originals from DriveThru.
It was a bit thin, but I still had fun playing! I will be sad if they don't develop it further. Then again, I'd kind of like to see more of their legendary forgotten settings like Dark Sun...
They will never release another Dark Sun. It is waaay to vile and racist. Personally I love the setting, but there is zero change they could publish it without some serious backlash from a lot of people ... for who that content is not intended. Let's put it that way.
If they ever release something with the name Dark Sun, it will be that in name only. Disconnected from the original. Even worse than Spelljammer.