Jeff Grubb on WotC and layoffs

Whizbang Dustyboots

Gnometown Hero
I blame the modern University system. It's possible now to get a Liberal Arts degree without having actually read a single Liberal text or even being able to define the term Liberal. Equally, I'm willing to bet that most MBAs have no first hand acquaintance with the words of Adam Smith.
University professors have a lot less influence than market incentives. If you are rewarded when your stock price goes up -- even if the reward is only "you get to keep your job" -- and fired when it doesn't, you behave accordingly, and do whatever you can to get that stock price up.

University professors aren't responsible for the culture of catering to investors above all others.
 

log in or register to remove this ad

GreyLord

Legend
University professors have a lot less influence than market incentives. If you are rewarded when your stock price goes up -- even if the reward is only "you get to keep your job" -- and fired when it doesn't, you behave accordingly, and do whatever you can to get that stock price up.

University professors aren't responsible for the culture of catering to investors above all others.

Speaking of University Professors, I recently read that they are currently making ~150K to 200K at major universities. Of course the point of the research was to say Presidents of the same universities are making 4-10X the amount of the professors...and the problems with rising costs...but I think the article missed the point.

A mere 1.5 decades ago, I recall Professors lucky to make 75-80K. So accordingly their salaries have risen 200-300% since then if my old memory hasn't failed.

Not to put down Professors, they do a grand job...but I don't think the economies have gone up 200-300% in that time period. I'd say there's ONE BIG major point of influence on the rise of tuition costs right there.

The question is do people really think Professors are worth that much. Look at the unemployment and the trouble people have getting jobs...are those professors on their mighty thrones really worth what they are selling.

Turning it back to the Hasbro/WotC sentiments...in that same light is WotC putting out material which is worth what they are paying those who are creating it. Unlike the Universities which currently do not seem to have as many checks...WotC has direct checks to what it pays and what it can afford. Those checks come from consumers and how much they decide to buy.

When WotC doesn't have the money to afford someone, it has hard decisions to make...who will be let go...who will they keep.

So, if you were 200K short, and hence had to cut costs from that somehow...what would you do?

Cut what you sell? That's not going to do much to help you.

Cut all the new employees...cut the old employees...one will have you fire more than the other...as I believe the topic tried to explain.

How about if someone is already doing well in another field with their career, such as writing, and they are doing okay with that field...perhaps they would be easier to let go than others who don't have that to fall back on?

It's all a hard choice, what exactly would you think to do?
 

Umbran

Mod Squad
Staff member
Supporter
I won't have a discussion where you can make assumptions and my generalizations about corporate business practices are forbidden.

If your generalization itself were forbidden, then I'd not have replied.

The thing is we are talking about one specific company - we have to establish if the generalization applies. What scraps of information I have suggest not. If you've got a scrap of information that suggests otherwise, then we're good to continue. Otherwise, we kind of lump up on one man's suppositions against another, and there's not much more to be said.

For some of the rest - "middle class strength" and what is appropriate to support it, seem to me to be a large policy/political thing, not relevant to this specific case - WotC is not going to be a major support of the middle class any time soon, and I'm not going there.

I can, however, elaborate on my last comment, which is practical and industry-specific, rather than political, and maybe that can give us some fodder....

As I said, WotC is not in a business that lends itself well to steady-state staffing in the long term, especially in the RPG quarter. The life-cycle of the product lines just don't seem to behave that way in practice, what with markets getting quickly saturated, and production heavily weighted on the creative end.

What I mean is this - steady-state staffing makes all kinds of sense for industries that have a pretty steady stream of very similar productions. There's a pretty constant demand for toasters, so you can staff up to the level where you're meeting that demand.

Demand will fluctuate a little bit, and there's some cost to you if you overproduce. So long as you don't overproduce too much, you can just call that a cost of doing business. If demand really drops, you do need to cut staff. But, really, toasters are probably pretty steady-state.

Look, however, at the movie industry - they aren't in a steady-state production business. They're instead a project-oriented business, where each movie is a project, and handled like its own business venture. They don't usually keep a huge horde of production capacity on staff. Instead, they staff up for a particular production, contracting individuals and other companies on for the work, and when their phase of the production is done, those people are let go, and they're off to other projects.

In many ways, RPGs are rather more like movies than toasters. You don't do a string of RPGs off an assembly line (unless you're the printer, I suppose). Instead, you have a major project to produce some Core Rules. Once those are done, you don't need nearly as many people, and you might well need different people for the different approaches called for in different kinds of supplements and adventures.

You may want to change creative directions as the product line continues on - for the toaster business, you don't notice that, because the design department is tiny compared to the production lines. But for RPGs, the bulk of the people are in the creative end, so a change in creative direction may well mean a major staffing change.

As a practical matter, I'd expect churn in any artistic/creative commercial venture. Heck, in the fiction publishing business, the creative capacity is almost never in the form of permanent employees of the publisher - it's *all* contract work there.

Folks will bring up Paizo - to me, they took lucky advantage of a unique situation, and jumped over a major portion of the product line lifecyle, and so are a bit of a special case. Let's see if they do it differently when they get around to doing their own rules from the ground up.
 

Speaking of University Professors, I recently read that they are currently making ~150K to 200K at major universities.

I don't think that means what you think it means.

For "University Professor" (a rare super rank for superstars at places like the UC system) in the highest paying fields (probably Computer Science, Law, and Business) it's probably be true -- for maybe 50-100 people nationwide.

For "Full Professors", the rank we normally think of as "professor", with thousands and thousands of them, $150 k might be possible in the top fields at high paying universities, but I don't think $200 k happens at all.

I would guess the average Full Professor in the US makes ~ $80-95 k, but I haven't checked in a long time. I just did a Salary.com check (always of questionable validity) on "Professor-English" in Saint Louis, MO, and got $80 k as the average.

If you want accurate information on pay for professors, check out the AAUP (American Association of University Professors), or check the websites of specific schools -- some do post their pay scale, or even actual individual salaries -- on the public internet.
 

Whizbang Dustyboots

Gnometown Hero
It's all a hard choice, what exactly would you think to do?
Figure out why I'm getting pantsed each quarter and revise my business strategy.

They are not going to cut their way down to success. It's not going to turn out that all of the veteran game designers were holding back the brilliant intern who can turn the RPG industry around.
 


Remus Lupin

Adventurer
Speaking of University Professors, I recently read that they are currently making ~150K to 200K at major universities. Of course the point of the research was to say Presidents of the same universities are making 4-10X the amount of the professors...and the problems with rising costs...but I think the article missed the point.

A mere 1.5 decades ago, I recall Professors lucky to make 75-80K. So accordingly their salaries have risen 200-300% since then if my old memory hasn't failed.

Not to put down Professors, they do a grand job...but I don't think the economies have gone up 200-300% in that time period. I'd say there's ONE BIG major point of influence on the rise of tuition costs right there.

Well, there may be a few stars that make that kind of money in Academia, but even professors at R1 universities in the United States seldom see that kind of salary. The ones that do are generally full professors with university appointments and some personal cache (e.g., Cornel West, a nobel prize winner).

If 1.5 decades ago professors made the amounts you suggest, then far from outstripping inflation, our salaries have been stagnant and perhaps even deflated. But I'd have to look at more data to say with any degree of confidence that any of this was true.
 

Mark CMG

Creative Mountain Games
The thing is we are talking about one specific company (. . .)


No, *we* are not. I was speaking in general terms and *you* wanted to make it about some spcific details of WotC which I will not do because *we* both know that the ones *you* require do not exist as general knowledge. If *you* know somethinjg about WotC, feel free to share it, but don't tell *me* that my discussions of general corporate business practices do not apply unless they can be proven and then base *your* specific discussions on assumptions that *you* want to make. The only specifics I mention are those that are the facts of record regarding the frequency and timing of the actual layoffs.


As I said, WotC is not in a business that lends itself well to steady-state staffing in the long term (. . .)


Rather, because of the way they run their business it does not lend itself to steady-state staffing. Again, you are trying to say that because of how things are they cannot be otherwise. I don't buy it. Paizo has a different business model that apparently doesn't require cyclical layoffs. Yes, yes, Paizo is different, no stockholders with expectations, etc. but that's precisely the point of the general corporate business practices discussion *I* was having earlier.

(RPGs are neither movies nor toasters.)

Besides which, intimating that there is no work in-house for someone who can work on RPGs, fiction, and their wargames lines (Rich Baker) when they obviously have work in all three areas going on currently and the employee has a proven track record for which he was promoted just six months ago speaks in marked contrast to all of what you are trying to say.
 


Incenjucar

Legend
A stock ticker... wow.

That's a whole new level of risky mentality. Not really a healthy long-term choice for a company unless it has strong lobbyists.
 

Remove ads

Top