WotC WotC President Cynthia Williams Resigns

Eyes of Nine said:

Y'all are killing me with referring to Williams as CEO. Cocks is the CEO of Hasbro, she was President of WotC. Difference of scale and who's your boss. Cocks was her boss. Cocks' boss is the Board of Directors.

That said, I don't feel like her tenure as prez of WotC did much for D&D nor MtG. I also don't feel like she was terrible for D&D, compared to previous WotC presidents; but MtG's hyper-release schedule and license of everything under the sun imo has been not great from a hobbyist's perspective

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I'm not sure whether Williams was impactful at all. There were plans in place before she joined up, and she was there for only two years, so she probably didn't get enough time to make any big decisions on her own. She was middle management in a President role. It's not a dig against her. She just wasn't there long enough, or invested in the brands/products long enough, to make any real difference. If she was invested, she'd still be there.

I want the next president to build a dynastic player-focused culture that calls out the corporate BS. Someone with the experience and charisma to influence the Board and stockholders into understanding that catering to the needs of the Community is the correct, and profitable, thing to do.

GMMichael said:

I heard she rolled a 1 on her latest Profession (CEO) check. We all know how swingy those checks can be.

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At least it wasn't LBB Traveller rules. Doesn't have to make a survival roll.

GDW must have been rough to work for.

Ruin Explorer said:

So people who want old edition SRDs really strongly, I guess you should be praying for WotC to absolutely go full foot-in-mouth again!

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Given WotC's past track record, you're all allowed to roll with advantage on that divine intervention roll.

LordEntrails said:

Just because the public was given two weeks notice, does not mean the board or Hasbro was given two weeks notice. She could have easily told them a year ago and nobody got around to find a replacements for her to train. Plenty of companies don't react to employees resignation plans/statements until actually forced to do so.
It's possible they knew nothing until she turned in a two week notice. Or it could be that her boss(es) have known for weeks and months and didn't announce it for a hundred different reasons.

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It seems pretty clear to me that they didn't want to announce her leaving during the late 2023 layoffs or in Q1 when they needed to build momentum for the year. Announcing the President's leaving in Q4 or Q1 could have hurt stock and shareholder trust even more. They needed breathing room.

Dire Bare said:

Disagree. They already screwed up releasing the 5E SRD into the Creative Commons, and (wisely) would like to avoid making similar errors again.

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How would such an error be made? What IP, specifically, is in those old SRDs that's not already Open Game Content? Because other than the legal declaration that certain terms aren't usable, there doesn't seem to be any.

Dire Bare said:

The 3E SRD already exists, but might need to be modified before being released into the CC.

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How? Specifically, how would it need to be modified for CC release, as opposed to the way it was released under the OGL, legal declaration notwithstanding?

Dire Bare said:

They might be able to use the 4E SRD as well.

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Really? The one that's nothing but references to various powers and abilities and such without actually saying what they do?

Dire Bare said:

But no other editions have such a document.

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Only if you don't count d20 Modern as an edition.

Dire Bare said:

If you are going to release something like this into the Creative Commons . . . where there are no take-backs . . . you would be wise to take the time to cross all of your "i's" and dot all of your "t's".

I mean, it shouldn't take years of time, but . . . it takes staff time, which likely is at a premium right now. And again . . . low priority.

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Below, I've attached a zip file containing all of the 3.5 SRD documents. Notice how each and every single one of them has the same line at the top: "This material is Open Game Content, and is licensed for public use under the terms of the Open Game License v1.0a." (The sole exception being the "Legal" document, which reiterates the OGL itself, outlines several Product Identity terms that I'm pretty sure don't even appear elsewhere in the SRD, and flat-out says that everything else is Open Game Content.)

Reviewing something that's been out in the public, just to make sure it doesn't somehow have any IP that's somehow been overlooked by everyone for over twenty years, should take a single staffer an afternoon at most (the OGL doesn't have take-backs either). Quite frankly, the only thing that makes sense is that either they're backing off on releasing this under the CC completely and don't want to publicly say so, or (like @kenmarable speculated), unnecessary hoops have been added for no reason except someone wants to save face.

Lupin said:

Hopefully the new boss, whomever they are, will actually allow the older edition SRDs to go into Creative Commons.

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“She helped implement Cocks’ Blueprint 2.0 strategy, which narrowed Hasbro’s focus on licensing the company’s most profitable brands and emphasizing digital products as much as possible….That blueprint has not materialized in the way Cocks wanted. The company faces an extremely tough 2023 and laid off 1,100 workersin order to salvage a bump in stock prices at the end of a tumultuous year that saw both the OGL fiasco and the miraculous success of Baldur's Gate 3. We can’t say for sure that Williams’ departure signals yet another new phase within the flagging toy giant or if the Wizards’ president found an opportunity to deploy her golden parachute before things get worse.”

I think Cox is scapegoating her. He promised doubling 2022's profits by 2025. I'm not going to miss her but unless Cox leaves I don't think much will change. I hope I am wrong. I really worry about them bungling the new PHB launch. New magic product is riddled with typos and other QC errors.

Oofta said:

If she had been fired, it would have been immediate departure. So for some reason she decided to leave, we'll never know. Honestly I don't see how it really matters.

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More likely it was either something personal and urgent which would suck, or a pressured resignation. Resign and get your goodies, or we fire you and you get less.

Ibrandul said:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

After a very brief search, Wizards of the Coast, subsidiary of Hasbro (NASDAQ: HAS) Gaming, announced today that it has selected David Williams to replace outgoing Cynthia Williams as company president.

Reached for comment, David Williams said he plans to embrace modern telecommuting culture by forging a bold path into the future for the Renton, Washington, based gaming company from the comfort of his secure cell at Boston Ridgegate Mental Facility.

Prior to joining the company, David Williams achieved success as a seasonal main antagonist on the ABC comedy-drama mystery television series Desperate Housewives. Portrayed by actor Neal McDonough, he is excited to bring the leadership skills he demonstrated as landlord and motivational speaker to the commercial sector of tabletop gaming and online garden-wall construction, a spokesperson told Ibrandul News.

"David is a real visionary," the spokesperson added. "He frequently hallucinates."

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"He frequently hallucinates, just like a Large Language Model, which is exactly the kind of optimized use of AI that we’re looking for over here at Wizards of the Coast.”

My baseline reaction what a harsh "HA!", but that was petty of me.

And it's not like she was the actual center of this fiasco. She was just the voice and face of it. The real... people... are still there, I feel.

Over the decades. I’ve been around several game companies’ changes of people at the top where I was in a position to know what was going on behind the scenes. In none of those cases was anything visible to the gaming public the primary motive for the change. There were personal clashes, burnout and wanting to get out of the biz, energy-draining personal and/or familial crises [1], and unexpected better offers, and like that. Things gamers at large could see were sometimes secondary concerns, but more often not.

It’s possible this case is an exception. But I’ll bet not.

[1]: it is my experience, having had too much of both, that it is harder to care about someone you love who’s suffering than to suffer yourself. Chronic pain and other suffering in a parent, spouse, or child is a hideous drain on your energy and mood. But (brief rant), because our society makes resigning/retiring to spend more time with your family when you and they need it into such a joke, many people get no opportunity to learn how common it is. Someone who actually is leaving to spend time with their family very often publicly claims some other reason to skip the mockery.