Jeff Grubb on WotC and layoffs

[Alphastream]

Paizo is doing as well or better than WotC in the RPG industry despite huge disadvantages in brand recognition because its pretty darn obvious that that is where the talent has gone. The system may not be perfect, but at least you aren't bored out of your mind reading the material. WotC never made a bigger mistake in the 3rd edition era than when it decided that modules don't matter.

D&D beat out its competitors in the early days because of modules. D&D is still in many ways relying on its old modules for content. Paizo is beating WotC because of modules.

D&D beat out other games because at first it was the only game, and because when other games came out it still out-competed them. Were their adventures better? Maybe, but I'm not sure that was the only or even biggest reason. There was a lot of quality across the board.

As for all the talent going to Paizo... that's just a ludicrous claim. Both companies have fantastic talent. Both draw upon fantastic freelancers. Wizards pays the best rates, and most people I know would consider them to have the best talent and to be the place to publish, but there is a ton of great talent in the RPG industry and both companies enjoy it by being respected brands.

And Wizards is making adventures. They are making more adventures than anyone. They don't sell them in stores... they give them out for free through Encounters and through LFR and other organized play. My stack of Encounters adventures isn't as big as my AD&D adventures, but if I put all the gameday and other 4E adventures I have, it is very close. And that's without including any of the 200+ LFR adventures. Think LFR doesn't count? Those admins are paid by WotC (though a small sum) and separately work as freelancers for WotC and have as much design and dev experience as folks at small RPGs. Then you have DDI/Dungeon, which is not easy to land as a gig, with top-notch editors and developers. By pages, by word, by tonnage, they are deep into the adventure-writing business. Sure, you haven't seen the latest classic adventure. We may never see it. We live in a different age. An RPG adventure doesn't sit on the shelf for 10 years like it did back then. I must have run Pharaoh six times for different groups over a decade. Innovations, as with Ravenloft, were significant - but that is increasingly hard to do. We just don't live in that world anymore.

 

[Tymophil]

[...]These people love gaming, work overtime to bring us the best gaming possible, and deeply care about us (when we aren't flaming them on the internet).[...]

It may be because I am French, but you seem to draw a picture of D&D that doesn't match my experience at all. D&D4 sold so poorly that it is not published any more in French... Still Pathfinder is, despite a terrible translation.

[...]As for all the talent going to Paizo... that's just a ludicrous claim. Both companies have fantastic talent. Both draw upon fantastic freelancers.[...]

From MY point of view, it SEEMS that, nowadays, WotC emphasizes format and deadlines over content. For example, I can't seem to understand why the adventure included in the D&D4 Dungeon Master's Guide is so poor : monsters plus trap, then monsters plus trap, then monsters plus trap, then... It is boring as hell. Who reviewed Mr. Wyatt work? It is obvious that this is going to bore people!
Why is the Skill Challenge rule so poorly implemented in this book? Why are there no skill challenge in the included adventure? Once again, who reviewed the author's work? D&D4 introduced new concepts, it needed a good work to make it come across to players. This was not done. The adventures never played on the strength of D&D4. I would go as far as say that it stressed its weaknesses. It was obvious, why did noone see it at WotC?

[...]I must have run Pharaoh six times for different groups over a decade. Innovations, as with Ravenloft, were significant - but that is increasingly hard to do. We just don't live in that world anymore.[...]

First, I have to say that I found, and still find, almost all published adventures from TSR, WotC bland at best, terrible at worst. I have DMed very few of them over time, though I played, as a PC, my share of them and read (and bought) lots of modules in the last four decades.
Very, very few modules have been interesting over time. Some background material have been inspiring (PlaneScape comes to mind), some Dungeon magazine adventures were good, but almost every module I bought from TSR, WotC was never used. Most of the time, I simply looked at format to inspire me. But the synopsis, the plot, the hooks were always terrible.
In its days, Ravenloft was a success, sure. So was DragonLance. But, let's face it, when they published those adventures, I was playing much better adventures written by amateurs Dungeon Masters in magazines or simply unpublished modules for the week-end game. Both Ravenloft and DragonLance (railroaded as can be) were poor by that standard, but seemed strikingly good because everything else was simply terrible. So people who played modules mainly thought that these were masterpieces. I don't think they were, and nostalgia won't be enough to make them shine.

 

[smerwin29]

Thank you, Alphastream, for bringing some much needed perspective to this topic. I have interviewed twice to work at WotC as a game designer/editor. Then I stopped applying for jobs there because of the uncertainty of the industry as a whole--I couldn't leave a good job and uproot my family. However, if I didn't have those responsibilities, I would have happily and with eyes wide open continued to pursue opportunities there.

As you said more eloquently than I could, WotC is in a strange position as being a small company beholden, if only tangentially, to a huge corporation. But in the end, it really is still a small company. And if you separate out the RPG side of things from the rest, it is a REALLY small company.

I've got a shelf full of games from more and diverse companies than I care to think about. Some are great, regardless of the size of the company. Some are less than stellar, again regardless of company size. But I know that these games have quite literally changed the course of my life from a very early age. I can only thank those people who have helped make them happen, no matter what company they work for. I hope WotC, Paizo, and all of the other RPG companies of the present and the future can prosper and continue to give us all the choices to play any game we want.

 

[wrecan]

If you want to save the jobs of people working on the D&D brand at Wizards right now, spend as much money as you can afford (or more) on D&D products, regardless of their quality or desirability. As long as D&D makes money, the budgetary constraints are lower and layoffs become less of a priority.

Of course that isn't necessarily the best way to get quality products. And you'd likely be sacrificing your own financial well-being in order to keep some really great folks like Bart Carroll, Chris Perkins, and Rodney Thompson employed. But, at least you won't be some soulless consumer looking out for number one all the time.

 

[Matt James]

Just speculating... but this may be one reason why author by-lines are now showing up as "RPG Team" or "Wizards RPG Team" on several 4E products.

At least, that's how several recent supplements have shown their authors over at Amazon.

Those are placeholders.

 

[Mark CMG]

There are a lot of ways to look at it.

How about others that don't include cyclical layoffs.

If you want to experiment a lot in hopes of finding a way out of the typical (horrible) RPG profitability cycle, isn't it better to over-hire so you can try new things? It isn't like employees of Wizards don't know layoffs might come.

Periodically culling the higher salaries about mid- to low-level employees and laying off people who have recently been promoted has nothing to do with over-hiring to try new things.

Wizards could make having no layoffs a priority. It would likely mean reducing budgetary risk, which would cut down on innovation. I'm not sure we want that, or WotC employees want that (they want to work at an innovative company). Similarly, it is pretty clear that Paizo's MMO is a separate entity so it can be severed if it fails. But we all know that could happen. If it does, that risk will result in a loss of work for someone. It's the risk you take for great results. The alternative is to think small.

The cyclical layoffs have nothing to do with whether or not they can or will be innovative. It's about corporate greed and you just have to look toward executive salaries and compensation packages. They could have trimmed the CEO salary by a fraction and avoided any layoffs at all.

Brian Goldner: Executive Profile & Biography - BusinessWeek


*edit*

(. . .) Hero Games (laid off 2/3 of employees, down to 1) (. . .)

Nothing to do with corporate greed and a particularly bad form to bring up their misfortune in the same context. Hero Games didn't layoff a bunch of employees (nor do so year in and year out) to "reward" top execs.

 

[Therise]

If you want to save the jobs of people working on the D&D brand at Wizards right now, spend as much money as you can afford (or more) on D&D products, regardless of their quality or desirability. As long as D&D makes money, the budgetary constraints are lower and layoffs become less of a priority.

Of course that isn't necessarily the best way to get quality products. And you'd likely be sacrificing your own financial well-being in order to keep some really great folks like Bart Carroll, Chris Perkins, and Rodney Thompson employed. But, at least you won't be some soulless consumer looking out for number one all the time.

Yeesh. Here's my one and only rule on buying gaming products: they have to be excellent and truly high quality in the FIRST PLACE. In this economy, I'm not spending a dime on something low quality or something I find vaguely okay just to support WotC or any other company. Be serious, gaming products are technically luxury purchases, not something that needs to be bought to demonstrate sensitivity.

 

[wrecan]

Yeesh. Here's my one and only rule on buying gaming products: they have to be excellent and truly high quality in the FIRST PLACE. In this economy, I'm not spending a dime on something low quality or something I find vaguely okay just to support WotC or any other company. Be serious, gaming products are technically luxury purchases, not something that needs to be bought to demonstrate sensitivity.

Then why should shareholders be more generous than the fans? If the people who love the game won't sacrifice their earnings for the love of the game, why should a Hasbro executive be expected to show more generosity? I like Rich Baker. I like Steve Winters. But I'm not going to take money out of my savings account to help make up the salary gap that led the "number crunchers" to decide that the should be let go.

People are saying that Hasbro is being short-sighted by firing developers with experience and proven track record. Maybe so. But the consumers are even more shortsighted. I don't see any consumers advocating buying substandard products on the notion that the developers behind the products have a proven track record and we want them to stay in the game (literally).

Paizo might be the darling of the moment, like White Wolf was in the 1990's. And maybe they'll supplant Wizards and maybe they won't. But what I do know is that it won't be because they magically found a way to avoid short-term planning. The corporations have to be short-term planners, not merely because their owners are interested in the short-term (or at least the quarter), but because their customers only care about the next release.

 

[Nathal]

Agreed.

The names don't really mean anything. If they title a book "The D&D Book of Cool Treasures" no one's going to care if it's written by Monte Cook or John Doe.

That's why freelancers are a much better value for WotC than expensive full-timers.

The names don't mean anything the first time. But they sure mean a lot to me after that first encounter. It has to do with the quality and style of that particular author. I don't recall avoiding an RPG book because of the author, but I sure do remember buying a book without reading it cover-to-cover first because of the name on the cover. I trusted that name. Am I really that unusual?

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

A series of somewhat connected thoughts after reading through this thread:

I don't know with absolute certainty about the Hasbro/WotC relationship, but I know from my own experience working for a smaller company, bought by a major corporation, but left as a subsidiary company, that the CEO and board are likely not controlling things at WotC to the point where they decide to have Christmas layoffs there. More likely WotC has certain goals set by the corporation, and as the end of the fiscal year approaches senior management at WotC has to do something to meet those goals. How exactly they do so is made at the WotC senior management levels. Executive Management approves the decision, but does not make it and won't step in unless they see something seriously wrong (not likely if they make their goals). I have no idea who runs the business side of WotC, but my feeling is that they are not bold leaders who are willing to take risks to change up the business model and attempt to achieve greater success at the risk of doing worse and getting fired themselves.

Regarding the firing of veterans, because a single individual achieves greater savings: that is only true to a certain degree. Benefits are pretty level across pay grade and are a large cost to the company. Laying off two employees making 50k is worth more than one employee making 100k. It is a balancing act between who and how many people you actually need to accomplish the work. In a creative industry such as RPGs, the other issue is one of the new, creative blood versus a veteran who is coming up with fewer really new ideas.

Comparing RPG talent to NFL players: Please! Even star players are traded, contracts not renewed etc. It is only the rare talent that gets the Franchise tag and knows they are safe for a long time.

Dangers of the cyclical layoff of veterans: Someone mentioned in an earlier post that WotC has the best salaries in the industry: that's because they have to. The calculus of a talented RPG writer has to take into account that they might only have the job for a short time before they get hit in the annual purging; therefore the upfront compensation has to be higher in order to bring them in, and some won't take the risk no matter what. While there is no such thing as a guaranteed job in this day and age, a company with a reputation for standing behind their staff will be able to attract talent at a lower cost because the employees are more certain that longer term employment is dependent on their own performance and what they achieve for the company, rather than the short-term bottom line.