More lay-offs at WOTC! [Merged]

[Ranger REG]

Re: The Quandry

I have just spent the last couple of hours reviewing this thread, and I think I finally realized something.

Think about this:

I work in the arts. Theatre to be exact. There has been a long-running debate on the national level that business practices have killed artistic expression, that a good theatre is not measured by how much profit it makes but by it's social impact and presence as an honored and valued institution in it's community that enlightens the citizens in an entertaining and thought-provoking way, raising the quality of their lives. The idea is that simply determining the success or failure of an arts institution by the business standards of profit/loss is stupid: that's not what art is about.

True, but you still need money to fund your theater project and your time, especially when production crew and actors have bills to pay such as rent, electricity, grocery expenses, etc. It would you be great if you can cater to rich patrons who would be glad to grant you donation for the service you provide.

My point is (and I'm sorry if I lost some of you), way way WAY too many decisions in our lives are already made for us due to business ethics of profit/loss. And as gamers, it sticks-in-our-craws that a major source of our entertainment is being undermined by a business that can't see anything except in terms of larger profit margins. What is really as issue here is that we feel our game has become simply a product to be shunted around from company to company, and that's not how we feel about it on a personal level. D&D is a major part of our lives, and it hurts to see that the company who controls it doesn't feel the same way. Simply put, it's a product owned by an impersonal company that will never see it from the personal perspective we all do.

True. But what can they do? Delay paying the printers? Postpone overhead payment? Hold employees' payroll until the money really start flowing in? When it comes to running a business it is never easy, trying to balance revenue with expenses and hope that in the end you have enough money to pay your employees so they can pay their bills (salary based on seniority and positions), and you have money to pay your bills.

After all, it would be cruel to pay a company's accountant the same salary as a mail clerk working in the basement.

My frustration, and I think a lot of you feel the same way, is that we are tired of seeing D&D treated as something we feel it shouldn't be. To us, it's not simply a book to sell and make a profit from, and we yearn to see it in the hands of a smaller company that perhaps would feel the same way, approaching our hobby as we do: a creative personal expression that allows us to have an entertaining social experience with friends.

To us gamers, yes. But to those who make a career in writing those books and providing such thing to us, it's a business, and they have to treat it as such else they will no longer be in business. Now as a small company that may be great, but then you lose wider access to the distribution network. You also lose acccess to bigger funding from a parent company. Small company can still suffer the same problems as big corporation, although they may not have any backer.

Trust me, even the printing company don't give a damn. All they care is that the company pay the bill for their service (printing out the books).

It's great when you can make a living doing art, but as any artist knows you don't do art to make a living: you do it because you have to--you simply don't have a choice. I suspect some of us might think of D&D in the same way, and don't think twice about adding that great supplement to our long wish list of future purchases.

And it's just plain sad what has happened to it.

Which is probably why you'll find more starving artists who have no choice but to take a second job to make ends meet. If that's the career lifestyle you want, then knock yourself out.

 

[Q1000]

Its official, to many of you still live at home with your parants.

This layoff is not an indication of the health of the hobby but it is an indication of the state of the union. If the economy is strong then I would be worried, but it is not. Look at the stock market, look how weak thiengs are.

 

[coyote6]

An insistence that WotC is the only people worth buying from seems laughable to me.

To me, too. OTOH, saying that WotC hasn't produced anything worth buying since the core books (or FRCS, or whatever) also seems laughable to me.

In the end nobody is actualy going to work for the firm they are doing the work for. In the end everybody is going to be outsourced.

Read /Slant/, by Greg Bear.

 

[Coreyartus]

Is there no one amongst us then, in all of our infinite geekness, that can convince "someone out there" to either: 1) purchase the D&D line from WotC/Hasbro, or 2) find someone who can be convinced to purchase it and run the company like any other hobby-inspired company instead of a mega-corporation?

Let's face it, business has changed. It's not about producing a product anymore that you can be proud of (and that people will buy because it's a quality piece)--it's about mass-production and getting rich quick. Statistically, it's been proven (and I'm sorry I don't remember where I heard this) that business in the United States has changed overwhelmingly since World War II from item-producing companies to service-based industries that simply re-sell or market other products, skimming off the top. We don't actually make anything anymore (it's all done overseas). Why should Hasbro feel any pride in actually creating something when they can simply buy out the little business that happens to make what they want to sell and make huge profits mass-marketing it?

I don't have much faith in Hasbro's business rationalizations for the recent layoffs or their past actions, based on the fact that they've proven over and over again they just don't care. When the going get's tough, people and products are simply dispensible. The size of the company dictates what their actions have to be, and a smaller company (run by people who do care) has more flexibility. C'mon, look at the Great Depression, for example. Thousands of companies didn't shut down because they weren't making ENOUGH profit, they simply weren't making profit period. There's a big difference. If a smaller company owned D&D, then a period of low profit margins might be more easily accepted because the people in charge (who actually know the industry) would understand that it's to be expected. The expectations of gargantuan mountains of profit simply aren't there, and they don't get lulled into a sense of unrealistic expectations when they do happen. But Hasbro will never understand because they simply don't do business that way: big business is quick, fast, dirty, and heartless. In a word: Greedy.

How much profit does a company have to make? Everyone who is reading this thread knows that the smaller d20 companies have proven life can be very comfortable in the shallow end of the pool. It's simply a different mindset--why would anyone go into the RPG business with expectations of making the amount of money the 3E core books have made? It can't happen! Everyone knows that, so they don't over-extend themselves with a sense of false security, getting bigger than they should, causing problems down the road (like what's happening now with WotC). Small RPG companies can't afford the risk! So they simply don't.

Surely there is someone out there... We've all grown up with this game, we're in our 30's and 40's (some of us)... Didn't any of us save any money? Oh, no, wait--we all spent it buying stuff to play the game we love. Shucks.

--Coreyartus

 

[Thorin Stoutfoot]

Surely there is someone out there... We've all grown up with this game, we're in our 30's and 40's (some of us)... Didn't any of us save any money? Oh, no, wait--we all spent it buying stuff to play the game we love. Shucks.

The kind of money you can save by bringing lunch to work and not eating out only saves about a quarter million to half a million dollars, at best, by the time you're in your 30s. Maybe if you got rich during the dot com era, you can afford to buy D&D ($50 million).

But to be honest, if I had $50 million and a modicum of business sense, I probably wouldn't invest it in RPGs. Tabletop RPGs just don't make very much money. Computer RPGs make a lot more money. Of course, the best is to start a company like Id software. 7 people, $500 million in revenues. Now that's something that returns value on investment.

 

[Ezrael]

Actually, I have quite a bit of money saved. In fact, I feel kind of ashamed that as the economy slumps, I'm actually making money. But I don't have *nearly* enough cash to buy D&D from Hasbro. For all the talk of this being a small hobby, that the game is small potatoes to Hasbro, it's well and truly out of *my* reach. I don't have a trading card game making me millions I can use to get venture capital (or however Peter swung it) so that I can buy the D&D properties from a huge company that's demented enough that it puts statues of Mister Potato Head all over Rhode Island (it runs that state, I sometimes think, like it's own private fief) and rich enough to weather such insane behavior. I have no idea how much money D&D is worth, but it's got to be millions of dollars just for the licensing of the name for games like NWN and Icewind Dale II.

However, if enough of us got together, we could create an entity that *could* offer Hasbro sufficient money to buy the game...and it would be even easier to come up with enough money to do what Pazio did with Dragon and Dungeon, create a house that would run D&D autonomously. At least, my deluded brain seems to think it could be done.

 

[Olive]

just so people know... the wizards boards are working. i can never figure out why people start acting like the world is over everytime the wizards boards go down!

 

[Levekius]

Levekius:

Posting direct personal insults is not only bad form, but could get this thread closed in very short order.

Please, point to those personal insults.

I just didn't buy his arguments and explained why.

 

[AussieMoose]

Bigger picture here...

Please don't take this wrong here, but speaking of bigger pictures how bout remembering that Hasbro is in more than 1 country?

For instance, in little old Australia, Hasbro's WoTC dept only has approx 6 staff and last I checked 1 was a magic player - thats it.

Also, Hasbro plays the game in Australia by US rules, the Aussie market is quite different, yet they fail to recognise this and do things the way they are done in the US.

So if the US starts layoffs, restructures, product minimising, then Australia will soon be back to using Distributers, no market support, no offical presence etc.

Mind you, they have never advertised the RPG sector at all as it is too small too bother about, cause no one has ever promoted it, cause.... talk about cycles.

So feel pity for small countries like Australia who have 6 WoTC people here, and no one from any other RPG company here. (unless there are some lately?) New Zealand and other countries have the same problem - Ass end of the world, if America sells well, we miss out totally until the 2nd or 3rd reprint. (not that bad of course)

RPG industry here has no say, no voice really. (No GenCon etc either)

My rant. LOL

 

[Levekius]

It's ironic (and a little sad) that you dismiss nostalgia and imply that I suffer from it, when you yourself are so drunk on it. Your belief that "In the old days, D&D was better... the RPG hobby was better" is nothing but the worst example of delusional nostalgia

You won't ever find me saying that. In fact, my position is a bit similar to yours: D&D in its actual form is better than it has ever been (although I'll add the early days of OD&D were also great and a major success).

And what's with your anger toward Skip? Where'd that come from? Calm down, man.[/B]

There's no anger. I just think his name on a product is usually enough reason for me to *worry* about the content, instead of an incentive. He's awful.

Look, I appreciate your humorous reply. It's clear you care about the game, and so do I. But please, if you want to argue, stop (unsuccessfully) trying to attack my examples of how D&D is better now than ever before, and instead provide examples of how D&D is worse than ever before.

I only pointed out what didn't make sense to me. Most of it still doesn't make sense. I couldn't point examples of how D&D is worse since it isn't, IMO. I just don't think there is a need to manipulate the truth to arrive at that conclusion. If you appreciate my humorous reply, it'd be better if you weren't calling me names either

For the record: several roleplaying companies are able to produce books with much less erratas needed. (Others are even worse, but it is delusional to pretend WotC isn't in need of better playtesting/editing/proofreading) I think we can both recognize the merits of WotC without going overboard. For a company of this size, their editing ability is *abyssmal*.

Master Tools *is* a WotC project. It is commissioned by them. It has been monitored and financed by WotC and it seems a *lot* of what went wrong is due to WotC's unwillingness to finance and back it appropriately. They do share responsibility for what went wrong and there was also a revoving door of people heading the project (Dancey was one of them for a while). It is very clear that WotC must share at least equal part of the blame for this one, no?

Master Tools is also but one example. Chainmail is another failure.
The instability at upper management is directly affecting WotC's ability to plan in the long term. Another recent example are the electronic version of older products.

EDIT: Actually, never mind. You win. Forget about it. I don't want this thread to morph into a 2e/3e debate or a war (see patrick's post above). Feel free to reply, or not. [/B]

I don't wanna win anything. There is no 2e/3e debate here because it seems we both agree that 3e is a better product, and it would be pathetic for a diehard 2e fan to lose time here, don't you think?

The reason I'm debating with you (I am not here to systematically attack and destroy everything you have to say) is that I do not agree with some of the views you have expressed. 3e has a lot of good things going, and some things that can be worked on., There's always room for improvement and right now, WotC (though in big part because of Hasbro) do not have a clear plan and are not handling 3e as effectively as they could. Some things also need to be improved in the 3rd party publishing department.