WotC Roll 4 Combat: Hasbro/WotC was offered 20 million for D&D at the nadir of 4e.

[Parmandur]

Sometimes I get this weird sense and wonder if I'm in an alternate universe.

I think D&D should or could have been a huge video game property much larger than it is now.

The issue is that the set-up of the video game industry mitigates pretty strongly against licensed games being any good good, especially since the quantum leap in Development costs that happened in the back half of the Aughts when HD assets became standard. Baldur's Gate 3 is already a massive exception on being a great licensed game: most big high quality games are made.by people with a stake in the property.

TSR really should have invested in games internally back when it was cheap to do so but still lucrative.

 

[Minigiant]

The issue is that the set-up of the video game industry mitigates pretty strongly against licensed games being any good good, especially since the quantum leap in Development costs that happened in the back half of the Aughts when HD assets became standard. Baldur's Gate 3 is already a massive exception on being a great licensed game: most big high quality games are made.by people with a stake in the property.

TSR really should have invested in games internally back when it was cheap to do so but still lucrative.

D&D like both Warhammer is an exception as it has a already popular lore which comes with it's own built in DLC and expansion model.

D&D is literally designed to make good games and serieses. The hard part is finding someone who will commit to doing a good job and not a cashgrab.

 

[Scribe]

D&D like both Warhammer is an exception as it has a already popular lore which comes with it's own built in DLC and expansion model.

D&D is literally designed to make good games and serieses. The hard part is finding someone who will commit to doing a good job and not a cashgrab.

Which is also sadly like Warhammer lol.

 

[Minigiant]

Which is also sadly like Warhammer lol.

Popular or semipopular High fantasy or space fantasy RPGs and War games are easy video game series due to the built in fanbases and number of races, classes, factions, variants, etc that you can drip out as DLC that gets hype.

 

[Parmandur]

D&D like both Warhammer is an exception as it has a already popular lore which comes with it's own built in DLC and expansion model.

D&D is literally designed to make good games and serieses. The hard part is finding someone who will commit to doing a good job and not a cashgrab.

Yup, and they finally got that again woth Larian. They also had that going a fair bit in the brief moment when the then-Atari had a lock down o lm the rights, and was motivated to invest time and resources in D&D.

Ultimately, the only way to really succeed is to make their own game studios and bring decelopment internal sonthey can control it...which WotC has been working on.

 

[Scribe]

Popular or semipopular High fantasy or space fantasy RPGs and War games are easy video game series due to the built in fanbases and number of races, classes, factions, variants, etc that you can drip out as DLC that gets hype.

Yeah, and yet the number of actually good 40K games is...well I cant even think of any, maybe that new RPG but I havent played it yet.

Dawn of War 1 and 2.

 

[mamba]

D&D is literally designed to make good games and serieses. The hard part is finding someone who will commit to doing a good job and not a cashgrab.

the problem with licensed games generally is that you pay a lot for the license, which cuts into the actual budget for the game, as the retail price is essentially fixed, and I do not really believe the license generates a lot of customers beyond what the game would have attracted anyway

 

[humble minion]

Ultimately, the only way to really succeed is to make their own game studios and bring decelopment internal sonthey can control it...which WotC has been working on.

And then you inevitably become primarily a video game company rather than a tabletop game company, simply because making high-quality modern video games is such a personnel-heavy, slow, and expensive business compared to making RPGs (or Warhammer, for instance). If you don't, you end up having a videogame tail that's much, much bigger than the D&D dog.

We know that the D&D/WotC just underwent big job cuts, but even before that, I strongly suspect that the entire D&D development staff at WotC/Hasbro would not have matched in headcount even one single moderate video game studio. This is why IP owners licence out their video game tie-ins rather than do them in-house, we're just talking projects that are orders of magnitude more expensive and complex than tabletop, and require massive initial expense and expense, in an industry where probably 80% of products get launched and then fade away with a resounding 'meh' a couple of months after release.

 

[Parmandur]

And then you inevitably become primarily a video game company rather than a tabletop game company, simply because making high-quality modern video games is such a personnel-heavy, slow, and expensive business compared to making RPGs (or Warhammer, for instance). If you don't, you end up having a videogame tail that's much, much bigger than the D&D dog.

We know that the D&D/WotC just underwent big job cuts, but even before that, I strongly suspect that the entire D&D development staff at WotC/Hasbro would not have matched in headcount even one single moderate video game studio. This is why IP owners licence out their video game tie-ins rather than do them in-house, we're just talking projects that are orders of magnitude more expensive and complex than tabletop, and require massive initial expense and expense, in an industry where probably 80% of products get launched and then fade away with a resounding 'meh' a couple of months after release.

Well, yeah, that's the way it's trending. WotC has 5 internal video game studios they've encountered building for a few years now, plus the Magic Arena team and the D&D VTT team. That's why Wizards of the Coast is their own division in Jasbro: they are Digital Gaming.

The TTRPG development being, first, cheap, and second, getting less of a focus from the corporation is something I consider good for the game and hobby.