On WotC's "Surge"

[AbdulAlhazred]

No it doesn't. You don't cancel planned and announced releases if you're on track and doing well! If everything were going according to plan, the canceled books would never have been announced in the first place.

There's a difference between "planned change" and "panicky flailing." This has all the hallmarks of the latter. Sudden cancellations, botched and hasty rollouts of electronic material, a massive bet on an untested offering... the last time D&D looked like this was in the mid-90s, and we know how that turned out.

All is not lost yet (I hope!), but Dancey's "death spiral" prediction is looking more true every day. Best-case, the changes they are making right now just happen to be exactly what's needed; the ship is righted and the money starts rolling in. Or some angel company waiting in the wings swoops in to save the day, like WotC itself did with TSR. But there's no guarantee of either.

Eh, all you have to have is different people with different agendas and plans. One guy replaces another. He has to pretend to keep to whatever plan already existed, needs to placate this or that person for whatever reason. Or it is keeping your options open in some fashion. I've seen a lot of stuff go on in big companies. Been on both sides of it. Certainly indicates to me there are divergences of opinion on what the plan is, but not necessarily that the ship is sinking. If the ship was really sinking I'd think you'd NOT launch a new CB and MB and VTT, but just keep up the low level of support to the existing ones for instance.

In any case we're the black hole of accurate info here. We'll probably never know until 5 years from now when some of these guys are out and care to talk about it.

I am wondering if the Class Compendium was cancelled to keep the PHB1 from being obsolete. If the Class Compendium was bringing the PHB1 class up to current errated and essentials standards what need for the original heavily errated and updated PHB1 books. I suspect there maybe a lot of PHB1 outthere that would have eventually found there way back to WoTC as never going to sell.

Maybe someone with more knowledge of the publishing industry could comment on this angle.

Well, it might have made sense to someone. Of course it wouldn't make a lot of sense to anyone that knows much about D&D since the PHB1 is pretty much done and you can stick a fork in it already. Of course corporate could quite easily have come down with something like that. Again I think it points to my theory that there is just a level of disagreement within WotC and different people are going at cross purposes.

Obviously someone wanted Heroes of Sword and Spell out there, or at least thought it would sell well enough to be worth publishing. Obviously someone either decided that was not true or someone else decided to weigh in and pull it. The key question would be which side was Bill Slaviczek on? Is he calling these shots and running things in that product line or is it someone else either pulling strings with higher ups or the higher ups themselves lowering some boom/meddling? We will NEVER know, unless someone starts leaking gossip and that doesn't seem to happen much over there.

 

[BryonD]

... I've seen a lot of stuff go on in big companies...

You are certainly correct. And there is lack of absolute knowledge all around.

But, the circumstantial evidence is not limited to stuff within WotC. We hear no raving news about success. We constantly hear this source or that source say their data suggests it ain't so great. Some people immediately start screaming that the evidence is incomplete. And they are right.

But, if you pull 25 marbles out of a bag and they are all black, you still not know the true contents of the bag. However, insisting that it holds 50/50 black and white marbles isn't a reasonable interpretation. But, no one could prove you wrong on it, so you could stick to it all you want.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

You are certainly correct. And there is lack of absolute knowledge all around.

But, the circumstantial evidence is not limited to stuff within WotC. We hear no raving news about success. We constantly hear this source or that source say their data suggests it ain't so great. Some people immediately start screaming that the evidence is incomplete. And they are right.

But, if you pull 25 marbles out of a bag and they are all black, you still not know the true contents of the bag. However, insisting that it holds 50/50 black and white marbles isn't a reasonable interpretation. But, no one could prove you wrong on it, so you could stick to it all you want.

Well, I haven't seen any estimated sales figures on Essentials, but it was named #3 on the big list of top 10 toy products of 2010. Doesn't really sound bad to me. There's been a lot of kvetching about it on this particular forum and the usual breast beating and flame wars on the WotC GA forum, but mostly all I hear from people I talk to is "we like it a lot". So it could be that it only sold sort of middling well or whatever, but it seems unlikely they took a bath on it. So in that sense any speculation about 4e's sales and whatnot isn't even pulling marbles out of any bag, it is feeling the bag and deciding the lumps feel black and hearing some rumor around the water cooler that somebody heard that someone else told someone that the marbles are black.

Honestly though, I don't seriously think I know squat. I'm not even saying I actually have an opinion. Any random statement on this thread could be entirely correct or none of them. I was just presenting a perfectly plausible alternative point of view for the purposes of contrasting it with the usual doom saying.

 

[The Little Raven]

Sudden cancellations, botched and hasty rollouts of electronic material, a massive bet on an untested offering... the last time D&D looked like this was in the mid-90s, and we know how that turned out.

Yeah, if you make incredibly vague statements, two things can look very similar. But when you take into account the actual details of TSR's condition, via Ryan Dancey, they aren't so similar...

I read the severance agreements between the company and departed executives which paid them extraordinary sums for their silence.

I met staff members who were determined to continue to work, despite the knowledge that they might not get paid, might not even be able to get in to the building each day.

I saw people who were working on the same manuscripts they'd been working on six months earlier, never knowing if they'd actually be able to produce the fruits of their labor.

I discovered that the cost of the products that company was making in many cases exceeded the price the company was receiving for selling those products.

I toured a warehouse packed from floor to 50 foot ceiling with products valued as though they would soon be sold to a distributor with production stamps stretching back to the late 1980s. I was 10 pages in to a thick green bar report of inventory, calculating the true value of the material in that warehouse when I realized that my last 100 entries had all been "$0"'s.

Nothing indicates any of this is occurring at WotC, so the comparison is incredibly weak.

 

[Dausuul]

Yeah, if you make incredibly vague statements, two things can look very similar. But when you take into account the actual details of TSR's condition, via Ryan Dancey, they aren't so similar...

Nothing indicates any of this is occurring at WotC, so the comparison is incredibly weak.

And if you list off a bunch of information about a now-defunct company that only insiders had access to before the company's dissolution, you can then note that we non-insiders have heard no such information about a still-existing company, and therefore no comparison between the two is valid!

Suppose this stuff were occurring at WotC right now. What would you expect to hear, different from what we are hearing? We do know that WotC has had round after round of layoffs in the RPG department, to the point that the yearly Christmas layoff has become a grim joke around here. We know that they are unexpectedly canceling products and making big bets on new material. We know they're making a push to branch out into new media like board games, and releasing gimmicky products like fortune cards. We know there's a lot of fragmentary and imperfect evidence to suggest 4E sales are lackluster and the player base is deeply split, and very little evidence--fragmentary or otherwise--pointing the other way.

Obviously the comparison should not be taken too far. I doubt very much, for example, that WotC has a warehouse full of 10-year-old material being used to prop up the stated value of its inventory. And I also doubt they are selling product at a loss. The point is that the company's output looks similarly erratic, suggesting a product line in deep trouble and management unable to formulate a coherent strategy to deal with it.

The companies are different, of course, and if D&D is indeed in a death spiral, the ultimate endgame will also be different. Hasbro is not about to go out of business and neither is Wizards (they still have Magic to sustain them, which is by all accounts going like gangbusters), and they won't simply abandon the D&D IP. But it could well end up becoming a sort of "ghost town" game, with no new content being released, until a few years down the road someone comes up with a plan to revive the brand with 5E.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

And on the contrary view we have nothing but vague speculation to say that 4e sales aren't good. We've really not heard anything to suggest it is at all bad. Supposedly PF and 4e sell at roughly equal rates. Paizo certainly doesn't seem to be dying, so I would say it is quite feasible that 4e is doing fine too.

WotC has been hiring and firing RPG game devs since long before 4e was even conceived. The place has a rotating door. Half the people doing RPG development on a serious basis have worked there in the past dozen years. I don't know what the size of the staff in the D&D department is now, but I'd imagine it was ramped up for pumping out the last 3 years of 4e stuff. Is it now more or less than it was in say 2005? I really don't know. This might be something one could deduce, unlike sales, but I haven't actually seen where anyone has made that comparison. I'd say staffing levels are a good indication of where things are at, but even if they are just back to what they had in 3.x days that just means they have what they need to cruise along. Times are hard too, companies are running lean and mean. Far and few between are those that are adding lots of staff.

And really, what does all this talk of sinking ships and desperate times really rest on? It rests on the cancellation of TWO (possibly 3) books. It is an interesting event, but hardly unprecedented or earth shattering in its implications. It could represent a desire to shift more to digital content, a difference of opinion between managers, or just an indication that these products are no longer considered important for some other reason or a combination of multiple reasons.

Sure, it is possible that things are all to hell over there, but if so then why no layoffs this year? Why no change of management. If it is really that bad I'd think you'd lay someone off and go ahead and put out the books you have in the pipeline. Obviously things aren't THAT desperate. Chances are really it is a mix of things and the truth is somewhere in between awesome and disaster. We'll no doubt find out at least what products they will be concentrating on at DDXP soon. I'm curious, but hardly alarmed.

 

[Jan van Leyden]

*Box sets. These could be mega-adventures, campaign settings, stuff with a lot of tokens or other gimmicks. Maybe one a quarter.

(...)

What do you think? Does this make sense?

Not in this way, I think. Adventures target a smaller market anyway, and boxed sets are expensive items.

But what about doing a boardgame with lots of cool stuff inside and then publish a D&D adventure using the boardgame's components (tiles, minis, props) as props for this adventure?

 

[Dausuul]

And on the contrary view we have nothing but vague speculation to say that 4e sales aren't good. We've really not heard anything to suggest it is at all bad. Supposedly PF and 4e sell at roughly equal rates. Paizo certainly doesn't seem to be dying, so I would say it is quite feasible that 4e is doing fine too.

PF and 4E selling at equal rates? You realize that's total disaster if true, right? Paizo is a tiny company compared to WotC; sales figures that would be spectacular for them (or any other RPG company) are peanuts for Wizards. I'm not aware of any time in D&D's history when it has not been the best-selling game around. There may have been a brief period in the darkest days of the '90s when Vampire: The Masquerade was beating it--sales figures are hard to come by--but that's all.

I doubt it's gotten that bad. Even if the base split right down the middle, the "no 4E" side of the split is divided among people sticking with 3E, people who went to Pathfinder, people who went back to* TSR-era D&D, people who went on to other games entirely, and people who just dropped out of the hobby. Paizo has by all accounts done a smashing job with Pathfinder and I salute them, but I would be surprised to learn that Pathfinder was selling half as much product as D&D.

[size=-2]*There are folks who never left TSR-era D&D in the first place, but they were already lost to Wizards at the time of 4E's release, so I wouldn't count them as part of the "broken base."[/size]

And really, what does all this talk of sinking ships and desperate times really rest on? It rests on the cancellation of TWO (possibly 3) books.

And the betting of the whole franchise on Essentials. And the Character Builder debacle. And the cancellation of DDM. And all the anecdotal evidence of poor 4E sales. And the management shakeup just before Essentials...

If it were just this one event, I'd agree with you. In the past, I've been mostly against the doomsayers. But this stuff just keeps accumulating.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

PF and 4E selling at equal rates? You realize that's total disaster if true, right? Paizo is a tiny company compared to WotC; sales figures that would be spectacular for them (or any other RPG company) are peanuts for Wizards. I'm not aware of any time in D&D's history when it has not been the best-selling game around. There may have been a brief period in the darkest days of the '90s when Vampire: The Masquerade was beating it--sales figures are hard to come by--but that's all.

I doubt it's gotten that bad. Even if the base split right down the middle, the "no 4E" side of the split is divided among people sticking with 3E, people who went to Pathfinder, people who went on to other games entirely, and people who just dropped out of the hobby. Paizo has by all accounts done a smashing job with Pathfinder and I salute them, but I would be surprised to learn that Pathfinder was selling half as much product as D&D.

Well, nobody really knows with any great accuracy. I'm going by what bits of industry analysis that I've seen. Doesn't mean PF overall has sold as much as 4e, just that apparently they are selling at a similar rate right now. Notice though, that says nothing about profit either. From what I can see the PF products are mostly adventures, which are infamously small money makers.

And the betting of the whole franchise on Essentials. And the Character Builder debacle. And the cancellation of DDM. And all the anecdotal evidence of poor 4E sales. And the management shakeup just before Essentials...

If it were just this one event, I'd agree with you. In the past, I've been mostly against the doomsayers. But this stuff just keeps accumulating.

I don't see where Essentials is more of a bet than any average couple of splat books. You produce the books you think will sell this year. As I've said elsewhere every book is a bet. Essentials got a lot of good press, which is about as much positive information as we can possibly have about a D&D product.

I don't know what the details of what bugs the CB has in it right now has to do with anything else. It indicates some issues in SQA, which surely should be fixed and might create a problem, but it seems likely to be independent of anything else. Management comes and management goes. If it was a shakeup, which is perfectly possible, it is as likely to be over the future direction and not the past performance (which in any case is pretty far past at this point). It doesn't have to involve any big disaster going on with 4e. They pushed out 4e, got obviously a pretty decent bump in sales over what 3.x was doing in say 2007. Now things have gone back to business as usual and corporate was promised more, so they put in a new guy.

As I've said, I don't think you need to postulate some kind of giant crisis. Between the fact that we know the RPG industry generally has been on a slow slide for the last 10 years or more and ANY substantial presence of PF competing with 4e it seems unlikely to me that just putting out 4e itself brought a radical long term change by itself. I think I'd look less at book sales and such being some kind of disaster vs just "this industry needs to change, who has the vision to do something" and Bill Slaviczek and this new MMO guy apparently have some ideas, which obviously involves DDI.

Honestly the only part of the story of the last year that at all gets my notice is the clumsy handling of the CB thing. Given that DDI logically almost has to be the wedge into the 21st century of gaming I find it telling that they have basic process issues at this point. Those are things you can fix though, they are just management details.

 

[TerraDave]

This turned out to be a pretty good thread...

We know that WotCs strategy going back to 3.5 (ie 2003/04) of selling minis and mostly player oriented hardbacks plus later the DDI with downloadable stuff isn't working, because they have totally changed it. We can certainly speculate as to why, and I have thoughts in the OP, but if it was going so great they wouldn't be dropping it like a hot potato.

Essentials was done on an accelerated basis starting about 15 months ago. The online builder was clearly suppose to role out at about the same time, and hence was probably part of the same plan. So probably about 15-18 months ago it was already clear that things needed to change. Hence the surge.

But, continuing the anology, no plan survives contact with the market. We can speculate as to how much recent hiccups are failures of execution--something which I think has been an issue for years--or just new data. Maybe hard back sales fell faster then expected, so the DDI became even more important and the WotCs more desperate to move the backstock before having to take it back.

We can't be sure, but Dausuul is right: something is off.