Obective look at WotC's history with D&D

[Fifth Element]

And in layoffs, I see a failing by managment. If I'm cutting a weak employee, I see where I failed to deploy that person to the right place where they'd be strong, or a mistake in hiring them and putting them in this position when they could have found a better fit had I not hired them.

You're missing the crucial example of "not being able to predict the future with 100% accuracy". Sometimes you can make a 95% move and still fail, because the 5% is how it turns out.

 

[Janx]

You're missing the crucial example of "not being able to predict the future with 100% accuracy". Sometimes you can make a 95% move and still fail, because the 5% is how it turns out.

If something fails and the business has no robustness to absorb the hit and has to do layoffs to make the balance sheet look good, once again, it's a failing of the business, not the employee*.

*barring that the employee made a bad product that caused the loss of revenue. Which my experience tends to be that big companies have no clue to hit the right employee anyway.

 

[DaveMage]

I think it's important to remember that the WotC that saved D&D from TSR no longer exists.

That WotC was run by Peter Adkison and was its own company.

The WotC of today is a subsidiary of Hasbro.

The WotC run by Peter Adkison gets kudos, but the subsidiary of Hasbro has become a very, very poor custodian of the brand (as evidenced by the OP). Had Hasbro not taken over, I think WotC today would look very similar to how Paizo has turned out to be.

I don't think D&D will ever thrive again (as it once did) under the auspices of Hasbro. It will take a smaller company where D&D is special, not just another brand that needs to make huge profits to justify its existence.

 

[Umbran]

If something fails and the business has no robustness to absorb the hit and has to do layoffs to make the balance sheet look good, once again, it's a failing of the business, not the employee*.

I think you're still missing something. So, a real-world example: In 2008 the stock market took a dive. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology lost about a third of the University's endowments - several *billion* dollars evaporated almost overnight. Several departments got their budgets from the interest earned on the endowments, and had to cut their budgets, and therefore their staff, and so people got laid off.

Perhaps you can view not being prepared for that level of disaster a "mistake", but I think of it more as an unpredictable external event that no sane business tries to account for.

That is an extreme case, for a large enterprise. The same idea still holds on the smaller scale - not everything that fails to go according to plan is a "mistake" by someone in particular. Viewing it that way is, I think, part of the blame-game that is itself a common error in modern business.

 

[Fifth Element]

If something fails and the business has no robustness to absorb the hit and has to do layoffs to make the balance sheet look good, once again, it's a failing of the business, not the employee*.

*barring that the employee made a bad product that caused the loss of revenue. Which my experience tends to be that big companies have no clue to hit the right employee anyway.

Ah, I didn't realize you were looking at it as a dichotomy: if it's not management's failing, it's the employee's. That's not the case. Sometime both are blameless, because you cannot predict the future.

Layoffs do nothing to make a balance sheet look good, by the way. There's no information about future employee wages and benefits on the balance sheet.

 

[Fifth Element]

That is an extreme case, for a large enterprise. The same idea still holds on the smaller scale - not everything that fails to go according to plan is a "mistake" by someone in particular. Viewing it that way is, I think, part of the blame-game that is itself a common error in modern business.

I fully agree in principle, but I think the example is a poor one. The stock market is inherently volatile, and basing your budgets on investment income seems a poor (ie, very risky) plan for an institution like that.

 

[nnms]

I think it's important to remember that the WotC that saved D&D from TSR no longer exists.

That WotC was run by Peter Adkison and was its own company.

The WotC of today is a subsidiary of Hasbro.

The WotC run by Peter Adkison gets kudos, but the subsidiary of Hasbro has become a very, very poor custodian of the brand (as evidenced by the OP). Had Hasbro not taken over, I think WotC today would look very similar to how Paizo has turned out to be.

I don't think D&D will ever thrive again (as it once did) under the auspices of Hasbro. It will take a smaller company where D&D is special, not just another brand that needs to make huge profits to justify its existence.

I don't think i could have said it better myself.

I just don't think it's realistic for D&D to ever reach the revenue level Hasbro is looking for. Since 2008, they've given up so much of the market share to other games. Why should 5e suddenly get it back? I think 5e will take a good chunk of the market share (much like 4e has now) but I doubt it will ever be a overwhelming majority like D&D has held in the past.

I think the age of D&D being the 800 pound gorilla is gone and is never coming back.

And I think we have Dancey & Adkison to thank for that in that the OGL means that all future versions of D&D will have to compete with both 3.x and versions of D&D-like games that other people can make with the OGL.

 

[WheresMyD20]

The fact that D&D exists at all?

I don't buy this argument. The D&D brand always had value, even if TSR as a company did not. Some company would have bought D&D. It just happened to be WotC, for better or worse. There was never any chance of D&D disappearing.

 

[Fifth Element]

I don't buy this argument. The D&D brand always had value, even if TSR as a company did not. Some company would have bought D&D. It just happened to be WotC, for better or worse. There was never any chance of D&D disappearing.

That's easy to say in retrospect, of course. We can't know whether it's true or not.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

D&D as a hobby may exist for a thousand years, but D&D as a commercially viable product could indeed disappear.