WotC WotC needs an Elon Musk

[S'mon]

Y'know, I'm gonna dig into this. As a Warcraft fan, casual v hardcore is something that comes up a lot. And, due to Warcraft being, y'know, a video game, we got numbers!

Hardcore players barely make up 10% of the playerbase and that's in a good year. Turns out, no, designing the game for just those characters is not good as the current absolutely brutal series of guild crushing raids at the moment show. Said hardcore players also constantly complain about wanting Raid Finder, an accessible way for people who aren't no-lifing and try-harding, to be removed.... Despite the fact Blizz have gone on record saying that raids only exist because Raid Finder gives enough numbers to make it justifiable to even do raids.

So, due to this history, please forgive me whenever my view on folks saying "Just focus on the hardcores" I kind of am a bit skeptical. A lot skeptical, I'd argue,

I'd instead argue what WotC need to do is put more meat onto these barebones products they're releasing so as to inspire people to be more excited. Stuff like Kobold Press, or heck, even the setting books for Pathfinder, are certainly not developed for the hardcore in mind but instead remain accessible, and they're miles ahead of what WotC's doing

Also on Ravenloft, what do you actually get for keeping the Core? Because from what I see, you get an inability to easily slot in new things and being tied to a setting system that mashed together a bunch of seperate micro-settings that were designed to be played seperately in the first place. The Core may have been historic but it wasn't necessarily a good idea to even begin with

Presumably in World of Warcraft, everyone pays the same subscription fee? But with D&D traditionally the hardcore fans have vastly more per-capita expenditure. 5e was actually innovative for the RPG market by focusing more on growing the player base than on maximising sales to hardcore fans.

 

[seebs]

Presumably in World of Warcraft, everyone pays the same subscription fee? But with D&D traditionally the hardcore fans have vastly more per-capita expenditure. 5e was actually innovative for the RPG market by focusing more on growing the player base than on maximising sales to hardcore fans.

I think this relies on assumptions about what "hardcore" means, and I don't think it actually has a single consistent well-defined meaning.

When I've been at my most active in gaming, I've often bought fewer books, because I was making my own stuff anyway. For me, "hardcore" is when I'm least likely to buy more books, and "casual, just wanna roll dice and hang out with friends" is when I'm likely to buy prepackaged adventures and things.

 

[S'mon]

I think this relies on assumptions about what "hardcore" means, and I don't think it actually has a single consistent well-defined meaning.

When I've been at my most active in gaming, I've often bought fewer books, because I was making my own stuff anyway. For me, "hardcore" is when I'm least likely to buy more books, and "casual, just wanna roll dice and hang out with friends" is when I'm likely to buy prepackaged adventures and things.

Well I said "hardcore fan" not "hardcore player".

 

[Azzy]

But with D&D traditionally the hardcore fans have vastly more per-capita expenditure.

So, fans that don't have the disposable cash to keep up with wealthier fans that can buy everything aren't "hardcore"?

 

[Zardnaar]

So, fans that don't have the disposable cash to keep up with wealthier fans that can buy everything aren't "hardcore"?

I would argue the hardcore are willing to spend more on D&D regardless of their in me.

Eg in 90's I didn't have much money. Alot of my disposable money went on D&D vs cigarettes, pot, booze.

Posting here you're more or less hardcore by default.

I suspect the D&D whales to use a magic term support D&D more than casuals. One whale probably spends more than 5-10 casuals.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

But, is it?

Bob Igor is back at running Disney. Russell T. Davies is back as showrunner of Doctor Who. I think that, barring a few exceptions, you're going to see more Old Guard coming back into prominence, rather than bold new voices. We're going to be going into an economic downturn, and I think a lot of companies are going to scramble to shore up and prepare for it, and they are going to rely on people who have weathered these storms before only a decade ago. If new leadership is picked, it's going to be with people who have proven track records (James Gunn at DC, Filioni at Lucasfilm).

Billionaire vanities aside, I don't see any radical system shocks in the works for the next few years. Companies are going to go with proven winners and low risk going forward.

Going back to Igor who caused all of Disney's problems was a bad decision and Disney will yet pay for it.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

Twitter has been in a death spiral for a long time, having only been profitable for a brief period from 2018 to 2019. It was not worth $44 billion, most people valued it around $10 billion. The company needed to change. Problem is it needed surgery and investment in rebuilding the core, not a blind man running around with dynamite and a chainsaw.

No one has a crystal ball of course, but now that it's been saddled with additional debt I don't think the prognosis is great. Brand name doesn't guarantee long term success, there's nothing magical about twitter that can't be recreated. In addition, how you change a corporate culture matters and it seems like Musk didn't really want to buy the company in the first place. He's kind of like the dog that caught the car.

But even if he does turn things around, a company based on technology is completely different from a content creator with as narrow a market as WOTC. Even if they did "revitalize" the company the odds of them producing a product you personally want is vanishingly small.

Think it adding monetaized video to Twitter, at better compensation levels is a great idea, it's the only path to profitability for Twitter, and a lot of YouTube creators have been fed up with YouTube for years now.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

Yes, pre-Twitter, it was at least possible to pretend that Musk was a great businessman, if you didn’t look to closely.

I mean, even then, you’re still wondering how a person who is supposedly running three businesses has time to tweet around the clock, but still. Now, it’s pretty clear he wasn’t really “running” Tesla or SpaceX, and that when he actually runs things, he’s a pretty lousy manager and a worse businessman.

None of that us clear at all, there is no evidence of anything you've said.

He's making massive changes at Twitter, you have to expect a pain period, we won't really be able judge for at least 5 years.

 

[Zardnaar]

None of that us clear at all, there is no evidence of anything you've said.

He's making massive changes at Twitter, you have to expect a pain period, we won't really be able judge for at least 5 years.

Space X would have gone bankrupt without government contracts. He's essentially was reliant on public money.

 

[Bolares]

Think it adding monetaized video to Twitter, at better compensation levels is a great idea, it's the only path to profitability for Twitter, and a lot of YouTube creators have been fed up with YouTube for years now.

Except Twitter does not have a giant like google to fund their monetizing effort. To actually do this Twitter would need a serious fundraising campaign, and with the state of the company right now, there are not a lot of investor that would want to do that without eating up the majority of Musk's shares.