WotC Hasbro Bets Big on D&D

During today's 'Hasbro Fireside Chat', Hasbro's Chris Cocks, chief executive officer, and Cynthia Williams, president of Wizards of the Coast and Digital Gaming mentioned D&D, and about betting big on its name. This was in addition to the Magic: The Gathering discussion they held on the same call.

The following are rough notes on what they said.

D&D Beyond

• Leaning heavily on D&D Beyond
• 13 million registered users
• Give them more ways to express their fandom
• Hired 350 people last year
• Low attrition

What’s next for D&D

• Never been more popular
• Brand under-monetized
• Excited about D&D Beyond possibilities
• Empower accessibility and development of the user base.
• Data driven insight
• Window into how players are playing
• Companion app on their phone
• Start future monetization starting with D&D Beyond
• DMs are 20% of the audience but lions share of purchases
• Digital game recurrent spending for post sale revenue.
• Speed of digital can expand, yearly book model to include current digital style models.
• Reach highly engaged multigenerational fans.
• Dungeons and Dragons has recognition, 10 out of 10
• Cultural phenomenon right now.
• DND strategy is a broad four quadrant strategy
• Like Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings or Marvel
• New books and accessories, licensed game stuff, and D&D Beyond
• Huge hopes for D&D

What is success for the D&D Movie

• First big light up oppourtunity for 4th quadrant
• Significant marketing
• They think it’ll have significant box office
• It has second most viewed trailer at Paramount, only eclipsed by Transformers
• Will be licensed video games, some on movies
• Then follow up other media, TV, other movies, etc.
• Bullish on D&D.

 

[MichaelSomething]

This looks like an opportunity for EnPublishing to capture some market share from WOTC!

Sick of money grubbing megacorps sucking your wallets dry? Click on the EnWorld store page to enter a gaming world driven not by profit but by love of the game!

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Agreed. My statblocks are always super bare bones too, because they're mostly just to prompt me, and I (theoretically) know what I meant.

I was mostly just stunned I couldn't have an individual tab for NPC's, stores, locations in towns or even maps to help my players, particularly between sessions. An ability to upload handouts, or what have you. Nope, just one big ol notepad file. I tried to manage with spoiler tags, but the whole thing feels like an afterthought from late 90's web design. And it's been that way for like a year!

During the pandemic I switched from running a Phandalin game from in person to online and was frustrated to see how poorly formatted adventures are in D&D Beyond.

It's fine for when I'm running my own adventures, which I have written up in a Google Doc anyway, and can hot-link to all the monsters, spells, magic items, etc, in D&D Beyond to consult at a click. But they definitely need to bring in some usability experts if they want online play to be more central to D&D going forward.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Sick of money grubbing megacorps sucking your wallets dry? Click on the EnWorld store page to enter a gaming world driven not by profit but by love of the game!

Given the very low profit margins in the RPG world, I think we should assume everyone is in it for the love of the game.

Literally almost any other endeavor is a bigger money maker than RPGs.

 

[Alzrius]

He says that WotC transitioning more towards digital play will make the game worse. The implication being that digital play is inferior.

No, what he says is that it will "likely have negative impacts on the tabletop role-playing community." Which is to say that a shift to a certain play-style will come at the expense of a different play-style, which isn't exactly a hard idea to swallow; that a focus on a particular area (e.g virtual play) comes at the cost of a diminished focus elsewhere (tabletop play). We've seen that same opinion expressed in this thread, with people saying that a focus on monetization via micro-transactions has the real risk of coming at the expense of a focus on quality game mechanics and lore.

Heck, he even hedges his bets by saying "likely" rather than "will definitely." So he's giving his opinion and making a guess, explaining his thought processes for why he thinks the way he does. Again, no different than anyone here.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

No, what he says is that it will "likely have negative impacts on the tabletop role-playing community." Which is to say that a shift to a certain play-style will come at the expense of a different play-style, which isn't exactly a hard idea to swallow; that a focus on a particular area (e.g virtual play) comes at the cost of a diminished focus elsewhere (tabletop play). We've seen that same opinion expressed in this thread, with people saying that a focus on monetization via micro-transactions has the real risk of coming at the expense of a focus on quality game mechanics and lore.

Heck, he even hedges his bets by saying "likely" rather than "will definitely." So he's giving his opinion and making a guess, explaining his thought processes for why he thinks the way he does. Again, no different than anyone here.

The thing is I heavily disagree with him.

 

[Oofta]

Agreed. My statblocks are always super bare bones too, because they're mostly just to prompt me, and I (theoretically) know what I meant.

I was mostly just stunned I couldn't have an individual tab for NPC's, stores, locations in towns or even maps to help my players, particularly between sessions. An ability to upload handouts, or what have you. Nope, just one big ol notepad file. I tried to manage with spoiler tags, but the whole thing feels like an afterthought from late 90's web design. And it's been that way for like a year!

Oh, absolutely. I write software and was thinking about building a campaign tracker and then the beta version came out and I decided to put it on hold thinking that I would take a wait and see attitude. Still waiting.

So for now I continue to use obsidianportal. Not that it's great, but I've been using it for a long time and I have a lot of info in there. But a real campaign tracker would be welcome.

 

[Alzrius]

The thing is I heavily disagree with him.

Sure, and that's fine. Disagreement is a good thing, but only when it leads to constructive discussion and reasoned debate, not claims of "he's a clickbait clown" which I think comes with implications of "and you're either a troll or a fool for taking him seriously."

 

[MockingBird]

Eh, I like D&DBeyond. Makes character management a breeze. I like that I can buy just The Sunless Citadel from TotYP. I like how the Adventure is setup with hyper links to stat blocks. As long as I can buy a physical book and that's all I need to play I could care less what they want to sell on Beyond. The only thing I wish they would do more often is include discount codes in the physical books for the electronic counter part.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

No, what he says is that it will "likely have negative impacts on the tabletop role-playing community." Which is to say that a shift to a certain play-style will come at the expense of a different play-style, which isn't exactly a hard idea to swallow; that a focus on a particular area (e.g virtual play) comes at the cost of a diminished focus elsewhere (tabletop play). We've seen that same opinion expressed in this thread, with people saying that a focus on monetization via micro-transactions has the real risk of coming at the expense of a focus on quality game mechanics and lore.

Heck, he even hedges his bets by saying "likely" rather than "will definitely." So he's giving his opinion and making a guess, explaining his thought processes for why he thinks the way he does. Again, no different than anyone here.

Except that premise is false. If you want to make money off of digital gaming, you make digital resources while still supporting tabletop play. One playstyle getting support doesn't mean that the other will get less support.

And trust me, I remember what he said. He repeatedly implied through the video that digital gaming was worse. Not just that he didn't like it, but that it was bad and that allowing for it to be better (through an official VTT and other tools) would be bad for the game.

His premise relies on badwrongfun. His video is clickbait doomsaying based on no evidence and claiming that his style of play is the One True Way. Trust me, I've seen some of his other videos. His grognard-esque "the Youth are playing the game wrong and modern D&D is worse in almost every way" is a lot more apparent in some of his other videos.

 

[Alzrius]

Except that premise is false. If you want to make money off of digital gaming, you make digital resources while still supporting tabletop play. One playstyle getting support doesn't mean that the other will get less support.

Except that when he talked about the shift toward one coming at the expense of the other, he wasn't talking with regards to WotC's production resources (well, he did allude to it), but rather toward the style of play that new players would formulate with regard to having learned the game in a digital environment where PC interaction with the game world was something that needed to be coded into the system, rather than through imaginative play.

That's why he talks about breaking down a wall or flooding a dungeon to clear it out being things that would quite possibly never occur to players who came into One D&D via the VTT, because those options presumably aren't available in the context of the VTT's digital tools.

Now, admittedly this could have used some contextualization in that not all VTTs are alike. Roll20, for instance, can function as little more than digital graph paper, token set, and dice roller, preserving a great deal of the imaginative play experience. But given that he was speaking directly to the demonstration that WotC had recently shown of a graphically-intensive 3D VTT, which seemed to highlight PC interaction with the environment far more than a simple online graph, I think that's a forgivable assumption.

And trust me, I remember what he said. He repeatedly implied through the video that digital gaming was worse. Not just that he didn't like it, but that it was bad and that allowing for it to be better (through an official VTT and other tools) would be bad for the game.

Your memory is flawed in this regard. He talks about the limits of digital gaming, certainly, but that's a far cry from implying that it's "worse." Personally, I don't see the problem with talking about those limits, nor about the potential for the assumptions that they engender being presented when people who start playing D&D via the VTT bring them to the tabletop experience.

His premise relies on badwrongfun. His video is clickbait doomsaying based on no evidence and claiming that his style of play is the One True Way. Trust me, I've seen some of his other videos. His grognard-esque "the Youth are playing the game wrong and modern D&D is worse in almost every way" is a lot more apparent in some of his other videos.

Again, talking about the limits of a particular medium is not "badwrongfun" anymore than talking about the limits of narrative play is saying that narrative play is badwrongfun. You can have a discussion about the drawbacks that something poses without casting aspersions on the thing itself, or the people who enjoy it, which is what he's doing here. Your negative interpretation of what he's saying isn't found in the video itself.