WotC Hasbro's CEO Reports OGL-Related D&D Beyond Cancellations Had Minimal Impact

Hasbro held a quarterly earnings call recently in which CEO Chris Cocks (who formerly ran WotC before being promoted) indicated that the OGL controversy had a "comparatively minor" impact on D&D's revenue due to D&D Beyond subscription cancellations. He also noted that D&D grew by 20% in 2022 (Magic: the Gathering revenues grew by an astonishing 40% in Quarter 4!)

WotC as a whole was up 22% in Q4 2022.

Lastly, on D&D, we misfired on updating our Open Gaming License, a key vehicle for creators to share or commercialize their D&D inspired content. Our best practice is to work collaboratively with our community, gather feedback, and build experiences that inspire players and creators alike - it's how we make our games among the best in the industry. We have since course corrected and are delivering a strong outcome for the community and game.

 

[DEFCON 1]

So here's the position Chris Cocks is in - his subsidiary has completely effed up its hostile attempt to aggressively takeover an entire hobby (surely no-one is going to take issue with this description of the events???).

Oh what the heck... I'm feeling frosty this morning, let me try!

D&D is not the "entire hobby". There are many hundreds of roleplaying games out there (and have been for 40 years) that are not in any way connected to Dungeons & Dragons OR the Open Game License. And thus nothing regarding what WotC did was a hostile act against those companies and games.

So that's the first one we can shoot down.

WotC revoking of the OGL would not have impacted anyone who published through DMs Guild. Those people's products would have been completely unaffected. So there was no hostility aimed at those products.

(Unless of course a person wishes to claim the percentage a person has to pay to OneBookShelf and WotC as a fee to publish under the DMsG to be hostile-- but if that's the case then all those people were voluntarily walking into a hostile situation and there's no reason to feel bad for them. They "signed the contract" knowing what they had to give up and they did so volunarily. )

So that's a second one we can shoot down.

What ended up being offered by OGL was a part of the Dungeons & Dragons game area in the Roleplaying Game hobby that the owners of the game controlled for themselves up until that point that they made the OGL. Thus people who used the OGL to produce D&D content were not breaking into new grounds of the RPG landscape... they were moving INTO the section of the landscape that had been TSR/WotCs. Which means that the attempt of WotC to revoke/change the OGL was them just trying to reclaim that part of the landscape that they used to own. They weren't "taking over" anything that wasn't originally theirs to begin with. So no, the "entire hobby" was again not impacted by this.

So there's number 3.

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Look, I get it. People were and are pissed. It's understandable. But at the same time... if someone chooses to express it in such a way that the resultant response isn't sympathy but rather a cock of the head and a "Whaaaaaaa?"... then we have to hope that person isn't actually trying to change minds, but rather just vent. And if it is just venting... then hopefully they are fine that their venting is being looked at askew.

If venting just for the sake of expressing themselves and getting their anger out is all they want, then more power to them! I hope they feel better putting finger to keyboard and getting it all out onscreen.

But if they are actually looking to change minds? Then the hyperbole usually does not usually work. At least not on a lot of people. It certainly doesn't to me. I instead waste 20 minutes typing up refutations to the hyperbole instead, LOL.

 

[Justice and Rule]

Oh what the heck... I'm feeling frosty this morning, let me try!

D&D is not the "entire hobby". There are many hundreds of roleplaying games out there (and have been for 40 years) that are not in any way connected to Dungeons & Dragons OR the Open Game License. And thus nothing regarding what WotC did was a hostile act against those companies and games.

So that's the first one we can shoot down.

Sure, but this had ramifications across the hobby. Certainly the VTT policy would have hurt other VTT makers, since anyone who makes a VTT would want it to be able to run with the current DND (given how big a part of the market it is).

WotC revoking of the OGL would not have impacted anyone who published through DMs Guild. Those people's products would have been completely unaffected. So there was no hostility aimed at those products.

(Unless of course a person wishes to claim the percentage a person has to pay to OneBookShelf and WotC as a fee to publish under the DMsG to be hostile-- but if that's the case then all those people were voluntarily walking into a hostile situation and there's no reason to feel bad for them. They "signed the contract" knowing what they had to give up and they did so volunarily. )

So that's a second one we can shoot down.

I dunno, they'd probably have to sign on to the new OGL to produce new stuff, which would definitely pen them in in a way the old one didn't.

What ended up being offered by OGL was a part of the Dungeons & Dragons game area in the Roleplaying Game hobby that the owners of the game controlled for themselves up until that point that they made the OGL. Thus people who used the OGL to produce D&D content were not breaking into new grounds of the RPG landscape... they were moving INTO the section of the landscape that had been TSR/WotCs. Which means that the attempt of WotC to revoke/change the OGL was them just trying to reclaim that part of the landscape that they used to own. They weren't "taking over" anything that wasn't originally theirs to begin with. So no, the "entire hobby" was again not impacted by this.

So there's number 3.

That's a very bad #3. Just because people used the OGL to produce D&D content doesn't mean they didn't produce new or original works, nor that they didn't "break new ground". And hell, even if it was using a bunch of existing D&D content, this excuse utterly minimizes the hard work and effort that was put in.

This isn't Wizards trying to "reclaim the part of the landscape that they used to own", but rather seeing an area they had ceded to people, watch it get developed by others, and suddenly attempt to reclaim it and evict those that had built on it.

========

Look, I get it. People were and are pissed. It's understandable. But at the same time... if someone chooses to express it in such a way that the resultant response isn't sympathy but rather a cock of the head and a "Whaaaaaaa?"... then we have to hope that person isn't actually trying to change minds, but rather just vent. And if it is just venting... then hopefully they are fine that their venting is being looked at askew.

If venting just for the sake of expressing themselves and getting their anger out is all they want, then more power to them! I hope they feel better putting finger to keyboard and getting it all out onscreen.

But if they are actually looking to change minds? Then the hyperbole usually does not usually work. At least not on a lot of people. It certainly doesn't to me. I instead waste 20 minutes typing up refutations to the hyperbole instead, LOL.

Look, I get it, there are a bunch of people who just want this over because they don't want to have to consider the impacts of the company that makes their game and they get uncomfortable when the conversation is about that. But you'd be better served by not trying to minimize the impact of what was done here, nor trying to paper over it with bad excuse like "But really, it was all theirs to take anyways, right?"

 

[darjr]

oh Jer answered much better than I could have.

 

[EpicureanDM]

All that said, remember that the words are usually chosen carefully. If the boycott had a comparatively minor impact, it was in relation to D&D's overall revenue- all of it, not just D&D Beyond. That doesn't really say much about how large the overall impact was- just in relation to the overall revenue of D&D

There is tremendous room within audited public company financial statements and the statements of the CEO during earnings calls to define what constitute's D&D's overall revenue. Internally, WotC can classify a wide range of revenue as "D&D revenue" and report that figure without it being an indication of the health of the game itself.

For example, WotC published a terrible D&D video game last year. They almost certainly got paid some sort of royalty or licensing fee from the company that produced it. If WotC internally classifies that revenue as "D&D revenue", it arguably muddies the water when trying to use their public disclosures to evaluate the strength and popularity of the D&D game. If, hypothetically, WotC reports that D&D revenue is up 15% year-to-year, but that 15% is comprised mostly of a video game royalty payment, that's a signal that the sales of the games itself, i.e. the books, are not doing well or that they're flat at best.

So, yes, there's not as much hard information to be gleaned from earnings calls like this without more detail that Hasbro's not required to publicly disclose.

 

[Burt Baccara]

I am officially OGL outraged out. Not because Hasbro or Wizards have successfully made things right. Rather, the spin and gaslighting are just too much to be bothered with anymore. Nothing Kyle Brinks says adds up in the way WotC wants it to add up. Cook may be right that the D&D Beyond boycott had little to no impact, though it wouldn't yet due to billing cycles and would not have any effect if people started signing back on already.

When they release the 3.0, 3.5, and Modern d20 SRDs in CC, I'll take another peak. Until then, WotC is a non-entity. Truth be told, I still think CC-BY is a trap as it removed the copyleft intent of the OGL and brushes aside 20 years of OGC commons. Though I am willing to see if the commons is rebuilt in CC-BY if 3.0, 3.5, and Modern d20 SRDs are in CC.

In the meantime, I will use the books I have for D&D and continue to explore other systems, especially newer games.

 

[jgsugden]

#1: DNDBeyond has a lot of annual subscribers. The ones that canceled immediately to send a message are a part of the impact, but the ones that do not resubscribe this year when their time frame is up is a bigger matter. There are a lot of people with annual subscriptions that reup in August because that is when many people first signed up when it went online (August 15, 2017). You can bet that WotC is watching to see how many of those people are buying new products on DNDBeyond right now as a predictor of how many of them will be dropping by August.

#2: Why does that matter? Because not all subscribers are the same. If you're in for the long haul, you're more likely to add the new products due to FOMO. If you're brand new, and can't afford the $1000 for the Legendary Bundle, you're more likely to be more picky. And once people stop buying for a bit - even if they come back - they are less likely to buy everything habitually in the future after missing so much while they were away.

Regardless, right now, there are more people that are already gone from DNDBeyond that have not shown their hand. They have not canceled their annual subscription because it will not be due for a long time, and they have not passed on any new books ... yet ...

#3: WotC lied to their investors. They lied to their customers. They lie to everyone - because pretty much every corporation does. If they tell their investors, "Heeeeeeeyyyyyy ... our decisions were unnecessary and have created a window for a competitor to massively erode our marketshare, to reduce spending on our digital product by established customers, and is projected to lose us 10 times the number of customers we're already lost over the next 9 months ..." ... well, they'd lose their jobs.

#4: Actions speak louder than words. In the end, the question will be how many people are buying into each system over the next 2 years. We won't know how much this cost D&D/WotC/Hasbro until we see how the new edition does when it is released. If you see an uptick in Pathfinder or Black Flag purchases in that time that start to register next to WotC numbers, it would be something for WotC to worry about.

 

[Cergorach]

Sure, but this had ramifications across the hobby. Certainly the VTT policy would have hurt other VTT makers, since anyone who makes a VTT would want it to be able to run with the current DND (given how big a part of the market it is).

That assumption is based upon the premise that the VTT users would only use official or properly licensed datasets for their VTT program of choice. Experience shows that this is not the case. A company called Lone Wolf Development has been creating the software called 'Army Builder' for ~25 years, for a long, long time this was the primary program used for Warhammer (40k) army building by many, many fans. Even if they bought the software legally, GW wasn't publishing official datasets or had any license in place for those datasets. Yet for ~25 years people were using that software with that game/IP... I've seen the same for D&D and similar RPGs. And I suspect that many an official version or not being available wouldn't mean anything, just less money to spend.

Heck, even for existing modern VTTs there are many unofficial rules options, in some cases the official versions are only a very small part of all the systems available.

 

[mamba]

You're right, it was probably substantially more than that (though certainly not every new D&D player can be directly attributed to WotC either, I don't want to discount the effort of DMs, Players, Livestreams and fans out there).

All I said is that I have nothing to measure new player numbers by, so I am not sure how you arrive at this conclusion (it being substantially more than 2M).

The 2M number were new DDB accounts. I have no idea by how much D&D grew (does the 20% growth include DDB? I assume so, in that case I am not sure D&D itself grew at all… it might even have shrunk).
I am not sure how many PHBs they sell each year, which probably would be the best indicator for player growth.

I have no idea how many are leaving D&D each year either. Is your growth net growth or counting new players only, so no actual growth of D&D player numbers overall?

So given all this, how do you get to your conclusion?

 

[Bedrockgames]

Just looking at the earnings call information in the link, that is pretty detailed financial information, and complicated. I’d be very wary, whatever side you come down in in the OGL discussion, if seeing what you want to see in those numbers or in what Cocks is saying. I think that kind of information takes time to dig into, and I think the effects, positive, negative or nil, of what happened in January will take time to fully be visible to anyone.

The big lesson of the OGL fiasco for me is that thread consensus and common wisdom in the gaming community can be very wrong. We are better able to navigate this stuff when we are more objective and also more open to the possibility that our objective analysis could still be incorrect (I.e. thinking in terms of different scenarios and outcomes rather than the one we think most likely)

 

[Justice and Rule]

That assumption is based upon the premise that the VTT users would only use official or properly licensed datasets for their VTT program of choice. Experience shows that this is not the case. A company called Lone Wolf Development has been creating the software called 'Army Builder' for ~25 years, for a long, long time this was the primary program used for Warhammer (40k) army building by many, many fans. Even if they bought the software legally, GW wasn't publishing official datasets or had any license in place for those datasets. Yet for ~25 years people were using that software with that game/IP... I've seen the same for D&D and similar RPGs. And I suspect that many an official version or not being available wouldn't mean anything, just less money to spend.

Heck, even for existing modern VTTs there are many unofficial rules options, in some cases the official versions are only a very small part of all the systems available.

I don't think an army-builder is comparable in terms of complexity and feature-density to a VTT.