WotC Hasbro CEO Chris Cox, "I would say that the underlying thesis of our D&D business is all about digital,”

[nevin]

First seen in Sly Flourishes discord.

Baldur's Gate 3 Is the Beginning of Big Plans for Dungeons & Dragons Video Games

Baldur’s Gate 3 seems to be the beginning of a new era of Dungeons & Dragons video games. Last week, Hasbro held its quarterly investors call, which featured a question and answer section. During the interview, Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks was asked if a recent writedown of the Dungeons & Dragons...

comicbook.com

"I would say that the underlying thesis of our D&D business is all about digital," Cocks said.

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fortune.com

Sly Flourish says “imagine losing three billion dollars. That's three thousand million dollars That's losing twenty three D&D Beyonds.”

wow if BG3 is thier strategy, I don't see any good there. It's a great divinity game if that's your thing but it's a lousy DND game.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

I don't think it's worth relitigating the entire OGL thing, but no, it could not "equally" be a power struggle, especially given absolutely ZERO heads rolled. The only person who left even adjacent to it was Ray Winninger, a couple of months before, who clearly must have had to be removed before it could happen. The D&D team was never "not subordinate". In fact, they cared so little about them, that if the leaks were true, they largely ignored them and didn't even really take input from them.

Given the exact same people, and I do mean exact same people are still in the same roles, there's no reason to believe there was any "power struggle" per se. Rather there was an internal debate over how to deal with the fact that their new plan seemed to be getting incredibly bad press and significantly damaging the brand.

It's not like D&D is "singing a different tune" now to what it was in say, November, either. The only thing that's changed is the tainted "One D&D" brand isn't being mentioned. But all the projects that comprised One D&D are going ahead.

Power struggles do not often end with heads rolling. There was constant power struggles and empire building with in Microsoft, particularly in the Balmer years. Don't know about now as I stopped paying attention.

 

[nevin]

By this line of thinking, N95 mask manufacturers in 2020 became incredibly successful not because of external circumstances but because their management consisted of epic business gurus who managed to grow their business thousandfold.

D&D is not a well managed brand. Hell, WotC makes incredibly stupid PR mistakes every month in both Magic and D&D, when all they need to do is shut up and don't rock the boat most of the time (also, don't hire the Pinkertons). There's a whole thread about Ben Riggs's presentation showing every incompetent move they made for the last 15 years. The only reason D&D 5E became successful was because external factors suddenly made D&D cool. If everything went according to the management's plan, D&D 5e would've been the mothball edition with only a skeleton crew maintaining things. But it exploded well beyond their expectations, and not they don't know how to deal with that success.

true to be fair it's never been a well managed brand. outside forces and factors have always driven it instead of it's owners.

 

[nevin]

Power struggles do not often end with heads rolling. There was constant power struggles and empire building with in Microsoft, particularly in the Balmer years. Don't know about now as I stopped paying attention.

nothing has changed. Microsoft still quiety waits till it is sure something is the hot thing and then they move too late and make a lot of money while destroying very creative companies and killing whatever new cashcow they were planning on making to add to the office, operating system,xbox trifecta. these days it's not tech companies microsoft kills it's gaming companies.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Power struggles do not often end with heads rolling. There was constant power struggles and empire building with in Microsoft, particularly in the Balmer years. Don't know about now as I stopped paying attention.

I ask again, if everyone is still working there, and everyone has the same title, and the output of the business appears to be the same as before, did a tree fall in the forest?

wow if BG3 is thier strategy, I don't see any good there. It's a great divinity game if that's your thing but it's a lousy DND game.

Spoken like someone who hasn't played BG3 - reinstall it and get playing Mr "I played it Early Access, I swear I did!".

true to be fair it's never been a well managed brand. outside forces and factors have always driven it instead of it's owners.

That is true, but it doesn't really excuse anything.

From many reports the D&D team is rife with power struggles and politicking.

Define "the D&D team". Most of the reports I saw suggested that it was actually the 3D VTT people behind a lot of this, weirdly enough.

 

[Umbran]

Digital has been the strategy for years now, except a brief interlude, were 5e became a huge success.

We started noticing the high sales of 5e back in 2016, when for the first time an RPG book cracked the top 100 Amazon sales rank of all books. That's years before the covid pandemic drove more people to online play. Ergo, the game's popularity is not directly linked to online play.

Now, I accept that WotC would be silly to not invest in digital offerings for the brand. But, the world of possible digital offerings is so much larger than the RPG proper, that it does not follow that trying to force the RPG itself into an online-only format is really the best business strategy.

Have a VTT? Sure! Have great character management tools that work without a VTT? Absolutely! But drive it so that entire online suite is really the only way to play the game? That sounds premature.

Baldur's Gate 3 seems to be doing well. That's awesome. Why are we thinking that driving tabletop RPG play on to computers is somehow a more obvious winning strategy than repeating Baldur's Gate 3's success several times over?

 

[Ondath]

wow if BG3 is thier strategy, I don't see any good there. It's a great divinity game if that's your thing but it's a lousy DND game.

This isn't the first time you're saying this (the last time you had also claimed that the game pitted you against mind flayers at level 1 when it clearly doesn't), and I'm still not sure if we're playing the same game. BG3 is an incredibly close approximation of the tabletop RPG experience in a single player computer format. Its turn based rules are definitely more faithful than the old Real Time With Pause games, and while I've seen reasonable people disagree about whether is recreates the Forgotten Realms faithfully, I think any claim that the game does not play like D&D is quite silly.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

We started noticing the high sales of 5e back in 2016, when for the first time an RPG book cracked the top 100 Amazon sales rank of all books. That's years before the covid pandemic drove more people to online play. Ergo, the game's popularity is not directly linked to online play.

Now, I accept that WotC would be silly to not invest in digital offerings for the brand. But, the world of possible digital offerings is so much larger than the RPG proper, that it does not follow that trying to force the RPG itself into an online-only format is really the best business strategy.

Have a VTT? Sure! Have great character management tools that work without a VTT? Absolutely! But drive it so that entire online suite is really the only way to play the game? That sounds premature.

Baldur's Gate 3 seems to be doing well. That's awesome. Why are we thinking that driving tabletop RPG play on to computers is somehow a more obvious winning strategy than repeating Baldur's Gate 3's success several times over?

These points are spot-on.

Digital is great to support D&D, but unless we're expecting COVID 2.0 very soon (in which case I may simply travel to Florida and offer myself to the alligators), but this push seems like it's going too far - and the wild investment in the 3D VTT is just extremely surprising when D&D itself doesn't seem to be getting much investment.

 

[Parmandur]

These points are spot-on.

Digital is great to support D&D, but unless we're expecting COVID 2.0 very soon (in which case I may simply travel to Florida and offer myself to the alligators), but this push seems like it's going too far - and the wild investment in the 3D VTT is just extremely surprising when D&D itself doesn't seem to be getting much investment.

The TTRPG is just cheaper to make, but they are investing. The number of gull time in draff designers has ballooned in the past few years. As of 2015, it was like 3 dudes, but now they have over a dozen (and not all dudes!).

 

[Umbran]

This is like, the tenth not true claim you've made lol. Maybe stop relying on stuff a guy on a Discord or a Youtube video told you? Just a thought.

Mod Note:
It would be good, awesome, even, if you (and everyone, really) could do a little more to keep this discussion from trending towards expressions of disdain for each other.

You really didn't need to make this personal to make the point. You chose to. Maybe don't choose that next time, hm? Thanks.