WotC D&D Historian Ben Riggs says the OGL fiasco was Chris Cocks idea.

[Alzrius]

Because of the confluence with the design and project management experience, whi h are significant in this case. Most people with game design experience are not qualified to be President of a company

The irony is that you're the one making a special pleading fallacy here, as you're saying that not only is "project management" somehow special in what skills it confers, but that the "confluence" of it and an MBA magically makes for a more compelling result.

Special pleading: design and project managament are transferable skills. See also, how many TTRPG designers have transitioned to the video game industry with great success.

And here you not only misapply the label of special pleading fallacy, as you're the one positing that these are "transferable" skills (as opposed to the aforementioned other skills, which are implied to not be), but you're also falling victim to Hitchens's razor, in that you're simply declaring this to be true without actually demonstrating it. Likewise, a citation is not only needed with regard to other designers going from TTRPGs to video games, but you then need to demonstrate how they're different from anyone else who's tried to make that transition and failed to do so.

EDIT: Not to mention that you're suggesting that the supposed transferability is two-way, in that you're positing how TTRPG designers going to successfully work on video games means that someone with experience designing video games will be able to successfully work on designing TTRPGs.

That's why I said "not counting" those: aside entirely from those initiatives, WotC owns five different pure software video game studios. It is a software company, it is what they do.

In fact, that's not what you said: you said "not even counting" those, which means that you are counting them, just in addition to the other five studios they've purchased. Of course, those five aren't relevant because WotC isn't a software company; it's not what they do. It's what they want to do, and have tried to do before, failing each time. While it remains to be seen if this time is different, I worry about D&D being used as a prop to try and make that happen; we've seen that before, and the results weren't pretty (looking at you, Gleemax).

 

[Oofta]

I find this whole “he wrote a book on game development” or “used to be a gamer” to be the hobby equivalent of liking a politician because “you can see yourself having a beer with him.”

Not really a negative or positive in either way as far as I'm concerned. But I don't see any serious red flags either, so it could be worse.

 

[Parmandur]

I'd prefer not to pretend that these things matter compared to the actual job that they do.

I would prefer not to pretend that these things don't matter, on the contrary.

A politicians job is to win friends and influence people to effect change. Being likeable is very central to their job function.

Running a game company while understanding the game design process is obviously useful, same as running a train company and understanding how trains work.

 

[TiQuinn]

A politicians job is to win friends and influence people to effect change. Being likeable is very central to their job function.

Running a game company while understanding the game design process is obviously useful, same as running a train company and understanding how trains work.

Okay.

 

[Parmandur]

The irony is that you're the one making a special pleading fallacy here, as you're saying that not only is "project management" somehow special in what skills it confers, but that the "confluence" of it and an MBA magically makes for a more compelling result.

The MBA is a bare necessity for getting the gig: having design experience is not. So it is, indeed, compelling to see that fairly rare combo at WotC now.

And here you not only misapply the special pleading fallacy a second time, as you're the one positing that these are "transferable" skills (as opposed to the aforementioned other skills, which are implied to not be), but you're also falling victim to Hitchens's razor, in that you're simply declaring this to be true without actually demonstrating it. Likewise, a citation is not only needed with regard to other designers going from TTRPGs to video games, but you then need to demonstrate how they're different from anyone else who's tried to make that transition and failed to do so.

As to examples: Warren Spector, Zeb Cook, Lawrence Schick, Jeff Grubb, Paul Reich III, just off the top of my head and I know there are more if I thought about it for a second. Read any text book on how design works, I won'tdo your homework for you: the process is indeed transferable between industries, so a designer executive is an interesting development.

In fact, that's not what you said: you said "not even counting" those, which means that you are counting them, just in addition to the other five studios they've purchased. Of course, those five aren't relevant because WotC isn't a software company; it's not what they do. It's what they want to do, and have tried to do before, failing each time. While it remains to be seen if this time is different, I worry about D&D being used as a prop to try and make that happen; we've seen that before, and the results weren't pretty (looking at you, Gleemax)

I said that I was not counting those in the first post, you close read is flatly incorrect and bizarre. Most people at WotC work at a videongame studio, making video games. That makes it a video game company. And that isn't going to change trajectory, frankly.

 

[Parmandur]

Okay.

Good, glad that you see reason.

 

[TiQuinn]

Not really a negative or positive in either way as far as I'm concerned. But I don't see any serious red flags either, so it could be worse.

That's just it. There's nothing there either way. He's either going to do well, do poorly, or possibly even be practically invisible to the majority of people.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Note that when I say "them", I refer to WotC/Hasbro suits - I actually think that those who are closer to the ground have their hearts, and often their heads, in the right place. The suits I would trust to cut off their nose to spite their face, if they thought there was a buck in it.

Sure, but since the creatives you're referencing don't get to make business decisions, and in fact have to do what the suits say, I would question how relevant their opinions are.

 

[Micah Sweet]

That's fair. And it's not like all of us out here have a unified idea of what's good for the hobby. I don't think you can even get 100 out of a 100 to agree that getting more people in the hobby is a good thing.

Depends on what you're sacrificing creatively to get more people.

 

[SlyFlourish]

Following up on my previous post about all the good WOTC has done in the past 18 months or so, I think there's two important considerations that often get missed:

1. People often attribute actions to a whole company and assume everyone in that company believes and acts in the same path when it's often small fiefdoms of corporate power whose power goes up and down. Sometimes it's a CEO and an aggressive lawyer who decides they can weasel out of some words in a 20 year old license agreement. Sometimes it's a group who really wants to help the whole hobby move forward or a group who thinks they can lock in the whole hobby in by putting out an open license. But a whole company doesn't make a decision – people do.

2. People often don't behave in the best economic interests of the company. We often say that companies act in the best interests of their shareholders but that's not always, or even often, the case. People, including fancy C-suite executives, make terrible decisions all the time based on their own ego, desires, and intuition.

This is to say that, while I'm extremely happy that WOTC has done so well for the hobby in the past 18 months, that might not always continue and with all of the churn we've seen in the executive and management staff at WOTC just in the past couple of months, we can hope they continue to hold up to their previous hobby-benefiting actions but we can't depend on it.