Project Sigil 90% Of D&D’s Project Sigil Team Laid Off

Reports are coming in of a swathe of layoffs at Wizards of the Coast, constituting 90% of the team of the new Project Sigil virtual tabletop platform. In all, over 30 people have been laid off, leaving a team of around 3 people.

Sigil is still in beta, only recently made public three weeks ago. Recent reports indicated that the scope of the project was seemingly being cut back.

WotC’s Andy Collins—who has worked on multiple editions of D&D and other WotC TTRPGs going back to 1996—reported via LinkedIn that he was one of those laid off. He indicated that the small team left behind would continue to work on the project.

More news as it comes in.

 

[Retreater]

I hope everyone will continue to enjoy their exclusive Project Sigil dragon miniatures for preordering the deluxe DND Beyond Core Rules sets.

 

[WisdomOfWombats]

Even if Sigil was done, which I highly doubt, letting go of the team before you have a version that runs on macOS seems like a bad decision. My online gaming group has at least two players who are not using Windows computers in their setup. And I am as GM consider moving away from Windows completely. So, Sigil is basically unusable to my gaming group. Map tool works fine, though, being browser based.

Sigil requires you to install a client. That's not the smartest decision, if you want to remain cross-platform compatible with relative ease. A browser based setup would have made much more sense.

So, Sigil is IMHO a failure. Marketing didn't come up with a good reason to use it, and the developers have zeroed in on a specific ecosystem instead of cross-platform compatibility.

 

[Steampunkette]

Why rely on reviews now though? You can download it and have a go.

That you haven't speaks volumes, doesn't it? Not about you, to be clear - about the product! It's free to do so! But people haven't, and people won't, ever, for the most part.

Two reasons:
1) WotC gets no more of my time or money than is needed to continue to do my job as a designer.
2) I just use Roll20 and making a 3d map set for my games feels as excessive as buying minis.

 

[SteveC]

Wow. I find this amazing. First, I'm sure there will be people affected by this, or certainly people who know them, on Enworld. For you: I am so sorry this went the way that it did. I hadn't used this yet, but I had talked with friends who had and they told me they liked it. I was hoping it would be better received.

This really throws into question what WotC's plan is for the game, going forward. The books are harder to get now with moving distribution in house, D&D Beyond really isn't a platform to play the game, I wonder how they are expecting to grow the brand. To me, this sounds like admitting it's not going to.

I find this really funny since the beginning of 5E was a small group thinking this was pretty much it for the game. Now, with 5.5E, things have grown enormously, and it seems like giving up. I know that sounds like something which would be in a clickbait YouTube video, but ... what's the roadmap forward? I feel like in a movie, this would be the point where there would be this giant record- scratch sound effect. It will be interesting to see where we go from here.

 

[mamba]

Sigil requires you to install a client. That's not the smartest decision, if you want to remain cross-platform compatible with relative ease. A browser based setup would have made much more sense.

it’s more work, sure but Unreal runs of Macs too, and browsers are not good for 3d and heavy use of assets. It was the right decision given the goals. This thing is still in alpha, Mac would have come in time

 

[TiQuinn]

This tells me that 5.5 (2024) did not do well.

How so?

 

[Vincent55]

keep shooting themselves in the foot your not going to have much to stand on soon

 

[dave2008]

Why release it at all if they're just going to shut it down?

Maybe the reaction to the beta was not what they hoped an now see no chance to recover?

 

[WisdomOfWombats]

it’s more work, sure but Unreal runs of Macs too, and browsers are not good for 3d and heavy use of assets. It was the right decision given the goals. This thing is still in alpha, Mac would have come in time

I think with a handful of people left, macOS will not come at all.

 

[mamba]

I think with a handful of people left, macOS will not come at all.

no, it won’t, they just pulled the plug on Sigil, but that wasn’t the plan at the time. Notice I said it would have come…