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.

 

[dave2008]

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

Oddly, I got the mini and didn't order the deluxe set!

 

[SteveC]

As someone who (unfortunately) games online exclusively, I'll just say that I still believe that the future of the game is largely digital. WotC has just shut themselves out of it. I play a Roll20 game every week with 5E and if you know me, I'm a Foundry guy who's trying to move my group to it. It would have been a strong argument to move to the in-house VTT but now we just have to find the best fit for us that isn't Sigil.

 

[rhythmsoundmotion]

Call me crazy, but what if they are just outsourcing all the development? Firing all the in house developers and handing it off to a development studio to handle.

 

[Afroconan]

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.

Have you seen Maps? It's actually a 2D VTT integrated in Beyond.

I'm a Foundry guy myself and I've only touched Beyond to claim freebies that I'll never used but the Maps implementation looks solid.

 

[mamba]

Call me crazy, but what if they are just outsourcing all the development? Firing all the in house developers and handing it off to a development studio to handle.

external developers aren’t cheaper and WotC just fired basically everyone who understands their code and design, that adds half a year of delays for an outcome that is as uncertain as the in-house approach. I doubt this, to me it is much more likely they simply cut their losses

 

[Reynard]

As someone who (unfortunately) games online exclusively, I'll just say that I still believe that the future of the game is largely digital. WotC has just shut themselves out of it. I play a Roll20 game every week with 5E and if you know me, I'm a Foundry guy who's trying to move my group to it. It would have been a strong argument to move to the in-house VTT but now we just have to find the best fit for us that isn't Sigil.

Lots of people play online. But I don't think "lots of people" wanted an unreal engine virtual Dwarven Forge set.

 

[Reynard]

Sure. There have been rumors that it was not selling well for weeks and if it was gangbusters and driving people to DDB, then they would not so quickly abandon Sigil.

I think you are correlating 2024 and Sigil too much. They may have simply realized there was too little demand for this particular rather niche product to warrant the continued expense of development.

 

[Zaukrie]

My take is that Project Sigil is dead. They saw the interest in it - and it was LOW.

(See Concord from last year).

I'm not actually mad at Wizards for this. Which is odd - I'm annoyed at them about enough other things. But stuff like this, which is actually pretty innovative, is also pretty risky. They took the risk, but it's unlikely to pay off.

Software projects fail all the time. They're harder than you think.

This.

 

[Afroconan]

Sure. There have been rumors that it was not selling well for weeks and if it was gangbusters and driving people to DDB, then they would not so quickly abandon Sigil.

People being driven to DDB doesn't necessarily corelate to people using Sigil. Especially when the implementation is half assed and, as Christian Hoffner put it "a solution looking for a problem".

3D VTTs are beyond niche. It's something that TTRPG players have dreamed of or thought it would be neat, but if prep on a 2D VTT can be time consuming, a 3D one is next level.

Sigil focused on being pretty first and being practical second.

They should have concentrated on the creation tools first and leverage the community for creating content and eventually setting up a marketplace for the community to sell content. Meanwhile they could've developed in house some official adventures with a couple of free setpieces for people to mess around and get hooked.

But I'm just a TTRPG fan, why would I know what a TTRPG fan wants?

 

[AlViking]

As someone who (unfortunately) games online exclusively, I'll just say that I still believe that the future of the game is largely digital. WotC has just shut themselves out of it. I play a Roll20 game every week with 5E and if you know me, I'm a Foundry guy who's trying to move my group to it. It would have been a strong argument to move to the in-house VTT but now we just have to find the best fit for us that isn't Sigil.

DnDBeyond maps isn't going anywhere for people that want to play online. Meanwhile the third party VTTs are still supporting DnD so I don't see how they shut themselves out of anything. They just decided that having a VTT with all the bells and whistles of Sigil wasn't worth the investment. As someone else said above it seems like people are ready to say Wizards is failing if they don't take chances on something that might not work and they're failures if they do take a chance and it ends up not working. They can't have it both ways. Either they're super conservative and minimize risk of failure which has it's own risks or they take chances now and then that don't always succeed. The majority of software product development ends in failure or at best lowered expectations.