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]

Hasbro just loves to waste money by starting with a bold vision under one executive and having the next one scrap it. Look at eOne and the D&D streaming channel with original content.
They are throwing stuff at the wall and seeing if anything sticks. Nothing has so far.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Look at eOne and the D&D streaming channel with original content.

I'd expect those shows to be made available for conventional streaming on Netflix, Amazon, etc., any day now. That's cash on the table at a time they clearly are looking for some.

 

[Metroido]

What's kind of interesting is that the 5.5e books were written so clunky because of this. Many people have commented on how a lot of things in the new books are worded in a tedious, awkward way that's sometimes difficult to parse for a normal human, but is great if you're planning on plugging those things into computer code. People speculated that this was done to make things easier to implement into Sigil. What a shame.

 

[Reynard]

The draw with third party publishers was to get into that walled garden of D&D Beyond and have it able to run with Sigil.

That Sigil was a big draw is a bold claim. I have never seen a 3PP hype being in the Sigil ecosystem, but they certainly do being in the Beyond ecosystem.

 

[Reynard]

What's kind of interesting is that the 5.5e books were written so clunky because of this. Many people have commented on how a lot of things in the new books are worded in a tedious, awkward way that's sometimes difficult to parse for a normal human, but is great if you're planning on plugging those things into computer code. People speculated that this was done to make things easier to implement into Sigil. What a shame.

I think this claim is nonsense, as in their is no evidence for it and it also doesn't make any sense from either a business or design standpoint.

It is entirely probable that Sigil was not that central to D&D, so they decided to cut their losses upon realizing how much more time and money it would take to get it right. Corporations of all kinds do that all the time. Who knows how many abandoned campaigns and settings are in WotC's files, just by way of example.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Convenience is King, and Project Sigil never gave off an air of convenience. It always seemed like whale-bait at best to me - maybe a place for dedicated hobbyists to do some neat stuff, but never something your average D&D player would spend hours in. Seems like WotC is learning that lesson now.

That's probably right but I do think they could have got it decently popular if they'd just made it so, as they suggested initially was a possibility (and the very first announcement), that you had the maps from any adventures you'd bought from WotC.

I mean, four big problems here though:

1) They'd have to create literally 10-50x as much terrain as they have in the current release of Sigil just to cover all the maps in the major WotC adventures (but they didn't have to do it all at once, it could be over time).

2) They'd have to actually build out the maps, replete with encounters, which is quite a lot of effort.

3) Sigil would have to actually work properly - IT DOES NOT right now, to be clear. For example (and this is one of many), there's fog-of-war option but all it does is put solid "fog banks" which Sigil treats as actual objects, and which cannot be seen through by anyone, including the DM who puts them there, and don't even have a state-change like doors in Sigil do.

4) They'd need a character generator that has more than just humans/elves/dwarves/gnomes/halflings/orcs in it, skin and hair colours that aren't "undyed RL Earth standard", more than one face per race (humans have three oh look out!), many different outfits, etc.

There are other issues. They could all have been overcome with proper planning and effort and money but... it would have been tens of millions to potentially hook some people.

 

[Umbran]

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

This is part of why I think shutting it down may have been a business decision largely independent of the development project.

 

[CleverNickName]

Hasbro just loves to waste money by starting with a bold vision under one executive and having the next one scrap it. Look at eOne and the D&D streaming channel with original content.
They are throwing stuff at the wall and seeing if anything sticks. Nothing has so far.

I'm not an expert and I don't work in the software industry, but this doesn't seem like it's unique to Hasbro.

 

[StarkMaximum]

I wish everyone excited for all Wizards' projects a very "please wake up to reality".

 

[Retreater]

I'm not an expert and I don't work in the software industry, but this doesn't seem like it's unique to Hasbro.

True. But it seems to be unique to Hasbro in the TTRPG space.