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.

 

[tetrasodium]

Only, it seems, if one has state-of-the-art high-end tech to run it on, which immediately rules out most people including me.

Which makes me wonder: if this was intended to be a mass-market thing, why didn't they program it so it could run on lower-end tech? Not doing so would seem to chop off a huge chunk of the potential market before you even start.

The general feel I got for that why is a bit two fold. Firstly the C suite type head of wotc/hasbro digital§ that kicked off the 3d vtt was a mtg player who wasn't really into playing d&d based on ogl fiasco rumors. Add in the Zynga techbro background and you have a product being pushed to focus on the needs of what was effectively the audience∆ of the user∆ for said product. That led to a near flowscape÷ level learning curve and workload for the gm wanting to use it .

Since the developers were being pushed to focus on the desires of a group other than what would have been their primary user/customer by their boss's boss's boss it resulted in a focus on things that do nothing for the primary user and ultimately increase the workload involved in running the vtt alongside their own d&d session/campaign. Anyone who has ever run their game with a vtt regularly and needed to give players tokens because players themselves couldn't be bothered to supply one to the gm before several sessions had passed could see the writing on the wall when wotc was talking up monitozing players with the vtt.


§ or something similar enough to not be worth debating.

∆ the GM is the user. Players are the GM's "audience" simply because there's not a great word to use for analogy. Some vtts might have players interacting with it while playing across the Internet, but the vast majority of what a vtt needs to do is service the GM so the GM can run a fun game.

÷ it's a great little app made for fun by the developer for his young (5? Y/o) daughter to play with that turned out to make stunning randomly generated terrain with an impossible UI to do much more than generate random stuff.

Ignoring Apple is a good (and Good) thing to do. Friends don't let friends buy Apple.

What other computer (as opposed to phone) platforms are there? Linux is still a rounding error, and I don't know of many if any Android-based computers. And running this in the little tiny screen of a phone seems pointless, so no need to program for those.

It's easier to run an android emulator like BlueStacks within Windows macos or whatever.i think you can even run Android in wine and virtualbox on top of Linux. That can be useful if you want to play a mobile game on your PC for whatever reason

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Whilst I kind of agree, the issue is that in the United States of America, 58% of mobile phones are Apple and it was trending that way even back then. Some Americans are even socially trashy about people not having Apple phones, which is wild.

I've never actually seen this occur, by the way, just read articles from Android sites claiming it's a huge issue. I suspect it's like other popular urban myths that it probably has happened once or twice, and then got talked about a bunch, and now is believed to be super-common in everyone else's social groups.

 

[Parmandur]

the miniature came with any option of the three books, the bundle, the digital option, and the print-only option. You got the discount for buying both together, the other two were not discounted

Still, the point of the free mini was more to promote Sigil, rather than entice people to buy the books who otherwise wouldn't.

 

[mamba]

Still, the point of the free mini was more to promote Sigil, rather than entice people to buy the books who otherwise wouldn't.

agreed, I doubt anyone got the bundle because the mini made it worth it, it was an afterthought.

 

[Theory of Games]

How did you picture that working with a human DM, though? Tabletop D&D and Elden Ring are entirely different genres, even though they have a lot of DNA in common.

I have no idea, but we'll have it one day

 

[TheSword]

The world needs both. You need the people who look at what could be possible, and the people who look at what could go wrong.

Thats not what pessimism means. It’s not just a case of working out what could go wrong, it’s assuming it will go wrong.

 

[Blue]

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.

Sorry, I don't find merit in this. This is a software project that they have stated they wanted to be for multiple RPGs. It has numerous problems, especially performance issues due to the 3D nature. Software projects do fail on their own merits, or lack there-of.

Also, they are continuing with Maps, their traditional (2D) VTT for D&D 5e on DnDBeyond, which would also be a casualty if they were ditching software development related to 5e.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Thats not what pessimism means. It’s not just a case of working out what could go wrong, it’s assuming it will go wrong.

What exactly does assuming it will go right accomplish, beyond it feeling better to you?

 

[KYRON45]

What exactly does assuming it will go right accomplish, beyond it feeling better to you?

Optimism isn't about assuming it will go right. Being optimistic is about working towards making things go right. Believing that we can get things to work.
Why oh why does every conversation end up with people arguing over the definition of things?!?!

 

[Umbran]

Which makes me wonder: if this was intended to be a mass-market thing, why didn't they program it so it could run on lower-end tech? Not doing so would seem to chop off a huge chunk of the potential market before you even start.

1) Lots of really successful games only work well on higher-end tech. Nothing new there - this is seen as a feature by the home computer industry, as it helps drive purchase of new, more powerful machines.

2) Over the course of development, one common path is to not worry about resource use or system requirements to start with, and then optimize and introduce downgrades to run on lesser hardware later. First priority is to get it to work at all, then you expand the audience for whom it will work. Unfortunately, cutting a project early tends to keep the team from getting to those secondary priorities.