And then there were 8! On Chris Sims and Jennifer Clarke Wilkes' Layoffs...

I've seen quite a few people speculating that Chris Sims and Jennifer Clarke-Wilkes may not have been made redundant, but possibly fired for various reasons, or because contracts ended (given that Jennifer has been at WoTC for about 15 years, that latter guess was always going to be very unlikely!). For that reason, I feel it's a good idea to set things straight and find out exactly what happened; I'm sure neither want rumours like that to start! The short version: yep, they were lay-offs.

Chris Sims kindly shared with me that "Jennifer Clarke Wilkes and I were laid off on Wednesday the 28th. Our positions were eliminated, reducing the D&D team to eight people working directly on the tabletop game."

Hopefully that will put some speculation to rest! Here's the original article, for context.

Who makes up the 8 still working on the RPG? Mike Mearls, Rodney Thompson, Jeremy Crawford, Greg Bilsland, Chris Perkins, Peter Lee, Matt Sernett, Adam Lee.

The 8 does not include art or brand staff, including community manager Trevor Kidd, brand/marketing managers, Organized Play program managers and the like, which brings the number up to about 13.

As an interesting point of comparison, Paizo CEO Lisa Stevens kindly shared that "We don't have any part time employees. The 25 full-time were folks that worked directly on Pathfinder products in design, development, editing and art. Currently, we are pushing 60 employees in the company and growing. In the next few months, we will be hiring more editors and developers to support Pathfinder. 2014 was our best year ever in both sales and profits. Still going up!"

 

[Mark CMG]

(. . .) $20. Few people research board games even with convenient things like BGG around, almost no one researches RPGs, (. . .)

First off, $20 is toward the low end of a typical gamer purchase and really only encompasses some thinner RPG books and card games, maybe a tiny boardgame. Second, I know more than a few hundred gamers that I see over the course of any given year at local gamedays and smaller conventions where folks actually all know one another, many of which I interact with regularly through social media. I'm not sure I could point you to any of them who don't look up info on their gaming purchases, which on average are closer to $50 and can rise toward $80 or even $100 on any number of boardgames these days. Even the folks I know who are FLGS-only purchasers, on principle, research their purchases online. They might get introduced to games at events for a first play but that alone rarely sells someone to the point that they wouldn't check things out further. I've seen gamers play in an event at a gameday then use their smart phone to check the game out before buying it right there from a vendor table.

 

[wedgeski]

The list of complaints and critiques is much larger than that but those are just a few examples. I love your enthusiasm, Wegdeski, but making this about the hype is missing the point in a way I don't expect from you. If I wanted "Four legs good, two legs better" I could click on the first or second result of a web search.

While I appreciate the compliment (?), I stand by what I said. Only our community could, in the space of a month, re-characterize the reaction to 5E as hype, and point at the inevitable binding woes, or interminable, interminable fixation by this community on the OGL, or any of the other would-be-failures of the new game that the they have apparently identified, and conclude that 5E is in fact a "mixed bag".

 

[Mark CMG]

(. . .) hype (. . .)

Oh, there's clearly more hype around this edition than any other has had. 3E's launch made use of some but the Internet wasn't yet ready to be that sort of machine by the late 90s. The amount of press (online and off) featuring articles heralding the 40th anniversary with 5E, the number of glowing assessments, and the frequency of designer interviews has been tremendous. This is how the search engines will largely bring back top searches geared toward the message and staying on point. This has been a much better coordinated release than previous attempts.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidewalt/2014/08/21/selling-the-new-dungeons-dragons/

Look closely at the language used in this article on Forbes, for instance. It's a puff piece and there have been dozens of them. Compare some of the vague but glowing language in the interview quotes to some of the posts and threads presented as substantive and you'll begin to see how hype is contagious. WotC has done well with it's machine this time; Far fewer face-plants than with 4E.

 

[ZombieRoboNinja]

I too feel for the people who lost their jobs, but from a strategic standpoint I don't think this is a crazy idea or bad news for 5e.

First off, on the PF vs. D&D numbers: it's 25 working on PF versus 13 working on D&D. Some provisos, though:

1. Just in terms of accuracy, that's counting the art editors for PF but not for D&D, so it's probably more like 20-23 vs 13.

2. Neither group has to really care if their "core rules" make a ton of money; hell, Paizo gives them away for free in the PFSRD. But Paizo is trying to make its profits off adventure path sales, while WOTC is trying to make its profits off licensing (including licensing official adventure paths like HotDQ and PotA, but more importantly video games, novels, comics, merchandise, and eventually films and maybe TV). This means that for Paizo to make a real profit, they need those adventure paths done in-house. Since adventure paths are only a fraction of the licensing potential Hasbro sees for D&D, they're content farming that stuff out.

 

[Sacrosanct]

You're comparing a $20,000 purchase to a $20. Few people research board games even with convenient things like BGG around, almost no one researches RPGs, it almost always comes down to someone saying "hey, I'm going to run a game of..."

That actually just reinforces my point, so not sure what you're disagreeing with. Mark very well scour the internet message boards for an rpg, but that's hardly representative of most people. If most people buying a car only go to the big popular reviews and don't really see message boards, people buying an rpg surely won't be doing that level of due diligence. I would posit most people buying an rpg do very little if any internet research, but rely mostly on word of mouth or get pulled into an existing game.

 

[Matt James]

Best wishes to Jennifer and Chris. I consider them both friends, and have worked on several projects with each. They are top-notch quality folk.

 

[bmfrosty]

Maybe this was just a decision handed to Mearls. Maybe he was told that he was losing two headcount, and that either he or someone above him would pick which heads to cut.

 

[danbala]

Anyway, Hasbro's recent 10-Q officially announced the 5e launch did well - as in "covered by Federal Trade Commission Rules" type report.

. . . well actually, what it said was that D&D the brand sold more in 2014 than 2013. Given that they sold (basically) nothing in 2013 that wasn't saying much. In fact, if you were cynical you might interpret the paucity of the information as attempt to convey a false impression of success while remaining truthful.

 

[CasvalRemDeikun]

. . . well actually, what it said was that D&D the brand sold more in 2014 than 2013. Given that they sold (basically) nothing in 2013 that wasn't saying much. In fact, if you were cynical you might interpret the paucity of the information as attempt to convey a false impression of success while remaining truthful.

They can't say that either. Reducing produ production to nil then resuming so that it looks like there was a spike in sales then only claiming that there was a jump in sales would be misleading investors.

 

[Staffan]

. . . well actually, what it said was that D&D the brand sold more in 2014 than 2013. Given that they sold (basically) nothing in 2013 that wasn't saying much. In fact, if you were cynical you might interpret the paucity of the information as attempt to convey a false impression of success while remaining truthful.

From what those who know corporate financials said in the thread, their report said a little more than that. Not only did D&D bring in significantly more revenue in 2014 than 2013, but it did so in a way that had a meaningful impact on Hasbro's overall revenue.