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!"

 

[Parmandur]

. . . 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.

No, what it said was that D&D sol enough to move the needle for Hasbro, a first. It was a noticeable seller relative to Hasbro's bottom line, not just pre ious performance, a much higher standard.

 

[Mistwell]

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.

Exactly why the FTC has rules to prevent those sorts of shenanigans. They are not allowed to write something in that report that intentionally conveys false impressions to investors - that's what results in shareholder lawsuits. As others have said, the announcement was that D&D was a material increase in revenues for HASBRO, not a year-over-year increase for D&D. That later event would be meaningless, and reporting it would be misleading (thus run afoul of the rules).

 

[was]

Always bad to see good people laid off.

 

[lkj]

Interestingly, Chris Perkins just retweeted a link to a D&D job posting:

http://jobs.hasbro.com/job/Renton-Associate-Game-Producer,-D&D-Job-WA-98055/245807900/

AD

 

[Zil]

Interestingly, Chris Perkins just retweeted a link to a D&D job posting:

http://jobs.hasbro.com/job/Renton-Associate-Game-Producer,-D&D-Job-WA-98055/245807900/

AD

That is an interesting job posting. From the tasks associated with the position, you can really see the increasing focus on managing IP and the importance of managing third party licensees.

It's also interesting that editors are classified as external rather than internal relationships. Are they third party editors or just WoTC editorial staff outside of the D&D unit?

 

[Kor]

I am still a little confused with what their staff do there. I greatly appreciate the products they have been making for the 5th edition line, but I can't help but think that at Paizo the same amount of people would have been putting out 3-4 times the amounts of products with at the same level of quality or higher. I see little to no support for the D&D game, other than the core books themselves. The adventures are great, but I would like to see a lot more "official" products made to develop the game. A monthly world-building book would be great -- we need a campaign setting for 5th, yet we have nothing. Maybe its time for something new as well? Eberron was a good success in asking for world submissions from their customer base -- maybe its time to do that again. I hope to see more product support from the WotC staff in the future. I suspect though they are headed towards contracting out for more of their work (which is fine if someone is overseeing the quality). The WizKids D&D minis are have been a good example of contracting out to make their support products -- however the quality of the paint application is lacking when compared to the Pathfinder Battles minis (which cost less) -- while I appreciate this product line it would be nice to have someone overseeing quality control so we don't end up with the same poor paint applications (or lack there-of) which hurt the D&D and Star Wars miniature lines in the past.