D&D General Dan Rawson Named New Head Of D&D

Hasbro has announced a former Microsoft digital commerce is the new senior vice president in charge of Dungeons & Dragons. Dan Rawson was the COO of Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Hasbro also hired Cynthia Williams earlier this year; she too, came from Microsoft. Of Rawson, she said "We couldn’t be bringing on Dan at a better time. With the acquisition of D&D Beyond earlier this year, the digital capabilities and opportunities for Dungeons & Dragons are accelerating faster than ever. I am excited to partner with Dan to explore the global potential of the brand while maintaining Hasbro’s core value as a player-first company.”

Rawson himself says that "Leading D&D is the realization of a childhood dream. I’m excited to work with Cynthia once again, and I’m thrilled to work with a talented team to expand the global reach of D&D, a game I grew up with and now play with my own kids.”

Interestingly, Ray Wininger -- who has been running D&D for the last couple of years -- has removed mention of WotC and Hasbro from his Twitter bio.

 

[Parmandur]

Could this have anything to do with the 2024 golden anniversary core, a brand new starter set as well as their online tools?

I mean, that's part of it, bit the ramp up has been going on for a few years and includes other products in the meantime.

Throwing money at a problem isn't the same thing as investing.

Hiring people to work on projects is literally investing in those projects. On the most basic level of defining words. You just spun a whole wild scenario about trying to get more product with fewer resources...but that is not the case. They are putting more resources into making print game products.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

The new starter, AFAIK, was made because Target asked them to make it, after being very successful selling the other two.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

If your sales have been consistently good, or have declined by an acceptable amount, you don't put additional stress on the design team to make more books. They're hitting their revenue targets, they know what they're doing, don't mess with success. But if your sales haven't been good and you're looking at a revenue shortfall, you've only really got one lever to pull: you've got to publish more books and make it up in volume. But you aren't going to start investing more money in your design and production teams. They're already underperforming. So you'll compromise on quality a bit in order to put a larger volume of products in front of your customers and hope they bite.

This is nonsense! If poor quality product is not meeting sales targets, then more poor-quality product will not change things.

You might, for example, repackage some previously published material under the guise of updating it and put it in a slipcase to boost the retail price a little. If you're on a design team tasked with raising more revenue with the same resources, that's a smart play. You might publish adventure anthologies filled with stand-alone freelance content, so that your editorial and production resources aren't stretched trying to harmonize all that disparate, unconnected content. You might produce a new starter set with less content compared to the previous starter set in order to churn up a little revenue from your completionist whales.

It is possible but a doomed strategy and pure speculation.

The only definition of "weak book sales" that really matters is WotC's internal definition, meaning the sales and revenue figures that senior management expect to see. They don't and won't care if the decline is due to quality.

Yest they will if they have the brains of a hamster. D&D is a discretionary purchase. You do not need it to live and within D&D product lines anything outside of the core rulebooks are even more discretionary. It depends completely on goodwill and reputation to sell its products.
Now it is perfectly possible that Wizards management are doing what you are saying but they are not a movie company yet and they depend on the reputation of the game at this time. They tank that reputation at their peril.

They just want the numbers to go up. If D&D's numbers were stable or rising at the old publishing pace, we might not see an increase in pace or volume. It's possible, but making new, good-quality D&D books isn't like adding another production line to your factory. So it's possible that the increased volume of products is because D&D's going to the moon.

But look at what's making up the additional volume: retreads of previously published material - both 5e material and legacy material - and consumer products like a new Starter Set. Publishing a new Starter Set is a warning sign, especially this one since it has less content (conserve resources!) and is not compared favorably to the Starter Set you produced eight years ago. If the design team can't produce a better Starter Set after eight years of experience and feedback, then it feels like they're rushing something out the door to make a buck.

D&D has been rethreading material since day one, how many Greyhawk releases have there been? How many threads on ENWorld have there been re-releases or possible re-releases of old material; Planescape? Dragonlance, Dark Sun?

Now you may say that the quality has been declining and I cannot argue with you because quality is perception in a product like this. I do not think it is much better nor worse. I still find things I am interested in and purchase that. So far, I have been really disappointed.
The only other metric is sales and here we have little to go on but there is evidence that revenue is rising. Since WoTC has not yet morphed into a TV-Movie company we can conclude that so far, the game is selling.

 

[Fifth Element]

Yes, which is why 3.0 to 3.5 was a functional edition change, no matter what they said.

And yet you refer to it as 3.5, the publisher's term.

 

[Fifth Element]

5e and Next were synonymous in much the same way 6e and One are. I really don't see that as rude or dismissive until an official name is locked in.

5e was explicitly a big departure from 4e. One D&D is not. Which makes using the term 6e an accusation of dishonesty towards the designers.

 

[Fifth Element]

Yes, and people also called it 5e during the playtest. Then it actually came out and Next was dropped and 5e became official.

The difference is they never claimed it was going to be a revision rather than a complete overhaul. It was explicitly always going to be very dfferent from 4e. It was designed specifically to be very different.

 

[Cadence]

5e was explicitly a big departure from 4e. One D&D is not.

1e and 2e were a lot closer and were still also denoted as different editions.

5e Revised? 5e Revised and Updated?

Edition (book) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Which makes using the term 6e an accusation of dishonesty towards the designers.

Or it could mean the person saying 6e is using one of the other definitions of edition?

 

[Fifth Element]

By any reasonable definition of edition, 5E is way more than the fifth edition of the game. TSR and WotC have always pulled shenanigans with the terminology, whi h is why theybare avoiding it now. They poisoned the well.

That's not what poisoning the well means. And, as pointed out earlier, fans called it 5e long before WotC did. So blame the fans I guess?

 

[Micah Sweet]

And yet you refer to it as 3.5, the publisher's term.

4e is taken. At some point, you have to allow for clarity.

 

[EpicureanDM]

This is nonsense! If poor quality product is not meeting sales targets, then more poor-quality product will not change things.

I agree. But all they know how to do is make books.

It is possible but a doomed strategy and pure speculation.

I also agree, both on the strategy and the speculation.

Yest they will if they have the brains of a hamster. D&D is a discretionary purchase. You do not need it to live and within D&D product lines anything outside of the core rulebooks are even more discretionary. It depends completely on goodwill and reputation to sell its products.
Now it is perfectly possible that Wizards management are doing what you are saying but they are not a movie company yet and they depend on the reputation of the game at this time. They tank that reputation at their peril.

The new person setting the revenue targets for D&D is a former e-commerce tech executive with an MBA, not someone who treasures his 1e Unearthed Arcana with notes scribbled in the margins. He will need to rely on people lower down on the food chain to advise him about quality. If you think, as I do, that the recent quality of D&D products is poor and sales are probably down as a result of those efforts, this new VP isn't going to be getting good inputs from his subordinates. They're the ones producing the underperforming products.

The numbers have to go up or he won't get his bonus. This new VP doesn't spend much time at any one company. D&D's goodwill and reputation only need to last until he moves on. He's got to get the numbers up, whether or not that includes an improvement (or reduction) in quality.

The only other metric is sales and here we have little to go on but there is evidence that revenue is rising. Since WoTC has not yet morphed into a TV-Movie company we can conclude that so far, the game is selling.

What matters is how the revenue is rising. What is selling? Are you selling a bunch of Starter Sets, but not seeing that translate into sales of the PHB? Your short-term revenue is up, but the long-term prospects aren't good. Does the D&D team get to include revenue from dice or accessories in their figures? As you say, we have little to go on. I don't look at D&D's recent books and see strength. I see confusion and uncertainty.