DnD Shorts final video

[Minigiant]

A $150M/year tabletop RPG is an incredible achievement. That it’s not good enough is a tragedy, and they’re aiming to screw it all up.

That's why I said it has to be based on Bad Internals for Hasbro as a whole. If this is true, people should have sold Hasbro 6 months ago.

We don’t know what the retention policy is for their Teams. It may be that it’s short enough the comment is already gone and can’t be traced. If Hasbro is like where I work, Teams is meant for ephemeral conversations, and anything important is supposed to be communicated via a tool with a longer retention policy.

I still wouldn't have mentioned it. If Cao is the rage machine they say he is, I wouldn't give him any tools to hunt.

Teams Retention at my old job was years because we dealt with contracts, jobs, and bids that took a long while to finish.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Teams Retention at my old job was years because we dealt with contracts, jobs, and bids that took a long while to finish.

We deal with those, but it doesn't benefit the company to retain Teams chats that long, so we don't.

If the information needs to be retained, send an email!

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

I think the content in this video makes the delay understandable.

I agree pointing a big neon arrow at the invite-only chats employees are using in Teams is risky.

 

[kenada]

I still wouldn't have mentioned it. If Cao is the rage machine they say he is, I wouldn't give him any tools to hunt.

I agree it’s definitely a risk. Even if the information is gone, he could still find out some other way. The work environment sounds toxic, so I wouldn’t know who I could trust to have that kind of conversation regardless of where we did.

Teams Retention at my old job was years because we dealt with contracts, jobs, and bids that took a long while to finish.

Our Teams retention is very short (30 days) because there are tools for documenting that kind of information with retention periods appropriate for that kind of content, and you are expected to use them.

Anyway, I hadn’t gotten to the point where he said he had to ask was Teams was. It definitely wasn’t a good idea to show those conversations in the video even if he did run them through a bot to paraphrase them.

 

[Minigiant]

We deal with those, but it doesn't benefit the company to retain Teams chats that long, so we don't.

If the information needs to be retained, send an email!

I worked with people who don't understand "Don't Reply All" with a "Yes"

 

[raniE]

Same. If true it's what I've been saying here for a long while.

Hasbro isn't making much money. Hasbro is leaning on WOTC's D&D and MTG to bail Hasbro out. D&D core books make money but the money slowed and cooled. Adventure books don't make enough for WOTC nor Hasbro. So this Chris Cao is aggressively attempting to pull out the gaming industry money printer. And the OGL stands in its way.

But I never bothered to look at Hasbro stock and yup it all makes sense now if true.


And my guy didn't know what Teams is. Really should have handed this info to someone else.

You don't have to look at just the stock price (which tanked over the past 12 months, worse than the market as a whole), you can look at the revenue and profits. Here's Hasbro's 2021 annual report. If you go inte the pdf, you get more detail. Hasbro made 6.42 billion dollars in revenue during 2021. Out of this, WotC and digital gaming revenue was 20%, 1.29 billion dollars. That's a large chunk of revenue, but it's not a majority. On the other hand, in 2021, Hasbro made an operating profit of $763.3 million, or 11.9% of revenue. WotC and digital gaming's part of that was $547.0 million. That's 42.5% of WotC revenue, and represents almost 72% of Hasbro's total profits in 2021. So WotC brings in 20% of Hasbro revenue but generates 72% of Hasbro profits. The rest of their stuff is essentially just spinning their wheels in comparison. Without WotC, Hasbro would have taken in 5.13 billion dollars in revenue and made a profit of 216.3 million dollars, or 4.2% of revenue. WotC is the money engine that's driving Hasbro at this point.

 

[BrassDragon]

Alright, I've been trying to separate the new 'factual' (but unconfirmed) information in this video from the gossipy 'this is how people act and feel' stuff that seems be to the main focus of the conversation so far. Feels like there is more to the implication that Wizards is an unsafe work environment but that's not the thrust of the video and should probably be better investigated and sourced... if true, it would deserve its own thread.

If we put that aside, what we learned is:

Business vision:

• Under a vision dubbed 'Hasbro 2.0' (EDIT: 'Blueprint 2.0'), the company wants to focus on fewer IPs but those individual IPs should be massive
• Magic: the Gathering already is such a brand, D&D is earmarked to be the another one, allegedly striving for $500 million USD revenue per annum by 2028 (currently estimated to be $100-150 million USD per annum)
• To get there, Wizards of the Coast leadership envisions a fully digital game in their walled garden where every bit of cosmetic and narrative content can be monetized to players and DMs, preferably on a recurring (=subscription) basis
• This would shift the focus from quarterly print releases to monthly content drops
• Printed books would be positioned as 'treasured collectibles' rather than core products

Business strategy:

• The above vision is threatened by other digital initiatives, namely Foundry VTT, Roll 20, HeroForge and (at least until the take-over in April 2022) D&D Beyond and other third party online content (which they apparently call 'pirate sites') such as 5E.tools. These must be 'killed'.
• The current OGL makes stopping these initiatives difficult if not impossible. Apparently this is the driving force behind the hard push for OGL revocation.
• The positioning of homebrew content in this new order is unclear but sources claim it was meant to be monetized despite denials on the D&D Beyond twitter feed.
• Most staff was not informed of the OGL changes until January 11, 2023 (for reference: Gizmodo article about leaked OGL 1.1 dropped January 5)
• The walled garden being developed has the project name 'Sandcastle'
• EDIT: Wizard's Digital game VP was apparently surprised by/against the acquisition of D&D Beyond, with his team already working on similar functionality and the resentment persists. Some of the more contradictory statements might be the result of this corporate factionalism.

Sandcastle: Unreal-powered 'digital experience'

• The $30 USD / month subscription fee was widely discussed internally, despite the denial of same through the D&D Beyond twitter feed.
• Character attacks, spells, abilities, animations can all be bought as microtransactions
• Aims to let a group play without a DM and a solo player without a group
• Tailor-made adventures will be designed for the new virtual tabletop with scenario- or encounter-based DM assistance (apparently the source of 'AI DMs' rumors, seems like the proposed feature is less ambitious than that)

There is more in the video, but it's mostly about personalities, hierachy, internal factions, workplace safety and how it feels to the insiders.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Hasbro 2.0

Blueprint 2.0

And it's interesting that a similar decision in 2007 is what spurred the creation of 4E and shaped the direction it took (only back then the goal was much lower - $50m/year).

Printed books would be positioned as 'treasured collectibles' rather than core products

Yes and we've been discussing this possibility for months, perhaps over a year, albeit usually the terminology was "coffee table books" or the like. The weird awkwardness of "treasured collectibles" has a disturbing ring of truth to it lol.

The positioning of homebrew content in this new order is unclear but sources claim it was meant to be monetized despite denials on the D&D Beyond twitter feed.

I think this issue speaks to divisions at WotC and Cao's apparently lack of understanding of D&D/TTRPGs. Clearly not everyone is with him given D&D Beyond was acquired against his advice. Might want to include that as it seems significant (buying Beyond against advice).

Anyway, yeah that's a helpful summary.

 

[Haplo781]

I am finding D&D Shorts to be highly irresponsible. Clearly showing that he has zero journalism training. His poorly thought-out method of reporting the situation is going to cause several people to be fired at WotC. Should have done a much better job at ensure that his sources cannot traced or letting Hasbro know about secret MS Teams chats. Sigh...

He literally showed the script to the people whose jobs are in the line and asked them if there was anything they wanted removed for their protection.

 

[Justice and Rule]

<Looking at @BrassDragon 's list>

At this point, we need OGL 1.0a to save D&D because this plan is going to kill D&D.