I think with Greg Leeds, it is helpful to look at his
previous interviews... from September 2011, a time we now know they were working on developing D&D Next.
"What are the results of that multi-year strategy?
Over-all our business is up significantly. I think anyone you talk to about what’s going on with Magic and D&D will tell you that we are having very, very strong sales. We are having very strong sales in digital, and we’re having strong sales in mass market, but our strongest sales are in the hobby shops. So that’s working. The best evidence of this is if you just talk to retailers about the last couple of years, the number of players that have been playing Magic and D&D, with a program like D&D Encounters, which is just completing its second season, the numbers are not falling off at all in terms of participation. When you come to a place like Gen Con you can see that there are so many people interested in getting together and finding like-minded D&D players. They love getting together. Now it’s happening in stores every Wednesday night on a regular basis. We are continuing to invest in great D&D content--the kind of content that gets someone not only to play D&D but also to go on Wednesday night to their local store and play with their friends."
"This year there have been some new developments in Dungeons & Dragons, and people are trying to read between the lines. There have been some reductions in staff (a couple of long time people have left the D&D team), and also there has been a cutback in releases at the beginning of the year for D&D. Are you reducing your emphasis on the role-playing game exploitation of the D&D property?
No, we are not reducing the emphasis on the roleplaying game property for D&D. I need to correct you. We have had some long time staff leave, a couple of people, but we haven’t reduced the overall number of people working on D&D. We are constantly adjusting and tweaking our organization. I think that any healthy organization has some amount of movement. With Dungeons & Dragons, because of that direct personal relationship that our staff has with the gaming community, our ultimate customers, when someone changes it’s far more noticeable than it is in many other businesses. But, I can tell you that in my 20 years of management experience I don’t think that I have seen an organization more stable over a period of 15 years than we have had in Wizards of the Coast or D&D. You take the average tenure of our employees working on D&D and it’s extremely high.
We will have and have had occasional turnover, but D&D is a healthy, thriving business on the role-playing side and will continue to be."
