NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 8549779" data-attributes="member: 907"><a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/wotc-ddi-4e-and-hasbro-some-history.661470/" target="_blank">This</a> is where Ryan Dancey discussed the thing. In short:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">In 2005, Hasbro decides to split things into Core Brands selling more than $50M and aiming for $100M, and non-Core brands who don't. Core brands get lots of internal support, non-Core don't and may or may not be mothballed.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Because of reasons dating back to the acquisition, each game line within Wizards gets treated separately. That's a problem because D&D at the time sells $30M at best (and at the time, this did not include computer games).</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">In 2006, Wizards presents a plan to Hasbro execs that they think will bring D&D above $50M, which includes ambitious plans for D&D Insider. They get the green light to go ahead with those plans.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Things do not work out as planned, particularly given how development of DDI crashed and burned and had to be retooled into something significantly less ambitious.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">At the time this gets evaluated, most of the people who planned that at Wizards have left already, so a new team gets to present new plans.</li> </ul>This was in 2012, which I think is when the D&D Next playtest launched. I don't know if Hasbro was still using the core/non-core division at the time. And as far as I know, 4e was never unprofitable, just not as profitable as they wanted it to be. So, new team with new, less ambitious plans. And the original launch of 5e was quite unambitious: you had the production of the first few adventures and sourcebooks outsourced to other game companies (as opposed to individual freelancers), and the release rate was quite slow (IIRC, 2015 saw three hardback releases). There were plenty of accessories for the game, but even those were outsourced to other companies (Wizkids for miniatures, Galeforce9 for things like spell cards and adventure-specific DM screens). It seemed very much like there'd be a small core team at Wizards whose job would mostly be to come up with ideas and then outsource those to third-party writers. D&D wasn't mothballed, but it was pretty darn close to it.</blockquote>

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