WotC Hasbro CEO Chris Cox, "I would say that the underlying thesis of our D&D business is all about digital,”

[Ruin Explorer]

There have been people against the OGL from the very beginning of its creation, for instance.

Being against something isn't "a power struggle".

The previous law firm I worked at, I was very much against a lot of the faux-modernisation decisions they were making (including spending insane money on modernizing a space and somehow managing to make it look worse, and trying to charge us money for coffee). Doesn't mean I was "part of a power struggle". There was no power struggle. People complained to each other and the changes went ahead anyway.

You can't have a power struggle without struggle, is what I'm saying. Otherwise you just have power.

The anti-OGL people at WotC don't seem to have engaged in any kind of "power struggle". Rather than were rolled over, and the leaking was an attempt to stop the OGL because they didn't have the power to engage in any kind of actual struggle inside the company. Only once the PR problems started to get real (December 2022 at earliest) might there have been an actual struggle, but even then it looks a lot more like "Oh, we're getting a ton of pushback on this, I guess we'll change course".

 

[darjr]

Being against something isn't "a power struggle".

The previous law firm I worked at, I was very much against a lot of the faux-modernisation decisions they were making (including spending insane money on modernizing a space and somehow managing to make it look worse, and trying to charge us money for coffee). Doesn't mean I was "part of a power struggle". There was no power struggle. People complained to each other and the changes went ahead anyway.

You can't have a power struggle without struggle, is what I'm saying. Otherwise you just have power.

The anti-OGL people at WotC don't seem to have engaged in any kind of "power struggle". Rather than were rolled over, and the leaking was an attempt to stop the OGL because they didn't have the power to engage in any kind of actual struggle inside the company. Only once the PR problems started to get real (December 2022 at earliest) might there have been an actual struggle, but even then it looks a lot more like "Oh, we're getting a ton of pushback on this, I guess we'll change course".

I dunno what your getting at.

Dunno why your arguing or want some deep definition of what the D&D team is.

Several credible reports have been made that the D&D team suffers from some degree of internal unhealthy power struggles.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

To offer some clarity, the power struggles as I've heard them described are not for who has control of the company (e.g. no one is trying to rally board members in order to assume an executive position so that someone else can be pushed out, etc.). Rather, they're struggles over the vision, design, and direction of the game. The pro-OGL and anti-OGL factions are one of the clearest examples of that, but as I've heard (most notably from Ben Riggs' recent seminar) there are others.

I am not a bit surprised. The company is large enough to hold people in positions of power with differing views. I think that as @Umbran stated up thread, there is no obvious way to squeeze more money out of the book publishing operation but there is no obvious strategy as to the best way to "monetize the brand" and without a strong personality at the top with a clear vision this is what you get.

 

[Parmandur]

That is actually not surprising, the OGL flies in the face of almost every other IP management strategy out there.

Yet it has been stupendously effective at it's main nefarious corporate goal, funneling most competition in the market into making D&D compatible material.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

My point being, just because a company sees "digital" as the future, does not mean they are abandoning traditional distribution. Why does it seem some argue that is the case?

Because historically that's what happens, by and large?

When a company says they're going digital, they always promise to keep non-digital, non-online stuff going, and then, a few years later, that's no longer a priority for them, and they're "cutting back on it", and suddenly it's basically gone. This is a familiar pattern.

With D&D, I don't expect them to entirely cut physical. Rather I expect them to increasingly try to move physical into a purer luxury/lifestyle brand approach. Spelljammer absolutely was a move in that direction. Continuing that format with Planescape suggests they still see it as the way forwards. We'll get the corebooks in 2024, probably with fancy pretty special editions. But in say, 2027, will we see some significant paid products as digital-only? Yeah I think we will.

Several credible reports have been made that the D&D team suffers from some degree of internal power struggles.

Source? I'm not trying to argue as much as interested to see if I've missed something.

Also to me "the D&D team" is the 30-ish people who actually work on D&D, Jeremy Crawford and down (including the art directors). That's why I ask what you mean by that term, because it seems like you're using it to mean "everyone who involved in D&D in any way at all at WotC, including the 3D VTT people".

 

[Ondath]

Yet it has been stupendously effective at it's main nefarious corporate goal, funneling most competition in the market into making D&D compatible material.

Absolutely. It definitely means Hasbro won't have all of the pie, but it makes the pie stupendously larger so Hasbro's slice also grows.

Nevertheless, some shareholder types seem to be of the opinion that not only should they make the maximum amount of money NOW, nobody else should be allowed to make any money. So they tried to pull the OGL 2.0 shenanigans and it blew up in their face - spectacularly.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

nothing has changed. Microsoft still quiety waits till it is sure something is the hot thing and then they move too late and make a lot of money while destroying very creative companies and killing whatever new cashcow they were planning on making to add to the office, operating system,xbox trifecta. these days it's not tech companies microsoft kills it's gaming companies.

I think it is partly a function of bigness, especially big corporations involved in a business that is not their core competence. I was genuinely surprised that Nadella did not sell off the xbox division.
When I was still programming, MS was constantly coming out with some neat software ideas that then never came to anything and withered on the vine. But if one looks back the same thing happened with the research arms of Xerox and ATT&T. Most of the modern computing and internet paradigms were invented there but the parent companies never benefited because they could not see how it helped their core business. So others took those ideas and ran with them.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Yet it has been stupendously effective at it's main nefarious corporate goal, funneling most competition in the market into making D&D compatible material.

Exactly. It was an absolute genius move in terms of market dominance.

No better example of this could be found than looking at the RPG section of a games store (now defunct) I used to visit, called Playing Games or something like that (it was near the British Museum, if it'd survived another 5 years it'd probably be doing fine now!). Anyway, it used to carry a really diverse selection of RPGs, but after the OGL/d20 deal, it just completely swamped by OGL and d20 products, absolutely dominating the majority of the space, and that really was what most people were coming to buy, you could see from other customers. Then 4E hit and killed that all with the GSL, and suddenly their RPG space (the basement) was basically a ghost town compared to what it had been, it wasn't remotely as busy as it had been before OGL/d20, even, because people had been converted to those, and now they were gone, and instead of buying tons of RPG junk, they just weren't.

 

[Parmandur]

Absolutely. It definitely means Hasbro won't have all of the pie, but it makes the pie stupendously larger so Hasbro's slice also grows.

Nevertheless, some shareholder types seem to be of the opinion that not only should they make the maximum amount of money NOW, nobody else should be allowed to make any money. So they tried to pull the OGL 2.0 shenanigans and it blew up in their face - spectacularly.

Fortunately, it was enough of a kerfuffle thst those who realized that Hasbro are one of the main beneficiaries of D&D rules being open won am irreversible victory with the Creative Commons.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Yet it has been stupendously effective at it's main nefarious corporate goal, funneling most competition in the market into making D&D compatible material.

Yup, it is a brilliant stroke of brand management but counter intuitive. I think what frightens most IP managers with this approach is that it surrenders brand image, to a certain extent. Any type of weirdness imaginable could become popular out of this base. What they are concerned is that, that weirdness would be damaging to the brand. What they do not get is that any such weirdness is likely to stay very niche, if it becomes popular it is already mainstream enough to become acceptable.