Hasbro CEO: "D&D is Really on a Tear"

Sorry, that laugh was a result of clumsy fingers on my phone.

 

[Wicht]

Intent doesn't really matter, in this case. Just about anything can become collectable - all you have to do is let time take its toll until they become scarce. Then, specimens in good shape are quite collectable.

I doubt they ever published Detective Comics#1 and thought, "this will finance some kid's college education someday if he keeps it in good shape."

 

[billd91]

I doubt they ever published Detective Comics#1 and thought, "this will finance some kid's college education someday if he keeps it in good shape."

And there's the rub. If they had done so, collectors would have swooped in, bought them up, archived them to be protected from deterioration, and... not allowed natural attrition to wipe out most copies and raise the value of the protected specimens. Remember when comic publishers came out with collector's editions, die cut covers, and all that BS? Fanboys polybagged up the comics certain they'd have something of value. What are most of those worth? Not very much - because they were collectibles and were, therefore, collected rather than used and lost.

 

[Iosue]

Not only do we not know that, I would be pretty sure he was talking about D&D as a whole - so the sum of the RPG, MMO, and anything else they've got going on.

Actually, he was fielding a question about the Games division. Things like Licensing and Entertainment are reported on separately. So it's more likely that he was referring to just the game, though also including the board games.

 

[Mistwell]

I think you might be a bit mistaken as to what I said.

Nobody denies D&D has made money, it's a new edition and all editions make money. A lot of this is vague speech. We don't know the expectations that were put on D&D. Shareholders are not going to necessarily going to get a breakdown of what does what.

Again, you're coming at this from a layman's perspective, and I am coming at it from the perspective of an in-house council for a public corporation that did these calls (which I was). It doesn't matter what they might not do - the assumptions are in place, put there by law and the threat of lawsuits, that you must do things a certain way. You can't guess what people might do - you assume they will take anything you say the worst possible way, and so you simply can't say anything that can be misconstrued different than reality. So yes you keep it vague - but you don't say it at all if it's not a material change in revenue for the overall company. Period. It's not based on internal projections - unless you make those projections public knowledge. It must be based on a general accounting criteria, and in this case it's just that it must be a materially important change for the positive in overall Hasbro revenue - NOT a projection, unless you mention it's based on a projection (which he does not). If you beat projections, you have to say you beat projections, and you have to have previously mentioned what the projection is so people can see you beat it. There are rules to these things. Rules way more complicated than D&D rules.

If D&D was projected to hit a specific number and they surpass that then they can praise it as much as they want to unless they start using actual figures which then leads to one having to be precise.

No, they cannot - unless they made those projections public which they did not (or in the very least they'd have to say "based on our projections" - it cannot be implied). Seriously, if you don't know the rules involved with these things, don't guess at them. They are way too complicated for you to guess at them and assume your guess is right.

There is no proof here that this edition's current model is working and that 5th edition is going to be a success. All it shows is what basically all the other editions have done and that is sell well in the beginning.

Ah, so that is what this is about, you don't want to admit the business plan might be working? Why, because you said something in the past about it, or because you don't like the edition, or because you want them doing something else? Why is that idea something that seems to bother you?

 

[wedgeski]

(That said, the failure of "John Carter" probably led to Disney buying Lucasfilm<snip>)

Eh?

 

[delericho]

Eh?

Disney made "John Carter", which flopped mightily and led to them losing a bunch of money. They then went out and bought a very similar property and proceeded to immediate announce a bunch of new films in the same vein.

Of course, I could be reading too much into things, again.

 

[MechaPilot]

I can't see a Ravenloft film ever happening - there's nothing you can do with that that you can't do with public-domain sources, and "Dracula" has a rather bigger draw than "Ravenloft".

I could see Spelljammer happening, maybe. Though with the failure of "John Carter", I think it's now even more unlikely than it was. (That said, the failure of "John Carter" probably led to Disney buying Lucasfilm, and thus to us getting more "Star Wars", so it's not all bad.)

I don't see John Carter as part of the barometer for the success or failure of a Spelljammer film. Spelljammer is much more likely to be like the Pirates of the Caribbean films, only in space.

With regard to Ravenloft and licensing, Universal has their monster films and is going to make their own cinematic monster universe. If you want a big-name vampire, Dracula is off the table. You could go with an Anne Rice vampire if you wanted to, but you could also go for the less well-known Strahd or Jander Sunstar.

Also, Ravenloft has plenty of other darklords, and Azalin, Jaqueline Renier, and Soth all have good film potential.

 

[AriochQ]

Dracula is public domain no?

I would rather see a Ravenloft, just because of the D&D tie in (and the fact that tons of Dracula films have been made already).

 

[Trickster Spirit]

Dracula is public domain in the US, but Universal is the studio going to court for the D&D film rights with Hasbro's backing, so it makes sense that they wouldn't want two separate, high-visibility franchises both featuring vampire lords going at the same time.

 

[darjr]

Also the steam 5e play via fantasy grounds seems to have been a bit of a splash in video gaming circles.