D&D 4E Hasbro, Greyhawk, and 4E speculation

[Dinkeldog]

Actually, what we'd probably do is not post anything on EN world about it one way or the other. I'm not in the habit of telling unsolicited lies; if there's something I don't want to discuss on the internet, well, I just don't discuss it on the internet. Even we mere underlings have a jot of common sense.

Moderator's Note: To highlight this, please assume that other people are not lying to you. Charles has taken time out of his day to post here with us. Remember to be polite.

 

[Henry]

Think back: how much notice did we have about Hasbro's acquisition of D&D?

From my opinion, we had a heck of a lot of notice. I lived through it as well, and the clues that TSR was dying and up for grabs were legion:

1) New products ceased production in 1996 and through the first quarter of 1997.
2) Dragon and Dungeon magazine ceased production.
3) More than one freelancer was complaining in newgroups and e-mails to friends that they weren't getting paid (the internet was not widespread, but it was prevalent, and AOL, GEnie, etc. served the function that the general internet does now).
4) The company was more and more infrequently returning correspondence to it.

In truth, Dragon Dice was its last hurrah back in 1995 and early 1996; after that vast miscalculation, the growing silence was a deafening awareness that something was horribly wrong.

WotC is anything but silent right now. Releases every quarter, online chats, WotC delegates crawling out of the woodwork (no offense, Belen ) WotC is pretty active, not necessarily in the dormant torpor that signals a possible acquisition. If you want a dramatic comparison, look at the Star Wars RPG line. Now THAT one's got a lot of fans earnestly worried for that particular line's health. The Minis are doing great, but the RPG is... well, a little quiet.

 

[WayneLigon]

One assumption that seems to underlie all of them is that D&D is a penny-ante little brand, and RPGs a penny-ante little category.

I guess because they're comparing them to the other Hasbro lines like GI Joe, the Star Wars franchise, My Little Pony, Furby and the like? I'd be surprised and amazed if D&D pulled in even half the revenue that the GI Joe division alone does; I might well be wrong, too, but it seems at least on the surface to be a logical conclusion.

On Hasbro's homepage, there is a link to Wizards, but not a D&D icon. If it really meant that much to them, wouldn't it have it's own section right there up front? Even if you go to All Brands, which I would suppose lists all the brands that Hasbro deals with, D&D is not listed. Heroscape, Lord of the Rings, Pokemon, and Avalon Hill are there. We don't even rate the same as Hungry Hungry Hippos.

Then again, Magic isn't listed there and it even has it's own site listed off the Sites bar, so maybe it's just incompetant web design and miscommunication.

I certainly don't think D&D is penny-ante in the world of RPG's, but I wouldn't have much trouble beleiving the entire RPG industry is penny-ante when compared to the big toy and game lines Hasbro supports. How off is that?

But the D&D business is run by the D&D business team, and as long as we do our jobs well, nobody on the Hasbro Board of Directors is interested in micromanaging D&D RPG releases, big or small.

Eh, I guess it's part of our culture now. Big and medium corporations have lied to us, all of us, so many times that we assume they're always lying now. It just wouldn't surprise anyone here if some Hasbro rep came into your office tomorrow and said 'get out' and that would be all the warning anyone would have. Sad and smacking of tin-hat-itis, but there.

 

[drothgery]

From my opinion, we had a heck of a lot of notice. I lived through it as well, and the clues that TSR was dying and up for grabs were legion:

1) New products ceased production in 1996 and through the first quarter of 1997.
2) Dragon and Dungeon magazine ceased production.
3) More than one freelancer was complaining in newgroups and e-mails to friends that they weren't getting paid (the internet was not widespread, but it was prevalent, and AOL, GEnie, etc. served the function that the general internet does now).
4) The company was more and more infrequently returning correspondence to it.

Err... not that I give any credence to the conspiracy theorists (there's very little chance a sale of D&D alone or all of WotC could be even semi-seriously contemplated without the D&D brand manager knowing about it), but that was WotC's acquisition of TSR. WotC seemed like a very healthy, profitable company when it was sold to Hasbro (and it was, and still seems to be).

 

[Greatwyrm]

LOL

Ok, I give you that. But seriously, as a poster mentioned previously, if D&D were actually up for sale (and underlings were let in on it), no one would breathe a word about it for fear of losing their jobs in a nanosecond. They would lie to our faces first, telling us any number of things.

Think back: how much notice did we have about Hasbro's acquisition of D&D?

And as I mentioned previously, Hasbro is a business. Therefore, everything is always for sale at the right price. They may not have any active plans to unload GI Joe either, but if you walked in with a check for $100 Million or so, they'd probably help you carry everything out to your car.

And now that you reminded me of how much notice we had about the Hasbro buy-out, we actually had more notice of 3e*. I remember sitting in on a playtest for 3e at GenCon '99. At that point, the rules were pretty close to their final form. Hasbro didn't announce the buy-out WotC until a few weeks later, in mid-September.

http://www.wizards.com/news/pressrelease.asp?19990909a

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*unless you follow anti-trust law in Washington state. I'm guessing that's a considerably smaller subset of the gaming community.

 

[CharlesRyan]

I'd be surprised and amazed if D&D pulled in even half the revenue that the GI Joe division alone does; I might well be wrong, too, but it seems at least on the surface to be a logical conclusion.

It wouldn't be appropriate for me to provide a brand-by-brand list of what's bigger than what. But contemplate this: When was the last time 30,000 G.I. Joe fans descended on a city for 4 days of 24-hour G.I. Joeing?

Seriously, though, your assumption that D&D couldn't possibly be as big as Furby is exactly the kind of self-image problem I'm talking about. Wake up, folks: D&D is a LOT bigger than you're giving it credit for!

 

[William Ronald]

It wouldn't be appropriate for me to provide a brand-by-brand list of what's bigger than what. But contemplate this: When was the last time 30,000 G.I. Joe fans descended on a city for 4 days of 24-hour G.I. Joeing?

Seriously, though, your assumption that D&D couldn't possibly be as big as Furby is exactly the kind of self-image problem I'm talking about. Wake up, folks: D&D is a LOT bigger than you're giving it credit for!

Well, I think sometimes people forget about the novels, the videogames, and other products. Also, the brand name is well known, and I think that WotC can capitalize on it. If I may ask, can you talk briefly about some of the efforts to recruit new gamers, such as the WotC delegate program and the Worldwide D&D Gameday? I think one concern that I have seen expressed on these boards is whether there are new people who are picking up RPGs as a hobby.

 

[WayneLigon]

It wouldn't be appropriate for me to provide a brand-by-brand list of what's bigger than what. But contemplate this: When was the last time 30,000 G.I. Joe fans descended on a city for 4 days of 24-hour G.I. Joeing?

Seriously, though, your assumption that D&D couldn't possibly be as big as Furby is exactly the kind of self-image problem I'm talking about. Wake up, folks: D&D is a LOT bigger than you're giving it credit for!

It's really good to hear that it's doing well - better than 'well', it sounds - but I guess it would be natural to assume that something as 'mainstream' as GI Joe would be much bigger in terms of both income and people using the material on a regular basis. I guess without numbers and figures which are probably difficult to obtain, we don't know.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

buzzard, you do make a good point. I think that Living Greyhawk is succesful for the RPGA, but it is possible that WotC could do a hardcover incorporating the changes to the setting reflected in the campaign.

I disagree that it is possible for WotC to produce a hardcover incorporating the changes that has happened in the LG campaign. I was part of one of the regional triads for a period of time. The campaign has run for 5 years now, sure. But there have been about 29 regions (a 30th will be added soon, The Sultanate of Zeif). Each region produced 8 to 9 modules per year, plus there are 5 Metaregions which produce 8-9 adventures per year, and each year there are 20 Core adventures. Roughly 160 adventures produced per year... multiplied by 5 gives us about 800 adventures to wade through to find which ways the setting was changed.

Plus, all of the interactives, Con specific events, some regions produced 4 per year.

Now, not to mention the "metaorgs" each triad developed. Metaorgs are associations that characters can join, nearly each of these were firmly anchored in the setting. Something like a Church of Holy Shielding metaorg (the Shield Lands alone has over 23 such organizations), and all this work done in polishing this off could be found for hundreds and hundreds of other organizations from documents on each of the Regional websites.

The scope of such a project to coordinate about 90 volunteers scattered across the globe, all of them, into submitting adequate documents detailing the changes that have happened to their region over 5 years is monumental. Good luck editing this down, or even re-writing it, because some of it has been crap and that will need to be worked with.

Not to forget all of the work that Erik Mona published under the much-mourned Living Greyhawk Journal, the standalone, Polyhedron, and Dungeon magazine iterations...

A single hardcover book detailing the changes to the Living Greyhawk campaign is just not possible due to the massive amount of work that has been produced already...

I imagine that WotC has a firm grasp that Living Greyhawk is not a small thing (I last heard over 18,000 active players around the planet), but I wonder if they have an idea how much material the unpaid campaign volunteers have produced over the course of its run-to-date. I just don't see them devoting any resources to cataloging what's gone on with it. It's too big.

 

[wingsandsword]

Seriously, though, your assumption that D&D couldn't possibly be as big as Furby is exactly the kind of self-image problem I'm talking about. Wake up, folks: D&D is a LOT bigger than you're giving it credit for!

The idea of a "self image problem" is probably based in the idea that we honestly have little reliable information on the size of our hobby, and very little up-to-date reliable information on the size of gaming.

The occasional "is gaming dying?" type threads really play on that uncertainty, with people saying it was obviously bigger back in the 80's when you could get D&D box sets at Sears and other everyday stores, while now it's largely confined to hobby shops and chain bookstores.

All most of us have are anecdotes, CG&R figures, and the old WotC numbers that were released back in 2000. The C&GR numbers are very dubious in their methodology, and WotC released some numbers about 5 years ago that looked positive, but in an field that has only really existed for 30 years, 5 years is an eternity, and it's quite clear that 3e/d20 has changed the face of gaming (making those figures further inaccurate).

Many of us would like to think gaming is big, and healthy (and the rapidly growing size of Gen Con does support that), but many people are unconvinced. If you look around on this site, there have been several threads with naysayers claiming the entire industry is on the edge of collapse with plummeting sales and everybody who disagrees is naive and deluded (personally I think that part is silly, how does our main convention get bigger every year while the hobby is supposedly falling apart?).

Maybe it has something to do with the fact our hobby still has a vague negative stigma in some quarters. I still meet new gamers who weren't allowed to play D&D until they got to college because their parents think D&D is "satanic", my dad believed it until only a few years ago, when I showed him that D&D is made by Hasbro, and there was no way a respected name like that would be making some kind of occult-indoctrination/satanic cult manuals (like he'd heard), their shareholders would never tolerate that.