Hasbro Hit With Layoffs, Wizards of the Coast Impacted

At least four Wizards of the Coast employees impacted by today's layoffs.

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Hasbro has announced they had laid off "less than 100" employees, with Wizards of the Coast and the Dungeons & Dragons team impacted as a result. Hasbro announced the "operational streamlining" of their team ahead of their third quarter earnings report, along with several organizational changes impacting oversight of different business lines. as part of these business realignments, Chief Marketing Officer Jason Bunge will now oversee Wizards of the Coast and digital marketing moving forward.

EN World has learned that at least four people at Wizards of the Coast were laid off as part of these changes. One of the four is Dixon Dubow, who publicly announced that he was laid off on Twitter yesterday. Dubow was the creator relations manager for Dungeons & Dragons and was a critical part of helping to repair D&D's image after the 2023 OGL scandal. Dubow was a primary point of contact for content creators who worked with the D&D brand.

Hasbro previously laid off a number of Wizards of the Coast employees as part of a wider employee reduction line last year. Numerous employees from various Wizards teams were either laid off or retired as part of a 20% reduction in the overall Hasbro workforce.

Hasbro also announced year to date operating profits of $630 million during their quarterly earnings report, with a $98 million dividend payout to shareholders.
 

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Christian Hoffer

Christian Hoffer

Retreater

Legend
If your goal is to minimize layoffs, this is not the correct strategy. Just sayin'.
I mean, they just boasted that they released the biggest product in the history of D&D. Clearly, money isn't the issue.
What it seems to me is retribution for "Blurgate" since they took out the guy responsible for interactions with streamers.
 

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Stormonu

NeoGrognard
At this point I honestly don't care. If you went to work for WotC in the last 20+ years, you know they're doing these on the regular, you knew what you were getting into. If not, then this is a good learning experience. I'm a (semi) fan of D&D, not a fan of WotC/Hasbro and don't know the people working there and I don't expect that the people that worked on the products I liked in the last 35 years, still work there.

And people here are a tad bit unreasonable. Do you expect that people keep working at the company when they don't get fired? If they leave, are they suddenly bad people and are traitors? Especially if they leave for another better paying job? No, that's 'normal', so why the different standards?

I did some local research (I live in the Netherlands):
  • About 6.5% of the working population leave their current company every quarter.
  • Of that about 2/3rds do that voluntary, 1/6th are fired by the company, and 1/6th is unknown.

If we use these stats for the US...
- The actual working population in the US is almost 170 million, that would translate to ~30 million people being fired every quarter.

Hasbro fired another 100 people... Whoopie! It might be annoying for the people being fired, but in my experience, being let go has generally been beneficial, getting better jobs in return (usually getting better pay).

And the reactions towards the owners (investors) of the company. Sure they are rich enough to invest/own a big company, this is pure jealousy! Just about everyone wants to be 'rich' (what that means is different for different people), but most people aren't and see that as a license to hate on people who are. If you hire a gardener to do the garden, do you have to keep paying your gardener if you pave your garden and don't need a gardener anymore? You have a contract with your employer, where you can leave with X amount of notice and they can fire you with Y amount of notice. Why are companies => people 'evil' when they follow the contract both parties agreed to?
Having the rug pulled out from under you from a position you enjoyed and did well at is never heartening. I have seen many family and friends have their life ruined - not made better - because of a company's bad decisions that are taken out on their employees.

I go to my job expecting to be paid for the work I do. But I generally expect that same job to be there the next day to go back to (if I haven't been screwing up at it). I'd be quite unhappy to find myself out of work because of the bad decisions someone else made, and that tends to be the way of upper management. They'll never take the responsibility for their poor decisions that led to layoffs or firings. It'll be the problem of someone else down the chain, likely someone who was doing their job.
 



Retreater

Legend
Likely the people responsible for blue gate were WOTC lawyers or lawyer adjacent.
My thought is that folks like the guy who just left were the ones who "wrongly" (in the view of the legal team) empowered the content creators to show the book.
Of course, as a content creator, you know more than any of us about how this works. I'm saying only that - as an outsider - a company removing their content creator relations guy after a snafu like this seems like it's connected.
 



Parmandur

Book-Friend, he/him
And it seems that there is reason to believe that @SlyFlourish's acquaintance, at least, was doing good and important work
It seems to me that given that these layoffs are the result of Hasbro HQ taking over marketing from Renton...that the recent rake stepping marketing steps that involved YouTubers like Mike Shea probably played a part with the role being cut.
 

GrimCo

Hero
Layoffs suck, but they are part of life if you work in corporate sector. On my second job, they hired me in February and fired me in November of same year ( they cut off 20 people, 10% of total workers in that branch office, mostly us newbies). Come June next year, same company is hiring again, this time around 30 people. At least they called most of us that got fired and offered us our old jobs back.

On the other hand, Hasbro stock is doing ok. It dropped down from 71 in September to 66 but it holds at that rate. Hasbro gives 4.2% annual dividend on stock, which isn't bad. As a very small new shareholder, hope these layoffs don't impact stock prices.
 

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