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Hasbro selling D&D IP?
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<blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9255176" data-attributes="member: 18"><p>I'm not trying to be difficult, but I feel like you're removing a lot of nuance and detail re: Hasbro and WotC's relationship to simplify it to a "pretty good job", and I don't think that's really right. Benign neglect is not "a pretty good job".</p><p></p><p>Hasbro, when the bought WotC, don't seem to have considered D&D a particularly valuable IP/product, certainly absolutely paling next to the juggernaut which was 1999 Magic The Gathering.</p><p></p><p>It's notable that Hasbro sold off the digital rights to most of their major IPs with the deal I discussed in 2000, it DID NOT include the Magic The Gathering digital rights. Clearly Hasbro saw those as significantly more valuable than the D&D IP (they licenced them separately but retained ownership).</p><p></p><p>With most of 3.XE, I think D&D basically got the benign neglect treatment from Hasbro. It made okay money and Hasbro didn't want to get in and micromanage it. But by 2007, that had changed. Specifically Hasbro had a demand to WotC that, unless D&D made $50m per year (which it was nowhere near doing), they were going to either mothball or sell off the IP. 4E and the DDI were the specific response to that. They were WotC's plan to make D&D able to to make $50m/year. They were directly caused by Hasbro's threat. A series of disasters unfolded. Most of them not connected to 4E's rules, but rather insane decisions like the unintentionally Simpsons-bit-esque marketing campaign, getting rid of the OGL in favour of a much worse licence, getting a tiny in-house team to work on the DDI and then having the bad luck to have the team leader be a murderer, and so on. All of this combined to prevent 4E from being really successful with the DDI, and also prevented it from making $50/year. Hasbro didn't act on their threat - presumably ideas had changed - and WotC employees managed to convince Hasbro that they could make a quietly profitable success out of D&D with a new edition and a very limited approach to putting out product. That's what lead to 5E - Hasbro had essentially once more entered the "benign neglect" approach to D&D - they didn't expect it to do much more than turn an okay profit and keep the IP relevant. Of course, 5E went insanely huge, again not so much to do with the rules (though accessibility definitely helped!), but to do with complex cultural factors and third parties like Critical Role. And once more, Hasbro wants D&D to make them big money. Thus they've essentially gone back to the DDI project, which was always intended to be a 3D VTT which you subscribed to, and based on 2023 information from Cynthia Williams, have a very large team working on that (a big change from the tiny team of the original DDI), several times larger than the one employed on D&D itself (or even MtG, I think, though god knows how many artists contract for MtG). Again we have bigger expectations from Hasbro about D&D's success - luckily these seem to be focused more on the 3D VTT this time, so if that's a flop, Hasbro may simply return to benign neglect.</p><p></p><p>But again, let's not confuse benign neglect and "a pretty good job". I think a "pretty good job" with D&D would have involved handling it and particularly the digital rights a lot better over the last 25 years. I think a different, more proactive approach could have got a lot D&D decent D&D-IP videogames made, got more D&D-associated TV and movies made, and generally marketed the D&D as a product better. Hell, I don't think 4E's failure was a foregone conclusion. Better marketing, not trying to kill the OGL, and just investing more in the DDI could have made it much more successful (I suspect 5E would still have happened, and at around the same time, and with many of the same ideas about simplification, liking making Feats optional and class progressions largely fixed, but with more 4E-style combat rules).</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Ruin Explorer, post: 9255176, member: 18"] I'm not trying to be difficult, but I feel like you're removing a lot of nuance and detail re: Hasbro and WotC's relationship to simplify it to a "pretty good job", and I don't think that's really right. Benign neglect is not "a pretty good job". Hasbro, when the bought WotC, don't seem to have considered D&D a particularly valuable IP/product, certainly absolutely paling next to the juggernaut which was 1999 Magic The Gathering. It's notable that Hasbro sold off the digital rights to most of their major IPs with the deal I discussed in 2000, it DID NOT include the Magic The Gathering digital rights. Clearly Hasbro saw those as significantly more valuable than the D&D IP (they licenced them separately but retained ownership). With most of 3.XE, I think D&D basically got the benign neglect treatment from Hasbro. It made okay money and Hasbro didn't want to get in and micromanage it. But by 2007, that had changed. Specifically Hasbro had a demand to WotC that, unless D&D made $50m per year (which it was nowhere near doing), they were going to either mothball or sell off the IP. 4E and the DDI were the specific response to that. They were WotC's plan to make D&D able to to make $50m/year. They were directly caused by Hasbro's threat. A series of disasters unfolded. Most of them not connected to 4E's rules, but rather insane decisions like the unintentionally Simpsons-bit-esque marketing campaign, getting rid of the OGL in favour of a much worse licence, getting a tiny in-house team to work on the DDI and then having the bad luck to have the team leader be a murderer, and so on. All of this combined to prevent 4E from being really successful with the DDI, and also prevented it from making $50/year. Hasbro didn't act on their threat - presumably ideas had changed - and WotC employees managed to convince Hasbro that they could make a quietly profitable success out of D&D with a new edition and a very limited approach to putting out product. That's what lead to 5E - Hasbro had essentially once more entered the "benign neglect" approach to D&D - they didn't expect it to do much more than turn an okay profit and keep the IP relevant. Of course, 5E went insanely huge, again not so much to do with the rules (though accessibility definitely helped!), but to do with complex cultural factors and third parties like Critical Role. And once more, Hasbro wants D&D to make them big money. Thus they've essentially gone back to the DDI project, which was always intended to be a 3D VTT which you subscribed to, and based on 2023 information from Cynthia Williams, have a very large team working on that (a big change from the tiny team of the original DDI), several times larger than the one employed on D&D itself (or even MtG, I think, though god knows how many artists contract for MtG). Again we have bigger expectations from Hasbro about D&D's success - luckily these seem to be focused more on the 3D VTT this time, so if that's a flop, Hasbro may simply return to benign neglect. But again, let's not confuse benign neglect and "a pretty good job". I think a "pretty good job" with D&D would have involved handling it and particularly the digital rights a lot better over the last 25 years. I think a different, more proactive approach could have got a lot D&D decent D&D-IP videogames made, got more D&D-associated TV and movies made, and generally marketed the D&D as a product better. Hell, I don't think 4E's failure was a foregone conclusion. Better marketing, not trying to kill the OGL, and just investing more in the DDI could have made it much more successful (I suspect 5E would still have happened, and at around the same time, and with many of the same ideas about simplification, liking making Feats optional and class progressions largely fixed, but with more 4E-style combat rules). [/QUOTE]
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