Hasbro/WotC has crossed the Trust Thermocline

[Muso]

The real question I think now is: will WoC learn from this and try to fix it, or will they pretend to listen to the fans and still try to pursue the exact same goals?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Also, isn't it mostly the GM/DMs who actually buy RPG products, making the percentage of actual paying customers bigger? I mean, yeah, players might buy the player-facing books, but probably not adventures?

Not only is that true, but on top of that, 5E is unique among D&D editions in that it really hasn't put out many books a player would ever consider buying.

Typically players buy books that have a bunch of player-facing content in them, and don't also have a ton of stuff that's clearly DM-directed. There are only two such books for 5E (apart from the PHB), in 8 years. Xanathar's and Tasha's. It's possible some players would also buy the dragon book, but it was marketed in a very DM-oriented way.

This is in huge contrast to 2/3/4E.

All of them pumped out "splatbooks" which is what players usually buy. 2E had Handbook after Handbook, just a hose of player-facing content. Then Skills & Powers and all that too, which was player-facing.

3E even more so. Endless splatbooks. PrCs being in the mix just made it more extreme!

4E had multiple "PHBs" full of player-facing material, class-based splatbooks, and then the Essentials line was also extremely player-friendly - certainly both the Essentials books were bought by my players.

Now 5E did recognise something important:

If you only sell to the DM, and making far fewer books, your sales become vastly more efficient, in terms of sell-through and real use at the table. But the problem is, that means DMs are even more your main audience than they are in previous editions. So you'd really better not piss them off. And given they also tend to be far more hooked-in to RPG news, far more likely to be interested in 3PP products, and are the only person in the group even remotely reliably capable of moving the group to another game, this sort of thing is EXACTLY what you want to avoid.

However, I don't think WotC's current leadership even understands the DM/player distinction, let alone that they've been selling to DMs. I'm sure Winninger did, and Perkins and Crawford do, but Dan Rawson or Cynthia Williams? Unlikely based on this. This reeks of failure to know your audience.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The real question I think now is: will WoC learn from this and try to fix it, or will they pretend to listen to the fans and still try to pursue the exact same goals?

The latter.

Their unctuous faux-apology shows that.

They so quickly dropped the most obviously-evil bits of the OGL 1.1 that it's hard to understand why they even did them except greed/arrogance, but they kept the red line point of deauthorizing the OGL 1.0a and destroying the concept of OGC.

They literally don't get what the problem is. They don't understand their audience on a basic level. They don't understand who is actually buying their books, and I strongly suspect they don't understand the difference between a DM and a player, and part of the reason they think D&D is "under-monetized" is that not everyone is buying all the books, and not every Beyond sub is a master-tier sub.

 

[mamba]

The real question I think now is: will WoC learn from this and try to fix it, or will they pretend to listen to the fans and still try to pursue the exact same goals?

not much of a question there, given their ‘walkback’ statement. It’s still full steam ahead

 

[Muso]

I also think the same. After the catastrophe of 4E they recovered well with the development, play testing and release of 5E, showing that they have learned (at least in part) from the mistakes they made before. Today it seems that they just don't understand what is going on and why they can't put their plans into action. Either there will be a change at the top or I fear it will get worse and worse.

 

[The Scythian]

However, I don't think WotC's current leadership even understands the DM/player distinction, let alone that they've been selling to DMs. I'm sure Winninger did, and Perkins and Crawford do, but Dan Rawson or Cynthia Williams? Unlikely based on this. This reeks of failure to know your audience.

In the now infamous December 8th investor presentation, the example that WotC president Cynthia Williams gave of D&D being under monetized was this:

"So when we think about our future monetization, we start here. Dungeon Masters, which are the people who guide you through the adventure, they only make up about 20% of the audience, but they are the largest share of our paying players. For the rest of the players at the table, we believe digital will allow us to offer a lot more options to create rewarding experiences post-sale that helps us unlock the type of recurrent spending you see in digital games, where more than 70% of the revenue in digital gaming comes post-sale. The speed of digital means that we're able to expand from what is essentially a yearly book-publishing model to a recurrent spending environment..."

They understand the distinction, and they're in the process of restructuring their entire business model to get more money out of non-DM D&D players. That's what 6e is all about. The end goal isn't simply a new edition of D&D. It's moving the game from the dining room table to a state-of-the-art VTT with impressive graphics and other features, which will become a platform to sell everything from subscriptions to virtual currency to virtual miniatures to game materials (like classes, feats, spells, monsters, etc.) to customizations (for virtual dice, virtual miniatures, digital character sheets, etc.) and other things that I lack the business savvy to imagine.

WotC didn't just stumble into the OGL debacle because they don't understand the composition of their customer base. It's part of a larger plan.

 

[mamba]

That's what 6e is all about. The end goal isn't simply a new edition of D&D. It's moving the game from the dining room table to a state-of-the-art VTT with impressive graphics and other features, which will become a platform to sell everything from subscriptions to virtual currency to virtual miniatures to game materials (like classes, feats, spells, monsters, etc.) to customizations (for virtual dice, virtual miniatures, digital character sheets, etc.) and other things that I lack the business savvy to imagine.

they can do that and stay at 5e. Nothing in 6e helps with that

 

[Justice and Rule]

And if those minor trust violations hadn’t occurred, do you think the OGL 1.1 wouldn’t have resulted in this backlash?

It’s not enough that trust violations erode someone’s trust. The mistrust has to be widespread, across a significant percentage of the fanbase, with the result that one more minor trust violation is the last straw. I don’t think that was really the case with WotC. Yes, they occasionally did things that annoyed some of the fans, but overall I think people had a positive, or at worst neutral, attitude towards them. But OGL 1.1 wasn’t a minor violation of trust. It wasn’t a final straw, on top of a mountain of older straws. And so it angered even WotC fans.

Honestly... kind of? The real themocline is a depth, and if WotC wasn't already a little deep (if manageably so), maybe it could have at least reassured the community a bit more that it was taking their voices to heart. I do think that while some people wouldn't trust them, there are a certain amount of people who look at the list of mistakes @Dire Bare put out and this ends up showing that those weren't isolated, they were a growing pattern of behavior.

So yeah, they might have a bit more ability to control the community if not for previous mistakes. This is perhaps a less apt example of the issue the thermocline is trying to get across (That small changes can yield huge backlash because the dam bursts on a build-up of resentment and irritation with a company), but sometimes people cross the thing by diving straight down rather than on a very shallow incline.

 

[The Scythian]

they can do that and stay at 5e. Nothing in 6e helps with that

The very act of creating a new edition helps with that. It changes D&D from merely the latest edition of that weird game where you sit around the dining room table and play with books and funny dice, to One D&D, the evergreen final edition of the game that will be built around a state-of-the-art VTT and suite of digital tools.

To be clear, I'm not saying that it would have been impossible for them to make a state-of-the-art VTT and suite of digital tools for 5e. However, they're obviously going in a different direction.

 

[raniE]

In the now infamous December 8th investor presentation, the example that WotC president Cynthia Williams gave of D&D being under monetized was this:

"So when we think about our future monetization, we start here. Dungeon Masters, which are the people who guide you through the adventure, they only make up about 20% of the audience, but they are the largest share of our paying players. For the rest of the players at the table, we believe digital will allow us to offer a lot more options to create rewarding experiences post-sale that helps us unlock the type of recurrent spending you see in digital games, where more than 70% of the revenue in digital gaming comes post-sale. The speed of digital means that we're able to expand from what is essentially a yearly book-publishing model to a recurrent spending environment..."

They understand the distinction, and they're in the process of restructuring their entire business model to get more money out of non-DM D&D players. That's what 6e is all about. The end goal isn't simply a new edition of D&D. It's moving the game from the dining room table to a state-of-the-art VTT with impressive graphics and other features, which will become a platform to sell everything from subscriptions to virtual currency to virtual miniatures to game materials (like classes, feats, spells, monsters, etc.) to customizations (for virtual dice, virtual miniatures, digital character sheets, etc.) and other things that I lack the business savvy to imagine.

WotC didn't just stumble into the OGL debacle because they don't understand the composition of their customer base. It's part of a larger plan.

The problem with that plan is ... we already have video games, and if you want to do video game stuff, then video games are better. This seems to be geared up to puncture the D&D fad bubble with lots of players leaving the hobby and instead of WotC being set up to quietly go into maintenance mode with say one release a year and letting third party creators take the risks that might bring people in to buy a PHB every now and again, they're going to develop an expensive system that requires constant maintenance just as their customer pool is shrinking.