Yes, when corporations make money, no matter how much it is, investors hope they will make more money, and price things accordingly. Then when they don’t, and the investors are disappointed, the stock price falls and people lose their jobs.
Oh cool, how did that work out with their Magic moves? Did that raise or lower their stock prices?
The point being that in the game theory of publicly traded companies there is, by definition, no such thing as “enough”. Not because of a moral failing of the people who work in them but because of the rules of the game. You might as well accuse the NBA of moral failings for not having a more representative distribution of heights among players.
They can set their own profits projections and make them so they are achievable without massive moves that spark backlash. This is not a skill competition like the NBA, this is them making deliberate choices. They didn't need to set such high predictions, they could have set things that were good while still in reason that didn't require them to take such risky, stupid steps. Again, that's greed. And if you want to say it's institutionalized, fine. But it still doesn't make it anything else.
Now, sometimes the pressure to meet those demands leads to poor decisions, and sometimes those decisions really are evil. (C.f. Purdue Pharma.). I’m sorry but while even a complete revocation of the OGL would have been unfortunate for a number of people, especially those who have built a livelihood on it, it really is “just business.”
You're trying to find greater evils to justify why lesser evils aren't evil. There can be gradations of such things, smaller and larger. If you're cool with them destroying the community that was built around them just so they could make the equivalent of Fortnite dance emotes, that's fine because that's all on you. I just think that sort of behavior is bad and shouldn't be rewarded, and also that we should at least be honest with what it is.
My biggest problem with y'all is that the only way we stopped this was by getting outraged and saying "No", and now we have a bunch of people telling us that we shouldn't have been outraged because this is just was businesses do. You're just neutering what was done by telling them "It's okay, go ahead and do it again. We'll go to bat for you."
I still don't buy the 3pp should have been destroyed narrative. VTTs maybe. But not those 3pps that do some of the dirty work for WotC, i. e. doing niche things, which are not profitable.
If you can buy the VTTs, I don't see why you wouldn't believe 3PPs. It's basically the same thing, but there are more of them. If you are going big, you want to remove risks, and having a bunch of people covering content you may or may not want to cover, thus putting you into competition with them?
To give an example, would you think that Wizards would do a crafting book for 5E if they weren't moving on from the edition? I'd say "No" because crafting has basically been covered a hundred times by other people and other groups. It's a no-win scenario because they have a hundred books people can compare theirs to and inevitably there will be
something wrong with it even if they are good. Having those 3PPs, to them, restricts them and removes profit they could be making.
You can make this argument a dozen times and while I'd say it's
wrong, I can't argue that it's at least
logical, especially if you want to become the EA of Tabletop RPGs. And I'd wager that was some of the thought here: leverage your position to vassalize the market so that your end of it is
firmly under your control.
They did not backtrack, because of a few people cancelled subscriptions. They did, because they noticed that small 3pp are not willing to do the dirty work anymore. So if destroying them was their goal, they could have done it.
I think it’s as simple as that. It wasn’t angry forum posts and DNDB cancellations that did it, it was phone calls with Mercer, Colville, Goodman, etc.
No, I disagree with this completely. If it was 3PP people calling them, this wouldn't have gotten into January. It was a combination of
everything, because these were all necessary but not sufficient things to sustain an outrage campaign. The fans being angry enough to actually act on their anger, 3PPs standing firm in their refusal to be bullied, and even D&D influencers keeping momentum going. It's not just about one aspect, but the entire wave of things being hard to ignore and brush off: they couldn't control the narrative because they didn't have a single outside source vouching for them. That freaked them out, and I'd say the design studio gave them a face-saving out with the surveys.
Yeah, that’s another point in regard to “they were making plenty of money and growing nicely.” We don’t know what their internal modeling was saying about the future.
But we do know they wanted to go from $150M profits to $1B. I'd say that their modeling said that would be difficult if they didn't take full control of their market. But also, it was their choice to make such sky-high projections. They could have said they'd double or even triple profits in that timespan and that'd still be astounding.
