Parmandur
Book-Friend
Ah, il bel giaco.Honestly it seems less like Chess and more like Dodgeball.
Ah, il bel giaco.Honestly it seems less like Chess and more like Dodgeball.
The layoffs have to do with toys not selling on the market last year as expected, pretty unrelated to this.There are a lot of little anecdotes among the leaks that make Hasbro look extremely incompetent. One, for example, was that executives did not have a meeting or communication with the creative and Beyond teams until early January, after OGL 1.1 had leaked and was trending. Probably difficult to coordinate a response when there's such a lack of basic communication.
Then they laid off 1000 people.
They are playing checkers by committee with themselves and losing.
This. Has anything about the past month given any indication that they know what they're doing, never mind that they're geniuses?
Absolutely. Someone at wotc won an internal struggle and made damn sure it wouldn’t be invalidated later.The 5E CC release pretty well shuts down any chance of accomplishing that.
I do think there was a little bit of regular chess-playing involved... but it was the pro-OGL faction within Wizards doing it. They saw an opportunity to put 5E out of reach of the anti-OGL crowd for good, and seized it. That's why they made a point of putting the Creative Commons-licensed PDF right there in the announcement, so the anti-OGL folks would have no way to walk things back or undercut them.
Yeah - I think that's exactly what happened. I told my wife that some of the leaks that Linda Codega and others (like the D&D shorts guy) were reporting on had the scent of an internal power battle being played out in public because someone needed to be smacked back.It seems that this OGL maneuver was a bit of a power grab that blew up in somebody's face: not briefing people sounds like an intentional strategy to make it a fait accompli before anyone could object. A failed strategy, as it turns out.
Well, the fact that the alleged leaks all pointed to a particular VP who only came into thr D&D part of the busienss recently as the "bad guy" gives that vibe.Yeah - I think that's exactly what happened. I told my wife that some of the leaks that Linda Codega and others (like the D&D shorts guy) were reporting on had the scent of an internal power battle being played out in public because someone needed to be smacked back.
That may not be what it was, but something about the leaks sure reminded me of some of the big orgs I've worked for when folks at VP levels are fighting each other. I can't even really point at what it was, just a feeling. So I may very well be reading too much into it.
Yeah. The narrative I'm seeing from the outside, as a somewhat-engaged observer, is "Alta Fox attempts spinoff, fails; Hasbro board realizes Wizards is the golden goose and starts paying way more attention to it, promoting Chris Cocks to CEO and installing a bunch of ex-Microsoft execs to key positions; new execs fundamentally don't understand D&D and bungle things while shouting down underlings who point out why their ambitious plans won't work; underlings concerned for future of D&D leak plans in desperate Hail Mary."You say this as if there's a singular "They" in WotC. The externally observed behavior is consistent with there being multiple people/groups with different levels of understanding, and it took some time and strife for those with understanding to get it through the heads of those who lacked it.
I think you're misreading or at least missing the broad points I was making for some more specific points that I was not. They did slow down the release for 5e. I did not say this was in response to poor numbers. I pointed to it being the result of a smaller design team—and a smaller team would be hard-pressed to develop multiple books simultaneously. The argument I'm making is that Hasbro will scale D&D back because it is not going to meet its company-wide big IP goal of which brands will be further developed and which would go on the proverbial back-burner. If the D&D team can survive with fewer members, that's what the company will do until they see an opportunity to expand on it. Until then, they seem like they would prefer to spend the resources elsewhere.Umm, I think you are mistaking cause and effect here. They intentionally slowed down the release schedule for 5e and it was much more profitable than the hardcover-a-month from 3.x & 4e days.
This wasn't in response to poor numbers, this was intentional.
No need to be snarky or condescending.One big complaint about 4e from players who liked 4e was the overly aggressive errata making print books obsolete quickly. Whole subsystems like flight got replaced. This was something the community wanted scaled back.
Please, if you are trying to use historical changes to justify your statements, you need to have an understanding of the actual causes of those changes, not just ascribe whatever narrative supports your statements.
Ever since New Coke, there's always a theory that a company is playing 4D Chess when the reality of the situation is they screwed up big time. Sometimes big companies like Coca-Cola read the room wrong and screw up. WotC is just trying to fix a public relations bomb they accidentally created and detonated.
I agree with this part. Originally, the slow release schedule of 5E was making a virtue of necessity. The D&D staff was cut to the bone over the course of 4E, and they simply didn't have enough people to crank out material at the pace of previous editions.I think you're misreading or at least missing the broad points I was making for some more specific points that I was not. They did slow down the release for 5e. I did not say this was in response to poor numbers. I pointed to it being the result of a smaller design team—and a smaller team would be hard-pressed to develop multiple books simultaneously.
This part I don't agree with at all. This is viewing the situation through the lens of the 4E transition, when D&D was a modest product line making a desperate play for "core brand" status so they wouldn't have to lay off most of their staff.The argument I'm making is that Hasbro will scale D&D back because it is not going to meet its company-wide big IP goal of which brands will be further developed and which would go on the proverbial back-burner. If the D&D team can survive with fewer members, that's what the company will do until they see an opportunity to expand on it. Until then, they seem like they would prefer to spend the resources elsewhere.
Corporations are generally not run by multiple factions. It's generally just one small faction with the CEO at the head who make the corporate decisions. More than likely it was one faction that made the bad decision, and the same faction that did an about face when faced with an unexpected level of opposition.I think we have to understand that Hasbro is not a hivemind. What happened was (almost for sure) not some master strategy, but the result of one faction pushing a plan through, only to be met with ferocious push-back that enabled another faction to push its counterproposal through. Internecine warfare, not 4d chess.
You have a very different experience of working in corporations than I do. Like, every company I've ever been in has been factionalized.Corporations are generally not run by multiple factions. It's generally just one small faction with the CEO at the head who make the corporate decisions. More than likely it was one faction that made the bad decision, and the same faction that did an about face when faced with an unexpected level of opposition.
What is the faction without the CEO going to do?You have a very different experience of working in corporations than I do. Like, every company I've ever been in has been factionalized.
If anything, 4e was the New Coke of D&D. Kinda. If Coke had based their formula off of "here are the complaints people have about the flavor of Coke; let's fix them without doing any external taste testing or change management."This isn't much like the New Coke fiasco. For New Coke, the company did taste tests and surveys first. They had good data that, generally speaking, the new flavor was preferable to the target markets.
What Coca-Cola failed to do was proper Change Management. They had largely assumed that since the new flavor was preferable in the market, they didn't have to help people accept and adjust to the change. And, in some areas of the country, that went over like a lead balloon.
While it is true that in this case, Hasbro/WotC didn't engage in proper change management, that's less important than the fact that the thing they wanted to change to was not what we'd call a good offering.
In a compartmentalized company with many semi-autonomous VPs, like WotC (their different units do their own thing, by and large), there is room for carrying fsvor with the CEO. Considering how totally the initial idea was backtracked suggests thet it wasn't the CEO's idea (as, indeed, the leaders claimed), but one VP's idea (again, per the leakers)leaders. If there were people who disagreed with thst VP, they could use data to convince the CEOnto disempower said VP. This isn't that abnormal in corporate politics...?What is the faction without the CEO going to do?