WotC New WotC President Is World of Warcraft's John Hight

After WotC president Cynthia Williams resigned a couple of months ago, taking up the CEO role at Funko, we've been waiting to hear who her replacement will be.

WotC has now announced that John Hight--who previously managed the World of Warcraft franchise for Blizzard Entertainment--is taking over. Like Williams, Hight comes from a video gaming background.

Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks said "I admire John’s career focus on fostering community. He is a true embodiment of our mission to bring people together through play. John’s love of D&D and Magic: The Gathering, combined with his leadership in video games, will be crucial as we expand our digital offerings to deliver what our fans crave."

Hight worked at Blizzard for 12 years, on both World of Warcraft and Diablo. According to Business Wire, his role includes oversight of Hasbro's network of gaming studios and digital licensing agreements.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

How do we know that?

Or was it by higher level HR management? I don’t know, but you keep making assertions without any evidence.

Your anecdotal evidence suggests HR is powerless. Mine suggests the opposite. Especially in larger companies.

The question is why didn’t he act. And as you just said above - we can’t actually say he was fine with it.

Truth is we have no idea what did or did not happen at that company behind the scenes once John took over WOW, this is all rumour and speculation, and I'm not comfortable with folks trying to cancel the guy with only partial information. It doesn't seem right or fair.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Sort of. Some people are pushing the idea that D&D will be this walled garden with evil microtransaction gnomes running around forcing us, and 3PPs, to pay them ever more money. The specifics have changed is all.

I think two big differences are:

A) It's the 2020s, not 2008. People are hugely more used to subscriptions and microtransactions for online games and services, and I suspect generally feel more positive about them (albeit still not great). 2008 was only two years after the famous "Horse Armor" incident with TES Oblivion, and there was a perception among DMs (not entirely unwarranted*) that MMORPGs were stealing their players, so any connection to WoW was a brush you could tar people with, even the most tenuous.

B) WotC have actually been more upfront about their digital plans this time, even if they're very much not nailed down. Literally the first mentions of the 3D VTT (now apparently "Sigil") including mentions of a subscription and microtransactions (and seemingly quite a lot of microtransactions at that!). But they also very much seemed to suggest the 3D VTT was going to exist alongside D&D in general, rather than to replace it. Whether it'll actually play out like that, we shall see, but in the short term it probably will. With 4E whilst the actual plans, when they finally got revealed, were not dissimilar, it was long after the damage had been done by a lot of vague and concerning statements.

Also thanks to Beyond an awful lot of people are already used to paying WotC more money and not questioning it - both via subscriptions and double-purchasing the books (or just purchasing a digital book that has a very low overhead relative to getting a printed book made and shipped, and where basically 100% of the revenue goes to WotC). It was little-observed at the time, but weren't WotC getting like, 70% of the amount paid to Beyond per book before they owned Beyond? When they took over they could have thus reduced prices and still be coming out ahead (hahaha as if), but in fact not only did they not do that, they soon thereafter raised digital prices.

When discussing technology, it's not just games. Hight also has experience working with a tech company and understands the investments required in software development and keeping things up and running. So he has exposure to the same sort of issues that will come up with things like DDB and the VTT as well as video game development. That was likely one of the things weighing in his favor.

One can hope this does indeed work out. Historically WotC has made error after error after error with digital-related decision-making, certainly the "red" column is lengthy whereas the green one very short, even recently they didn't manage to convince Larian to keep working with them despite Larian making insane bank off of a WotC IP (and sure, that's not something WotC could force but I do feel like it's highly unusual and probably has roots beyond "we were bored of the IP").

* = More realistically it was that MMORPGs were dominating the increasingly limited leisure-time of a lot of players, and MMORPGs of that era particularly could basically easily expand to fill your entire leisure-time if you were even slightly endgame-oriented. People weren't saying "To hell with D&D" they were fulfilling social obligations they'd created to raid X times a week or whatever. There were probably a few people who got the same thrill from MMORPGs as playing actual D&D, but I doubt it was many and their loss was likely inevitable.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Truth is we have no idea what did or did not happen at that company behind the scenes once John took over WOW, this is all rumour and speculation, and I'm not comfortable with folks trying to cancel the guy with only partial information. It doesn't seem right or fair.

Bollocks, frankly.

Don't try and pull "trying to cancel" that's a disgusting claim. Especially as you've made no effort to read the lawsuit because you're saying "We don't know what happened". We do. That you've chosen to not to know is your choice, not an absolute.

It's a recorded fact, from the California lawsuit that a male senior Blizzard employee who I am avoiding naming attempted to rape another a female junior Blizzard employee, and that he'd done a lot of other very bad stuff (much of it recorded in the lawsuit), rather habitually, and this senior Blizzard employee was, as a matter of cold fact, John Hight's direct report. This wasn't the first time this person had done something bad - he did a lot of bad stuff. His name has now been scrubbed from WoW (he had a habit of naming stuff after himself) by Blizzard, and he was one of the very people actually fired during the lawsuit, rather who quietly resigned. To be clear, the senior employee stayed on at Blizzard after this assault until 2020 when he was terminated because the information had reached the public.

Note that Hight was neither fired, nor resigned from Blizzard at that time - unlike a lot of people.

To me this suggests that he didn't approve of these unsavoury activities, the Cosby Suite, the cover-ups, the routine firings of people who tried to change this situation and so on, but they all take place under him, and as a VP, there is no question he knew what was going on with his direct reports and knew about the general firm culture. And I think it's totally valid and important even to point out he did nothing about this for 10 years.

Whether that makes you want to "cancel" him is up to you. That's not something anyone is forcing you to do, is it? And again, that you know nothing about the situation, and haven't chosen to inform yourself, doesn't mean the same applies to others. So don't give me "partial information". You're a human. You operate on "partial information" every second of the day.

I would say I don't think it's "cancellation"-worthy, just kind of rubbish behaviour. But it is worth noting if WotC has culture issues in future.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

We have a saying "Caesar's wife must not only be honest but appear so."The origin of this expression comes from an incident that cost Pompeia, then wife of Julius Caesar, the divorce.

And when I read about the History of my land I had to learn in the hard way the true value of honor.

The corporations need prestige for their brands, but when bigger is a company, then there are more falcons than doves in the top. Don't hope the noblest hearts to be in the top of the hierarchy because the people with a noble heart aren't at all interested into controlling the rest.

In your society if you don't climb toward a better postion then you are a loser, but here in my society if you climb very fast, or you are very lucky or your hands are tainted. We don't trust success to be got thanks effort and talent. Here our point of view is where there are more money then there are worse people. Here we don't believe megacorporations be guided by people like Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark but by scoundrels with suit and tie like Lex Luthor or Norman Osborn.

Maybe worse things have happened, but we will never know it.

Other idea is he has been hired to be an intermediary between Hasbro and Microsoft. This may want IP for its videogame section.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Other idea is he has been hired to be an intermediary between Hasbro and Microsoft. This may want IP for its videogame section.

This doesn't make sense because a very large proportion (possibly the majority) of senior Hasbro people and some WotC people are ex-Microsoft who left on seemingly-friendly terms. Hiring an ex-Blizzard (owned by Microsoft) guy doesn't improve that. Cynthia Williams was ex-Microsoft, for example.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I do not know if the ttrpg market has reached saturation but it must be close.

Must it? Even the most optimistic take on D&D's popularity is that 50 million people play it worldwide. (And that number is highly suspect, to put it mildly.)

There are 8.1 billion people in the world. Surely a few more could be convinced to try tabletop games.

 

[Pedantic]

Must it? Even the most optimistic take on D&D's popularity is that 50 million people play it worldwide. (And that number is highly suspect, to put it mildly.)

There are 8.1 billion people in the world. Surely a few more could be convinced to try tabletop games.

I don't know, those people come with all kinds of competition. We have a lot more ways to do roleplaying and a lot more ways to do games than we've ever had at any point in TTRPGs past. Plus, the D&D hegemony cuts both ways; it eats up everyone who plays TTRPGs, but it also becomes the face of the whole experience which is self-limiting in some ways. Anyone who doesn't want to deal with the fantasy trade dress and/or intrinsically violent premise might never make it through the door.

There's no way to know of course, but I don't think there's much more room for increased exposure to help. D&D has already spread very far, very fast and is running out of fresh eyeballs to be put in front of.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Must it? Even the most optimistic take on D&D's popularity is that 50 million people play it worldwide. (And that number is highly suspect, to put it mildly.)

There are 8.1 billion people in the world. Surely a few more could be convinced to try tabletop games.

I think it might have reached saturation in the US and and English-speaking countries, and WotC has been pretty bad at marketing D&D outside those (and often seemed to just not really care about them). The premium pricing and requirement to use polyhedrals rather than d6 probably don't help.

If TTRPGs haven't reached saturation and keep expanding, I think because of WotC's er... relaxed issue to sales and lack of care towards marketing/sales beyond the middle to upper middle class of the English-speaking world may cause us to see a lot of very interesting RPGs emerge from non-English-speaking cultures, particularly in Latin America, Africa and Asia (I mean, it's already happening, but it's pretty small-scale so far).

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I think it might have reached saturation in the US and and English-speaking countries, and WotC has been pretty bad at marketing D&D outside those (and often seemed to just not really care about them). The premium pricing and requirement to use polyhedrals rather than d6 probably don't help.

If TTRPGs haven't reached saturation and keep expanding, I think because of WotC's er... relaxed issue to sales and lack of care towards marketing/sales beyond the middle to upper middle class of the English-speaking world may cause us to see a lot of very interesting RPGs emerge from non-English-speaking cultures, particularly in Latin America, Africa and Asia (I mean, it's already happening, but it's pretty small-scale so far).

I think getting serious beyond the English-speaking world is the most obvious growth area. Blizzard, incidentally, is very good about this -- WoW's biggest audience is in China, but it's also widely played across the world -- so Hight could potentially push them in that direction more seriously.

And yes, please, to more TTRPGs that aren't just US/UK visions of what adventure games can be.

 

[Pedantic]

I think it might have reached saturation in the US and and English-speaking countries, and WotC has been pretty bad at marketing D&D outside those (and often seemed to just not really care about them). The premium pricing and requirement to use polyhedrals rather than d6 probably don't help.

If TTRPGs haven't reached saturation and keep expanding, I think because of WotC's er... relaxed issue to sales and lack of care towards marketing/sales beyond the middle to upper middle class of the English-speaking world may cause us to see a lot of very interesting RPGs emerge from non-English-speaking cultures, particularly in Latin America, Africa and Asia (I mean, it's already happening, but it's pretty small-scale so far).

That's a really good point. D&D marketing has always been an afterthought outside of English. I wonder if we're wrong to look at TTRPGs specifically though, given you're looking at places where videogames are available simultaneously, and where roleplaying might never coalesce into what we think of as traditional TTRPG forms. I'm immediately thinking of People Make Game's video the rise of jubensha.