Obective look at WotC's history with D&D

[doctorhook]

I think WotC is Sisyphus trying to push D&D back up to an unreachable height of popularity. Considering the era from which it arose, I believe D&D (as a game) was always doomed to be eclipsed by technological advances in consumer entertainment, and that it was really only D&D's relative mechanical novelty in the 1970s that allowed it to achieve the level of popularity that it did.

D&D was mechanically inspirational because it provided probably the first good example of how to represent a complex fantasy-adventure story algorithmically. Perhaps coincidentally, D&D emerged on the eve of personal computing and the information age, when the combination of technology and algorithmic representations like D&D resulted in the invention of video games that directly compete with D&D for consumers' time and money. Each decade since has seen D&D's digital competition become stiffer: the 80s brought rich storytelling to video games; the 90s made those stories extremely visually attractive; the 2000s turned computer gaming into a highly social activity. Every decade, technological advancement steals another advantage D&D once had over digital fantasy gaming; D&D's gradual replacement by digital games has always been inevitable, due to the inherent limits of the pen and paper format. (Don't forget that digital gaming also has its own substantial advantages over pen and paper gaming, as well.)

With this in mind, I believe WotC has done a "good" job stewarding the D&D brand--I'd grade them a B. WotC certainly didn't manage D&D "perfectly", but that's an unrealistic expectation of any company. WotC was much, much more effective at managing D&D than TSR was--TSR broke the bank and broke its own products. I don't know that WotC being a part of Hasbro been good or bad for D&D; without Hasbro, perhaps WotC would have made the same mistakes as TSR.

Non-digital pen-and-paper gaming is doomed to be increasingly unprofitable, and D&D is no exception. WotC deserves all due credit for repeatedly trying to bring D&D to the digital age, because in the long run I believe that's the only future D&D has.

 

[mkill]

Guys... how about reading some of Ryan Dancey's accounts on the matter? I know the man is highly controversial. But even if you disagree with his analysis and opinions, there is no doubt that he has the best insight into WotC's D&D business (among the people who openly talk about it)

That said, Hasbro/WotC's fault was something entitely different. Hasbro is a big company, and for Hasbro, only brands with revenue of $50m or more count. With an estimated $30m total size of the tabletop RPG industry, they had a choice: sell it or make it big.

They decided to go big, but to do that, they'd have to triple the RPG market in size. Impossible. So they tried to grow with novels, boardgames and DDI.

The only thing that could have brought D&D up to that scale is Skyrim, Diablo, the LotR movies and Game of Thrones under D&D brand. They tried a movie, they tried an MMO, but both tanked, effectively keeping the D&D brand at its niche status while interest in the fantasy genre is at an all time high.

Add in the success of Pathfinder in D&D's core market and you'll understand that 5E is a last ditch effort: recover sales or the D&D brand goes to the highest bidder.

 

[nnms]

Can you point me to an example of Hasbro selling one of its brands, ever?

They don't. They just shelve them and pretend they don't exist.

 

[AeroDm]

Can you point me to an example of Hasbro selling one of its brands, ever?

They don't. They just shelve them and pretend they don't exist.

Well, they did license the video game rights of D&D to another company (Atari). So perhaps they'd consider licensing D&D (the board game) to a small company for a fixed fee and then continue producing the board games, video games, and pursuing movie deals. That way Hasbro keeps the parts they are good at and some small company can nurture the RPG.

 

[GSHamster]

I think you're still missing something. So, a real-world example: In 2008 the stock market took a dive. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology lost about a third of the University's endowments - several *billion* dollars evaporated almost overnight. Several departments got their budgets from the interest earned on the endowments, and had to cut their budgets, and therefore their staff, and so people got laid off.

Perhaps you can view not being prepared for that level of disaster a "mistake", but I think of it more as an unpredictable external event that no sane business tries to account for.

That is an extreme case, for a large enterprise. The same idea still holds on the smaller scale - not everything that fails to go according to plan is a "mistake" by someone in particular. Viewing it that way is, I think, part of the blame-game that is itself a common error in modern business.

This is a poor example. It's still a mistake on the part of the company. Funding departments out of the interest earned on a semi-risky investment?

The stock market has fallen multiple times in the past 20 years. It doesn't take a genius to see that it would fall again at some point. The hard part is predicting when the fall would happen, not the fact that it would eventually fall.

 

[Croesus]

This is a poor example. It's still a mistake on the part of the company. Funding departments out of the interest earned on a semi-risky investment?

The stock market has fallen multiple times in the past 20 years. It doesn't take a genius to see that it would fall again at some point. The hard part is predicting when the fall would happen, not the fact that it would eventually fall.

There's a reason why we talk about risk vs. reward. Doing something has risk. Doing nothing has risk. If a business has a negative event, that doesn't mean management made a mistake.

Let's flip this around. Say you were late for work because of a traffic jam. But wait - traffic jams happen, so why don't you leave for work an hour early every day, just in case? That would likely (though not 100%) avoid traffic jams. But then you have to consider the cost. Are you really going to waste an extra hour every day just to avoid a potential traffic jam making you late for work?

Quoting from a column published several years ago:

To manage risk you can Avoid, Insure, or Mitigate (Max supplied the acronym, AIM).

Avoidance means reducing the likelihood that the risk will become an event. Preventive maintenance is one of the most important ways to avoid risk. Staff training, to increase competence, is another.

Insurance includes all tactics that deflect the consequences of risk to someone else. Insurance is the label because that's the best-known way to deflect the consequences of risk...snip...

Mitigation means reducing the impact should the risk turn into actual events. Fault-tolerant system design and business recovery planning are well-known risk mitigation tactics. So are cross-training and succession planning.

There is, of course, a fourth risk management tactic. It's probably the most popular of them all. It's called hoping. Synonyms are keeping your fingers crossed and denial. Theoretically, you can also accept the risk -- consciously choose to do nothing. Usually, though, acceptance is just another synonym for hoping.

To the extent that a negative event is due to tactic four, I agree that you should blame management. But all the other methods of managing risk are appropriate, at one time or another, because they acknowledge the fundamental truth that no one controls everything that happens.

 

[Croesus]

This is a poor example. It's still a mistake on the part of the company. Funding departments out of the interest earned on a semi-risky investment?

The stock market has fallen multiple times in the past 20 years. It doesn't take a genius to see that it would fall again at some point. The hard part is predicting when the fall would happen, not the fact that it would eventually fall.

For some reason the forum won't allow me to edit my earlier post, so here's a follow up.

You seem to be saying the university should not have hired staff using gains from their investments. That would be Avoidance - they are avoiding the possibility that a negative event would require layoffs.

But wait, hiring those staff may increase revenue to the university, boost its reputation, facilitate additional donations, and so on. By not hiring those additional staff members, the university may still have to layoff staff at some point in the future.

Instead, the university could choose Insurance (deflecting the costs of the negative event to the laid off workers) and Mitigation (ensuring that remaining staff are properly trained so they can fill in any critical roles of the laid off workers).

If you assume that Avoidance of a negative event is the only appropriate standard for managing risks, good luck to you. The real world has risks no matter what you do. You can't avoid all bad things, no matter how smart the person or management.

 

[GSHamster]

Umbran cited a stock market downturn as an "unpredictable" event. I disagreed. A stock market downturn is an "inevitable" event.

Not being prepared for an inevitable event is a clear mistake by management, in my books.

 

[Croesus]

I
* Deadlines about the VTT and DDi were not met, in part because of a tragedy. http://www.enworld.org/forum/news/3...ider-d-d-4th-edition-hasbro-some-history.html

Definitely bad management here, though I'd argue this one is less about managing the brand and more about simply delivering the services promised. Any company that makes commitments and fails to meet them is going to upset their customers. About the only company that gets a pass for this is Blizzard and only because their customers expect an amazing product in the end. If Blizzard ever slips in quality, they'll lose their teflon coating in a hurry.

I
* The GSL alienated many 3PPs who relied on the OGL in the past, and initially included a "poison pill" clause which prevented a company using OGL from also using GSL. This "poison pill" was later changed after severe criticism.

This is more mixed and touches on my earlier comments about risk/reward. A case can be made that the way WOTC handled the GSL led directly to Pathfinder, but would different choices really have kept Pathfinder (or something similar) from being developed? And how many current Pathfinder customers would be WOTC customers if Pathfinder didn't exist? Keep in mind that the OGL itself was not seen as a positive contributor to WOTC's bottom line at this time, so moving away from it was a reasonable (if controversial) decision. Clearly WOTC could have handled communicating the GSL better, but I'm uncertain if having the GSL itself was a "mistake".

I
* WotC fired several people who had a profound effect on D&D over the years including Logan Bonner, Steve Winter, Michele Carter, Stephen Schubert, Bill Slavicsek, David Noonan, Jonathan Tweet, and others. Annual X-mas Wizards of the Coast Layoffs DDOcast – A DDO Podcast!

Honestly, how many D&D players even know about these layoffs? And how many of those care enough to be bothered by them? This one strikes me as an Internet sensation - something a few thousand folks know about, but having pretty much zero impact on the D&D brand among WOTC's vast customer base.

 

[Croesus]

Umbran cited a stock market downturn as an "unpredictable" event. I disagreed. A stock market downturn is an "inevitable" event.

Not being prepared for an inevitable event is a clear mistake by management, in my books.

And as I pointed out, Insurance (layoffs) and Mitigation (cross-training) are perfectly acceptable choices by management in managing such risks. Again, you seem to be defining any layoff as a "mistake" by management. I respectfully disagree.