Stan!, a longtime employee and contractor for TSR and Wizards of the Coast has an amazing YouTube interview shoe he’s been running talking to many luminaries who worked at TSR and WOTC. You can find the playlist here. Thanks to @MerricB for pointing it out!
He had a recent interview with Ray Winninger, who led the D&D team from 2020 to 2022.
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The meat of his insights into D&D, WOTC, and Hasbro begins around the 50 minute mark.
Here are some things I grabbed from it:
A few times on EN World I’ve seen people asking for both more products per year from WOTC and deeper catalogs around one world, like a bunch of Eberron products or a bunch of Spelljammer products. I think Ray clarifies the difficulty with those ideas when it comes from WOTC’s business. My feeling is that we’re better served looking for more products and deeper products from other publishers who can focus and make a business on these types of products.
If you pick up other insights or if you found similar interesting insights from this interview or Stan!’s other interviews, let’s share them! I think there’s a real wealth of knowledge in these videos.
He had a recent interview with Ray Winninger, who led the D&D team from 2020 to 2022.

50 Years in the Dungeon — Episode 50 — Ray Winninger
Ray Winninger is the former head of Dungeons & Dragons for Wizards of the Coast and a long-time game designer and technologist.This week's cartoon homage wil...

The meat of his insights into D&D, WOTC, and Hasbro begins around the 50 minute mark.
Here are some things I grabbed from it:
The reason there were so few products during the early days of 5e wasn’t a strategy but a simple matter of having a small team unable to release more than they did.(Mike Mearls says this is incorrect in this post)- Because of this, sales of older products did better than the sale of newer products, which was an inverse of how it normally worked (new products typically outsold older products).
- Ray brought up that the big change in demographics – a large increase of women gamers – increased the overall pool. It wasn’t like less men played but now the demographics changed.
- As D&D got more popular, other parts of the company started to pay attention it but they wanted to treat it like every other product.
- The OGL discussions had happened much earlier than when they actually tried to implement it. Ray, as we saw from his public statements on it, was clearly against it.
- According to him, when he left, over 50% of players were using D&D Beyond regularly for character creation.
- Ray looked at the stuff in A5e and thought it was really cool. He sees that sort of work as a real value of the OGL to let other publishers make stuff WOTC can’t or won’t make.
- Ray says that RPG publishers need to be looking at digital play — how to play online, character builders, and the like.
- He talks about the product dependency of putting out a big product like Spelljammer and then putting out smaller related products that sell much less because they’re dependent on those who bought the first one.
A few times on EN World I’ve seen people asking for both more products per year from WOTC and deeper catalogs around one world, like a bunch of Eberron products or a bunch of Spelljammer products. I think Ray clarifies the difficulty with those ideas when it comes from WOTC’s business. My feeling is that we’re better served looking for more products and deeper products from other publishers who can focus and make a business on these types of products.
If you pick up other insights or if you found similar interesting insights from this interview or Stan!’s other interviews, let’s share them! I think there’s a real wealth of knowledge in these videos.
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