D&D (2024) RPG Evolution: Where Are the Board Gamers?

Alta Fox and Hasbro both have ideas of what makes an effective Board member. But their definitions of what makes a gamer qualified for their Board of Directors varies.

Meet Hasbro's Board of Directors​

For the longest time, Hasbro's Board of Directors seemed to be more focused on managing the company financially than managing its products. On the Hasbro web site, each Board member's qualifications are listed, touting a variety of financial, brand, and business skills. Until recently, none of them had any gaming on their resume.

The question of the Board's game expertise didn't come up in financial circles, because Hasbro didn't defined itself more as a toy company than a game company. Hasbro's products encompassed board games and toys, and while board gamers are certainly a hobby, they are not necessarily playing the same board game. As Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons became ascendant, Hasbro rapidly transformed from a company that manages games to a gaming company. Most emblematic of this shift was Wizards of the Coast itself. Chris Cocks, current CEO of Hasbro, moved up the ranks as President of WOTC since 2016, and President and Chief Operating Officer of WOTC and Digital Gaming in 2021.

Digital is quite important to Hasbro, as is apparent from the word "digital" mentioned in Cocks' profile on Hasbro's site five times (three in the quote below alone):

Under Mr. Cocks’s executive leadership as President and COO of Wizards of the Coast, Wizards of the Coast grew by over 150% in global revenue, surpassing $1 billion in 2021. His bold new approach to customer segmentation unlocked numerous multi-hundred-million-dollar insights and led Wizard’s iconic brand MAGIC: THE GATHERING to multiple years of consecutive growth since 2018. Mr. Cocks was instrumental in the successful expansion into digital through MAGIC: THE GATHERING Arena for PC and mobile. Additionally, with Mr. Cocks at the helm, DUNGEONS & DRAGONS became a pop culture powerhouse with over 50M fans to date, and through innovative ideas in digital gaming and entertainment, the brand is set up for ongoing success. Prior to Hasbro, Mr. Cocks has had numerous brand management, digital marketing, technical, sales and general management experiences at companies including Microsoft, Leapfrog and Procter & Gamble, working on category-leading brands including Xbox, Halo, Fable, Leapster, Actonel, MSN and Windows.

With so much money locked up not in just games but gamers, Cocks was the leader Hasbro was looking for, but the Board he joined didn't reflect this new digital direction. It wasn't long before shareholders noticed the discrepancy.

Card Players​

We previously covered how Alta Fox proposed a slate of new board members as part of its activism to shake up Hasbro. The activist shareholder emphasized that the Board was lacking gaming and capital allocation experience. On the gaming side, Alta Fox touted Jon Finkel, the "Michael Jordan" of Magic: The Gathering "with a large following in the community":

Jon Finkel brings a unique blend of expertise in the capital markets, finance and the world of Magic: The Gathering (“Magic”) to the Alta Fox slate. He is currently a Managing Partner and Co-Chief Investment Officer at Landscape Capital Management LLC, a quantitative, market neutral investment management firm, where he specializes in overseeing the firm’s portfolio of investments and is heavily involved in strategy development and research. Prior to that, Mr. Finkel played various games professionally, including Magic. Mr. Finkel has won a myriad of accolades during his career as a professional Magic player and is widely considered to be one of the greatest players of all time.

Things didn't work out quite the way Alta Fox planned. Their proposal was rejected, but it struck a nerve.

Video Gamers​

Prior to Cocks' appointment as CEO of Hasbro, there was one board member already in the digital gaming space: Hope Cochran, appointed back in 2016. Hope Cochran is the Managing Director at Madrona Venture Group, a technology-focused venture capital group.

Prior to joining Madrona in January 2017, Ms. Cochran was the Chief Financial Officer of King Digital Entertainment, the creator of Candy Crush and other successful mobile games, from 2013 to 2016. In this role, she helped drive the company’s significant employee and revenue growth, guided the Company’s IPO and successfully completed a $5.9 billion acquisition by Activision.

Shortly after Alta Fox proposed new Board members, Hasbro appointed two board members with digital gaming experience. The week after Hasbro turned down Alta Fox's proposal, two Board members stepped down and were replaced by Blake Jorgensen and Elizabeth Hamren (pictured above). Blake Jorgensen is Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of PayPal Holdings, Inc:

Prior to joining PayPal in 2022, Mr. Jorgensen spent a decade as the CFO and Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Electronic Arts (EA), a video game company, helping to drive the transformation of the company, resulting in dramatic improvement in growth, profitability, and market capitalization.

Elizabeth Hamren is Chief Operating Officer at Discord, Inc.

Prior to joining Discord, Ms. Hamren served as a Corporate Vice President at Microsoft Corporation from March 2017 to December 2021 running product and engineering for Xbox consumer products, including developing and launching the Xbox Series X|S and leading Xbox Game Pass. Prior to that, from August 2015 to March 2017, she led Global Marketing and Sales for Oculus at Meta Platforms, Inc. (formerly Facebook, Inc.), where she launched the industry-defining Oculus Rift virtual reality headset.

Hasbro's Board of Directors now numbers 13. Of those, four of the Board members have gaming experience. And yet as the stewards of the D&D and M:TG brands, there's something missing.

Where's the Tabletop Gamers?​

Scott Thorne at ICv2 noted a curious discrepancy in Cocks' announcement:

One thing I do not see in Cocks’ vision of the future of Magic and Dungeons & Dragons: any mention of the physical products on which the digital versions are based. Given his background with Microsoft and digital gaming, that is not really surprising, though he does say he plays both. Hazarding a guess, I think Wizards has looked at the success Marvel and DC Entertainment have had with movies and online games based upon their comic book properties and hope to leverage the Magic and D&D IPs into success in the digital realm. The physical versions of Magic and D&D will remain important, in much the same way that Superman and Spider-Man are, important as source material but providing comparatively little revenue to the company. I think Wizards has looked at the success of Hearthstone, Marvel and Transformers and sees that as the future of the company.

It's clear that for Hasbro, the nearest analogue to dealing with tabletop gamers is the digital gaming space. That may well explain why there was so much focus on digital products in the leaked OGL:

For example, when we released OGL 1.0a, YouTube, apps, blockchain, crowdfunding, and other now every-day technologies and distribution channels didn’t really exist in the way they do today. OGL wasn’t intended to fund major competitors and it wasn’t intended to allow people to make D&D apps, videos, or anything other than printed (or printable) materials for use while gaming. We are updating the OGL in part to make that very clear.

While the Open Game License shares much in common with open licenses used in software, one place where they differ is the small, creator-owned space. D&D encourages every Dungeon Master to be their own designer, so it's not surprising that thousands of them have gone on to publish their own content on DMs Guild and DriveThruRPG. In its rush to get the bulk of fandom onto the D&D Beyond platform, it's clear Hasbro's video game-focused leadership didn't take that nuance into account.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Hearthstone is actually a pretty good model. It's not Warcraft per se, it's not WoW, it's a light-hearted digital card game based on Warcraft. Those kinds of spin-offs are a good way to leverage D&D digitally, some of which we've already seen with the idle heroes game. And I think it's hard to argue that WotC has put out enough digital games at this point, especially ones able to compete with games like Hearthstone.

That said, this space is harder to compete in than one might think. The only real competition Hearthstone has isn't MTG's various digital offerings, but Marvel Snap, which came with a well-known designer and a real development budget. This isn't an area where WotC can cheap out and succeed.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I think the challenge is that the Venn Diagram for experienced business executives and and experienced TTRPG gamers probably doesn’t overlap a great deal.

Back when this board were coming of age, D&D was a niche game for freaks and geeks like me. Now as the new generations come through the ranks I suspect that will change. I don’t think it can or should be forced though. It evolves naturally.

Of the Microsoft employees born in the United States or Canada, probably 90% have played D&D. It is a geeky company stuffed full of geeks. We're not talking about General Motors or the NFL here.

 

[Vaalingrade]

I can't imagine anything less important to a board member than if they play games or have experience in games. That's not their role at all. If a board is involved in product decisions, that company is is real trouble.

I mean, I can't think of anything less important than board member, so it all evens out.

 

[Pedantic]

Hearthstone is actually a pretty good model. It's not Warcraft per se, it's not WoW, it's a light-hearted digital card game based on Warcraft. Those kinds of spin-offs are a good way to leverage D&D digitally, some of which we've already seen with the idle heroes game. And I think it's hard to argue that WotC has put out enough digital games at this point, especially ones able to compete with games like Hearthstone.

I'm still mad that it came at the expense of the WoW TCG, a game I'd argue did an excellent job of improving on MTG's formula, and offered more design depth than Hearthstone can.

That said, this space is harder to compete in than one might think. The only real competition Hearthstone has isn't MTG's various digital offerings, but Marvel Snap, which came with a well-known designer and a real development budget. This isn't an area where WotC can cheap out and succeed.

Is Riot Game's Legends of Runeterra in the running at all? I hear about it in the same breath sometimes.

 

[Thomas Shey]

But at some point of that philosophy loses nuance and selling paper clips = selling RPGS. It also seems that a lot of non-gamers have a chip on their shoulder against the customer. Maybe that's the same for all CEO, but I can't think that's good.

Yes, micromanaging is bad, but it's evident that overall in business that many board members are now much more short-sighted due to being more beholden to share holders than the business itself.

Direct stock purchase used to be a retirement strategy. Now it seems more like a casino run by lemmings and monkeys in trench coats trying to fool the humans into giving them money. (Which already happened with 410k - man I'd kill for a pension."

Honestly, the modern short-term thinking stock trading has produced is malign for almost every publicly traded company, because its all too willing to eat the seed corn.

 

[Abstruse]

I think Alta Fox has remained quiet until the rescent tweet because they are planning a Proxy war, they still aren't happy and blame CEO Chris Cock pissing off fans of both MtG and D&D, but after they got slammed by SEC over free the wizards they are more patient and silent right now, taking the openings presented to build up for a Proxy War for control of the board.

They've already run one proxy war. It happened during the last Board of Directors elections and they lost. All they're doing is priming for another one only trying to run a PR campaign to make them look like the "Good Guys" who are "Real Gamers" instead of yet another vulture capitalist firm only worried about extracting as much money as they can. They had a very long time to point out any of these problems, but they were more concerned last time with separating Wizards of the Coast from Hasbro because they wanted all the profits from Wizards to go to further enrich the wealthy shareholders instead of reinvested back into the company. They want to burn Hasbro so they can pick Wizards of the Coast dry.

And if anyone for a second thinks that an AltaFox packed board at Hasbro wouldn't have done the exact same thing to milk as much cash out of the company, I've got an NFT of a bridge to sell you.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

They've already run one proxy war. It happened during the last Board of Directors elections and they lost. All they're doing is priming for another one only trying to run a PR campaign to make them look like the "Good Guys" who are "Real Gamers" instead of yet another vulture capitalist firm only worried about extracting as much money as they can. They had a very long time to point out any of these problems, but they were more concerned last time with separating Wizards of the Coast from Hasbro because they wanted all the profits from Wizards to go to further enrich the wealthy shareholders instead of reinvested back into the company. They want to burn Hasbro so they can pick Wizards of the Coast dry.

And if anyone for a second thinks that an AltaFox packed board at Hasbro wouldn't have done the exact same thing to milk as much cash out of the company, I've got an NFT of a bridge to sell you.

You presume too much, we don't ultimately know what their true plans were,but I doubt it was the remove the OGL. When the first battle happen Chris Cocks held all the cards, things were going amazing when Alta Fox made their first moves, which made things much more difficult for Alta Fox. This time is different, Chris Cocks bungled things, at a critical time, the stock is down and the company is scandal ridden now and 1000 layoffs are happening pushing the stock 9% lower. His regime was in its prime still, now its weak, sickly, and vulnerible the perfect time to strike.

 

[Jer]

And if anyone for a second thinks that an AltaFox packed board at Hasbro wouldn't have done the exact same thing to milk as much cash out of the company, I've got an NFT of a bridge to sell you.

Maybe not the exact same thing, but something equally disastrous and ill-conceived.

I keep coming back to the observation that the time when D&D had its greatest period of growth was when Wizards decided they couldn't make much money off the game itself so put out a minimal edition with unprecedentedly low levels of support to keep the game active so the brand could be promoted and otherwise they left it alone. Shockingly when they weren't trying to make it a huge brand it became a huge brand. They really need to think about why that might be the case.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

In terms of publishing under open licenses, you have creators of RPG content, and coders of software utility. Both are inherently creative.

Absolutely. I was intending to emphasize how most of the creativity in software is on the development side, while with role-playing players and DMs exercise a much greater degree of creativity in their consumer role. I'm not sure there are many other hobbies that can compare to that actually, which may be part of the appeal of role-playing.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Absolutely. I was intending to emphasize how most of the creativity in software is on the development side, while with role-playing players and DMs exercise a much greater degree of creativity in their consumer role. I'm not sure there are many other hobbies that can compare to that actually, which may be part of the appeal of role-playing.

Modelers of various sorts outside the kit-knocking-together variety.