If you are correct, then the December lay-offs looked good on paper, but the bean counters are now seeing less net beans as the true and tangible impact comes along.
I really doubt that is the case.
Not at all. I don't suggest this will show up that soon in the least. Quarter to quarter - even annual results - are short-term in the business cycle. Medium-term decisions are those that extend out to three - sometimes even five years, depending on.
Beyond five years in the future -- that's the horizon I'm referring to when I speak about the "long term" impact of decisions to layoff creative staff as an enshrined matter of firm culture at Wizards.
We certainly do know that these decisions have had an effect to date. The whole firm culture goes back to 2001 -- the same year that events are put into motion which results in the decision to spin off WotC's periodicals division in early 2002. That periodical division became Paizo Publishing.
How that story turns out ultimately remains unknown. But yes - I believe it all has its genesis in the firm culture we are discussing here.
If you are looking for the present impact of these past decisions, I put it to you that a significant portion of the millons of dollars in sales revenue generated through the sale of products published by Paizo would have otherwise been dollars spent on products published by WotC.
In that sense, the opportunity cost of such layoffs and goodwill transfers has already been higher than the operating expenditures supposedly "saved".
Not every sale earned by Paizo is revenue that is subject to such a prisoner's dilemma that can be posited or otherwise attributed as a dollar that "ought" to have been earned by WotC. But a sizeable portion of those sales? Yes. I think so.
If that is so, we're already talking millions of dollars in foregone revenue already.