[Updated] Chris Sims & Jennifer Clarke Wilkes Let Go From WotC

The details are unclear, but D&D editor Chris Sims has reported that he is now in need of a job, and is willing to relocate. He was hired by WotC in 2005 after working for them as a freelance editor. Part of the D&D 5E launch, he was one of the editors for the Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide, and was responsible for stat block development in the Monster Manual. The reasons have not been revealed, nor is it clear whether he left or was laid off.

Whether this is an isolated thing or part of more layoffs if unclear right now. More if I hear anything! In the meantime, if you can hire an excellent writer and editor, please do!

For more on ex-WotC employees, please check my list here!

UPDATE: Jennifer Clarke Wilkes is also in the same boat. She has worked on both D&D as an editor and on Magic: the Gathering, and has been working for WotC for many years.

UPDATE 2: Chris Sims confirms here that he and Jennifer were both laid off.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Just curious who you're addressing there? Who said they wanted to boycott WotC?

(I'm not saying nobody did - I haven't read every post in the thread - but a quote would probably help!)

Not just in this thread specifically. But over the years in these dicussions we've had lots of people say things like WoTC is the devil and this is why they'll never buy anything from them ever again, etc, etc, etc.

WoTC isn't any different than any other corporation, so it always strikes me odd of the vitriol and passive agressive threats when we don't do the same standard for everything else. Yeah, I get the geek emotional investment, but hyperbole never solved anything.

 

[iwarrior-poet]

Every time WotC does this, they lose much more than they gain. OK--it is a viable, corporate cost-cutting measure---but D&D loses any long-term stewardship and brand commitment from potential game creators/innovators.

Both 4E and 5E did not launch well (or at least not as well as anticipated). I believe this could have been avoided if they had retained the creative types who truly loved working on D&D products. I love D&D, but since 3.5 I have lost almost all faith in WoTC's approach to supporting/creating/innovating. If they had truly leveraged one of the newer additions with an excellent digital aide, a top-notch MMORPG (with input/output to the digital aide), and some cross-over multi-media (movie, books, or even an good web-series)----D&D would be back in the spotlight and raking in cash from a variety of revenue streams.
Yes---I know that some of this would have been very difficult (licensing rights, etc.), but it could have been done if someone had connected the knowledgeable D&D talent with the right resources.

Instead we have a new edition which looks like it will do even worse biz than the last. Someone with $$$ and vision needs to buy D&D off of WotC if it is going to thrive.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Both 4E and 5E did not launch well (or at least not as well as anticipated).


Instead we have a new edition which looks like it will do even worse biz than the last.

curious. What leads you to believe this? do you have any hard numbers or anything?

 

[Alphastream]

I thought that in general, freelancers earn a lot more than salaried staff per hour. The advantage in hiring them is that you only have to pay for the hours you actually need them, and you often don't have the "hidden" costs of employment (taxes, sick pay, holiday pay, maternity pay, pension contributions, providing equipment, office space, etc.) and it's generally more flexible. I'm not arguing with those of you who know the figures - I'm sure you're right with regard to the "per word" figures - I just find it interesting that the freelancers in this situation actually get less.

I'm a contractor/freelancer for my real job, and in most fields this is absolutely true. It isn't in publishing and certainly not in RPGs.

The core issue is a lack of money in RPGs, even at the highest corporate level. An average story goes like this: An individual starts an RPG company, spends tons of unpaid time writing an RPG, borrows money to pay for printing, prints, gets a good amount (hopefully) of initial sales and perhaps can pay off the loans, needs to publish a supplement to keep interest in the line - therefore borrows more money or uses up the profits, the next book sells less because of diminishing returns (each product will be of interest to an increasingly smaller subset of players), now the person is losing money... if they don't publish interest drops and if they do they still lose money.

A way to lessen that model is to hire freelancers to keep costs way down and also to publish more faster. This is especially important if the company is large enough that the work would require hiring someone. You can imagine how brutal it would be for most RPG companies to pay an actual salary in that model. As an example, Dungeon World has shared some figures. For the first 5 months they had costs of $53,000. They had, at the end of it, $34,000 in the bank, which he says, "will be used to pay taxes for 2012 and then a significant part of it will be split between Adam and I." He also says that this would support one full-time employee living somewhere cheap. I'm not sure about that, but it's regardless really lean... and this is an indie RPG company that absolutely knocked it out of the park. We can also look at Evil Hat's numbers, which reflect a mature company that has built up support and following over a decade or so... and they still would have trouble employing a number of people. It is a brutal industry and it leads to hiring cheap freelancers instead of hiring.

Plus, by all accounts it's a really good place to work - while it lasts.

Absolutely. Even the people that leave Wizards speak fondly of it, almost without exception. Every time I interact with Wizards employees, they have a great comaraderie and the workplace is better than most places I've worked with by far. (I have visited more than 100 different corporate work places since 1996.)

{Also, for the record, I don't /agree/ that Wizards no longer needs editors to watch over their contractors. I bet you anything we see a further drop in product quality from this point on. Never fire your editors. You only think you know how to write.}

Absolutely. From all accounts, the first published outsourced adventure required heavy editing/adjustment, and that's with it coming from an outside company with deep D&D setting knowledge, adventure writing expertise, and 5E experience. As a freelancer, I've always been blown away by the quality of WotC's development and editing staff. They have added incredible value to all of my projects.

 

[iwarrior-poet]

No hard numbers, just my anecdotal observations. The build-up to the last two editions was considerable---to what I perceived as a tepid response. I don't see the newer edition books on shelves of major booksellers. The gaming store in my area went out of biz because no one was buying 4e. The 4e digital aide role out was terrible, and the 5e digital aide is now non-existent.

There doesn't seem to be anyone with the will, commitment and foresight at the helm of D&D to push it into popularity.

As a gauge---I played Advanced D&D in the early/mid '80s--when EVERYONE played---and I believe if D&D was handled well it could be there again.

 

[iwarrior-poet]

curious. What leads you to believe this? do you have any hard numbers or anything?

No hard numbers, just my anecdotal observations. The build-up to the last two editions was considerable---to what I perceived as a tepid response. I don't see the newer edition books on shelves of major booksellers. The gaming store in my area went out of biz because no one was buying 4e. The 4e digital aide role out was terrible, and the 5e digital aide is now non-existent.

There doesn't seem to be anyone with the will, commitment and foresight at the helm of D&D to push it into popularity.

As a gauge---I played Advanced D&D in the early/mid '80s--when EVERYONE played---and I believe if D&D was handled well it could be there again.

Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...-Wilkes-Let-Go-From-WotC/page12#ixzz3QE2zwosE

 

[Sacrosanct]

No hard numbers, just my anecdotal observations. The build-up to the last two editions was considerable---to what I perceived as a tepid response. I don't see the newer edition books on shelves of major booksellers. The gaming store in my area went out of biz because no one was buying 4e. The 4e digital aide role out was terrible, and the 5e digital aide is now non-existent.

I think the death of FLGS has more to do with everyone buying their stuff online, like Amazon. Not that the books are not popular. In fact, D&D 5e is listed as a best seller, and had a huge response for online retail. That's why your comments threw me off. I've had the opposite impression for 5e.

 

[Alphastream]

Both 4E and 5E did not launch well

This is completely incorrect. By several accounts (including Ryan Dancey), 4E exceeded 3E in initial launch numbers. 5E has been off-the-charts (or should we say, "on the Amazon charts") in its success - it is unlikely anything other than the first Red Boxed set has done as well, and I would bet that 5E's PH has beaten that as well.

Some data points:

- Ryan on 2E and 3E sales: (3E released in 2000)
"The one thing I can tell you is that when TSR did the transition from 1e to 2e in 1998, they sold 289,000 Player's Handbooks in 1998. We sold 300,000 3e Players Handbooks in about 30 days. And the trajectory of the rest of the product line mimicked the PHB."

Escapist Magazine, Dec 2011:
- "[3rd edition] was the most successful RPG published since the early years of 1st edition AD&D," Dancey said. "It outsold the core books of 2nd edition AD&D by a wide margin.
- Preorders for the core books of 4th edition of D&D in June 2008 were extremely strong and - without any hard sales numbers released by WoTC - anecdotal evidence from local game stores supported the claim that it sold much better than 3rd at launch.

- Acaeum with a former TSR soure:
Adventures sell far less than rulebooks do (which is why we stopped doing them.) Rulebooks are a whole different matter. In 1989, TSR sold something like 1,000,000 copies of the D&D boxed set in one year. It was amazing.
(That's the Red Box)

Ryan Dancey in 2014 Gen Con EN World interview on YouTube:
- Not official numbers for 3E, but in 1989 transitioning from 1E to 2E sold 286,000 copies of PH. When went from 2E to 3E, "sold 300,000 copies of PH in one month and got better from there."

5E's stay on the top Amazon charts is unprecedented and alone indicates a higher rate of sales than 300,000 in one month... and you add retail stores to that! The mention in the Hasbro quarterly report backs the success up further. My guess is the PH will be more successful than the Red Box across a full calendar year.

I'll close with an interesting Dancey quote. (Dancey is a great source of data, though I don't usually agree with his conclusions, such as his prediction that the hobby is dying.)
- Ryan on desired WotC annual revenue:
"Success for 4e was defined (by Wizards) as generating annual revenues between $50 and $100 million. By that (self-imposed) definition, it is a failure."
"Wizard's cost basis is several orders of magnitude higher than Paizos. They have more, higher paid staff. They pay more for art. They pay more for production. They have more overhead costs (rent, legal, etc.) And worse, due to the way Hasbro structures itself, they don't get to claim any credit for the royalties earned by D&D licensing. So the money Wizards gets to use to offset its costs is just from product sales and DDI.
4e is also exclusively sold through middlemen. You can't buy D&D from Wizards of the Coast. Whereas Paizo earns 100% of many of its sales, Wizards only earns 40% on all of the stuff it sells. So Wizards has to sell 2.5 times as many units just to generate the same revenue as 1 unit of a Paizo product sold direct to a consumer."

 

[Mark CMG]

This is completely incorrect. By several accounts (including Ryan Dancey), 4E exceeded 3E in initial launch numbers. 5E has been off-the-charts (or should we say, "on the Amazon charts") in its success - it is unlikely anything other than the first Red Boxed set has done as well, and I would bet that 5E's PH has beaten that as well.

Just looking at the rest of your post, it appears there is quite a bit of semantic gymnastics and assumption being used to back up this hyperbole. 3E launched a single book out of the gate, not the whole set, during a time when the Internet was just beginning to be leveraged for such things. Ryan Dancey clearly says he has no numbers for 4E while you imply he is speaking to the numbers in your opening paragraph. As to 5E, I hope it is doing well but I honestly see no evidence it is the off-the-charts success you claim it is.

If I saw huge swaths of PF folks moving back over to 5E, I'd agree in a heartbeat that 5E must be doing very well indeed. If I saw a huge drop in OSR movements rather than growth, with folks saying they were moving toward 5E I would consider these hyperbolic claims. Maybe the bigger conventions are having strong turnouts for D&D 5E events but among the smaller conventions and gamedays I am only seeing a smattering of D&D events listed. The PF events seem very prevalent and popular.

If 5E sales figures are as astronomical as you say, folks don't seem to be making anywhere near the appearances at events that I would expect to see after such claims. Gen Con? Of course. Winter Fantasy? Seems to be doing well with 5E stuff. But is this spreading naturally out to other events like the virus it should be for what you say is "off-the-charts?" I'm just not seeing it.

And let me say that I think 5E is a good RPG. I think it has some issues as all of them do but it is solid and the production values are huge. I think they oversold it as an OSR replacement, as there are just too many modern RPGisms that regularly pop up in gameplay to keep it feeling OS. But combats are quick and the Advantage / Disadvantage mechanic is a clever one to add into the game.

I hope it continues to do well but, dude, dial it back a bit on the hype already. Anyone with eyes can look around at what is happening at stores and events (though some will see only what is happening at their one or two local places). I get to a lot of events and whenever I put together a monthly roundup for upcoming ones, I look through the events listings. I should be seeing a heck of a lot more for D&D for your hype to be correct. Mind you, they are doing decently but, as said, it's not cutting into anything else. There are no system mass migrations happening.

 

[Gecko85]

Both 4E and 5E did not launch well (or at least not as well as anticipated).

And you know this how? All three of the core rulebooks have been in the Amazon top 100 at one point, with the PHB still there 5 months after launch. They also sold out for a period at all local shops around here, and I've heard that was true most places. No official numbers, but everything points to a successful 5e launch.