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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9221446" data-attributes="member: 18">I mean, if we assume the plan was to spin off WotC and make it private, the trouble with a "suck dry of cash" deal is that WotC would not, immediately, be able to access large loans to pay out large dividends. I don't think its IP is valued so highly that that would be possible. And if they immediately tried to sell off the IP for get a big load of cash (another tactic that's been used), I think they'd have so little conceptual leverage, that they'd have got a disappointingly poor price for it. I think most potential buyers would make a fairly insulting offer thinking that the new company might fail to be profitable/successful despite past history next year, and their offer would suddenly start looking pretty good. If the plan was to make it public again (I forget whether you can do that straight away with a spun off company, dammit, I read so many prospectuses and so much IPO-related news that I could have said, say, eight years ago!), then I think other factors would have conspired against that.So I wouldn't consider those to be huge risks (though certainly non-zero). I feel like the plan there was less about vampiric "cash extraction" and more like "Hasbro is stopping my shares from gaining as much value as I feel they should, let's cut them out". Certainly neither plan is remotely interested in WotC putting out quality products that people actually want.So I don't particularly see any reason to "stan" for that plan either. But I do think WotC would probably be healthier as a separate entity to Hasbro, and I very much doubt this is the last time WotC will get it in the face for mistakes Hasbro have made with entirely separate products. Trouble is, once you've been bought, you usually only get sold to other large companies. Like Blizzard got bought by Vivendi, a bizarre French corporation, which was a strange mixture of media companies and failing utility companies, and huge amounts of money was funnelled directly from Blizzard's profits into doing stuff like propping up failing French utility plants. Blizzard was making money hand over first, but very little was going back into Blizzard - during their meteoric rise with WoW, where they peaked at like $2.7bn a year from WoW subs alone, they weren't even really allowed to expand. There's a 2010 interview with Rob Pardo somewhere where he talks about how they only spent $200m total, from 2004-2010, on all of maintaining and developing WoW (explicitly including the expansions), all the bandwidth, all the servers, all the CSRs, and so on. I can't help but think had Blizzard been independent or even owned by a gaming company, a lot of the literal billions they were making would have been plowed back into their games and development. I feel like something similar, on a smaller scale, is happening with WotC under Hasbro - D&D isn't getting money ploughed back into it (and sure you can argue about how much impact that'd have, but I'd say there'd be some) - rather it's going to support Hasbro and into the 3D VTT which increasingly seems to be a separate project from TT D&D entirely (we shall see, we shall see, I admit). Blizzard eventually got sold to Activision, who basically attempted to use them as well (albeit with less success, as Blizzard had shot themselves in the foot with Cataclysm and WoW was bleeding customers fast, but that's a long separate story). I do hear that under MS, Blizzard have been re-separated from Activison, and will be allowed to do their own thing, at least. I guess if the company is gigantically huge enough maybe you're better off?</blockquote>

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