D&D 5E Why I Think D&DN is In Trouble

[WizarDru]

Its not me. It was posted on the WotC forum with links and references for the fact checking. Go take it up with them. They pretty much proved it. The only thing that might be contended is whether 5E is running on its own income or whether WotC is footing the bill with MtG profits to keep it alive. I freely admit that is my own speculation

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All it took was a 10 second www.startpage.com search to find this stuff out. Its really not that hard.

If it's that simple, then it would have been helpful for you to post the link to the post in question. I did more than 10 seconds with startpage and google, but didn't find your specific article. The use of what I'll assume to be hyperbole (magic being 99%) weakens any argument you are trying to make. While it's a certainty that Magic sales have driven both WotC and Hasbro's recent numbers from being horrible to just a failure to meet goals, the main reason D&D has posted low sales in the last year is that WotC has barely published any new content in the line. But sales of their board games (particularly the well received Lords of WaterDeep), miniatures games and other licensed items have certainly help fill in the gap in the last year. D&D is not simply a game, it's a brand. M:tG is bolstered in large part by real money sales from the online game, which I believe Forbes indicated contributes more to the company revenues than the printed cards. Given that Magic has had a steady release schedule over the last two years that has managed to get distributed in places like B&N, Target and even supermarkets, it's no surprise that they are contributing more to WotC's revenues currently.

Most of what I see in those regards are speculation about WotC's finances coupled with an assumption of Hasbro being actively hostile to the D&D brand. Having lived through multiple examples of WotC surviving market shifts, economy changes, internal mistakes, company turnovers and multiple rounds of layoffs and product releases...I need a little more concrete data that WotC and D&D are 'in trouble'. I remember when WotC was doomed when the CCG market crashed; when they lost Pokemon; when they announced the OGL; when 3.5E came out; when 4E came out; when they sold to Hasbro; when they closed all their retail stores and so on. WotC lives alongside companies like Netflix, TiVo, Nintendo and Apple as enterprises that are continually being told how they are doing their core business incorrectly by outsiders, despite their continued survival in the market. Do they often make mistakes (sometimes very costly ones)? Without question. But their business plans and finances (which they have no obligation or advantage to share) is not something we are privy to, so a lot of such material is speculation. And if you want such speculation to be taken seriously, you need more detailed information to back up your argument. It's not other folks job to back up your argument for you and then refute it.

 

[Mistwell]

Its not me. It was posted on the WotC forum with links and references for the fact checking. Go take it up with them. They pretty much proved it. The only thing that might be contended is whether 5E is running on its own income or whether WotC is footing the bill with MtG profits to keep it alive. I freely admit that is my own speculation.

http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/stories/2003/03/10/story4.html?page=all

This is an article from 11 years ago, and meaningless to what's happening at WOTC right now. And, I am not sure why you thought the CEO part was the part I was objecting to (though you are wrong on that too). I am objecting to almost everything you wrote - it was inaccurate down the line, from number of employees, to intent behind selling prior products, etc..

 

[Mistwell]

I do think Mistwell is jumping the gun a bit on assuming WotC will take a more prominent place in deciding Hasbro priorities. Boys Toys sales are down, but that's assumed to be a temporary blip due to the lack of supporting movie releases last year. The 4th Transformer movie, plus Captain America 2 and Spider-Man 2 should push their Marvel sales way up vs 2013. Still, Hasbro is in a pretty solid position, and I don't think any of the executives are looking to rock the boat at WotC, which has 6 straight quarters of growth, both from Magic and other brands.

There was plenty of Marvel brand support from the entertainment industry last year, and yet their Marvel properties are way down. Churning out a 4th transformer movie is continuing with the diminishing returns on that line - it's not an overall growing line, it's a shrinking one. They get a bump from each new Transformers movie, but the bump is growing smaller and smaller each time and Hasbro is well aware that's a diminishing line in the same way GI Joe was.

Games, and Girls, are the two parts of the company with real sustained growth, and it's those two divisions that investors are focused on. Games is notably larger than Girls, so most of that focus is on Games, which is led by WOTC.

 

[Mistwell]

True, but that business plan is also nine years old. There's no guarantee that's what still going on. From the earnings report, it looks like Core brands are now called Franchise brands. But yea, 5e may well be running on only its own income. There's just no way to tell.

You don't have to guess. We know for sure that business plan was ended years ago. He said it in the very article that we heard about these details to begin with. D&D was later put under the WOTC budget rather than it's own budget and that whole thing ended long ago.

 

[TwoSix]

There was plenty of Marvel brand support from the entertainment industry last year, and yet their Marvel properties are way down. Churning out a 4th transformer movie is continuing with the diminishing returns on that line - it's not an overall growing line, it's a shrinking one. They get a bump from each new Transformers movie, but the bump is growing smaller and smaller each time and Hasbro is well aware that's a diminishing line in the same way GI Joe was.

Games, and Girls, are the two parts of the company with real sustained growth, and it's those two divisions that investors are focused on. Games is notably larger than Girls, so most of that focus is on Games, which is led by WOTC.

<Caveat: If D&D is subsumed in WotC's budget already, than all of this is irrelevant, and I'm discussing this purely out of fun.>

Boys seems to be down because Beyblade tanked and Marvel sales didn't keep up with 2012. Since 2012 had the Avengers, and 2013 only has Iron Man 3 and Thor (toys kids would already have from buying Avengers stuff in 2012), I don't think that loss is particularly surprising. 2014, though, has new Transformers (with Dinobots!), plus Guardians of the Galaxy, which I expect to be huge with kids, even if I doubt it will be a monster success at the box office.

Since a lot of the Girls brand growth was due to Furby, I expect there won't be a repeat of the 25% growth, barring some new product.

I do imagine Hasbro's investment in some iOS/Android app studios could lead to more growth for Gaming. (Is there a mobile version of MGTO? I imagine that could do very well.)

 

[pemerton]

I think we might see a STRONG level of internal support for D&D Next, which means a lot more money behind it than we're all used to seeing.

The problem is the CEO of WotC is a Hasbro plant from their management team.

<snip>

If 5E fails, its likely that D&D will be shelved as a TTRPG and made into board games, books, and cheap cable movies.

I don't follow the Hasbro stock levels, nor read the financial (or gaming) press on how they're doing. My only evidence is what I see coming out of WotC, plus posts I read on these boards.

On the basis of that evidence, I would not be surprised to see a strong level of internal support for D&Dnext. A lot of money seems to have been spent creating it - besides all the salaries for the WotC staff they are paying consultants, paying for the playtest, wearing the cost of no new products for a couple of years and (presumably) of weaker numbers in DDI than they might have expected if they kept going with 4e. There's also the cost of litigating over the movie rights. It would seem irrational to spend that much money creating a product (and on associated brand costs like the litigation) then not to put in the effort to support it in the marketplace. A game designer who is a hobbyist might do that - put a lot of (unpaid) time into designing a system, then release it with little or no fanfare to see how it sinks or swims. But that would strike me as an odd way for a large commercial publisher to go about things.

I also don't see the big deal some posters make about a "Hasbro suit" being in charge. There seems to be this curiously widespread belief that a "suit" can't oversee the design and successful marketing of an RPG. I don't see any particular reason to think that's true. "Suits" oversee the design and marketing of bucketloads of other "cultural production": movies, TV shows, non-literary fiction (and plenty of literary fiction too), games, toys, etc. RPGs just don't seem that special to me in this respect: presumably Greg Leeds can read a summary of focus group reports and marketing surveys and whatever other tools they use as well as the next person!

It's true (I think) that we're never likely to see D&D move as close to the avant garde again as we did with 4e: once bitten, twice shy. But most other commercially successful "cultural products" aren't avant garde either. They're mainstream products satisfying mainstream tastes. D&D is in an even better position than that: having played such a big role in creating the tastes of so many present and past RPGers, it's in an ideal position to satisfy them. (This strike me as an important element in the overall playtest - WotC finding out exactly what sort of market it and TSR created.)

And of course if D&Dnext flops, for whatever reason, D&D the RPG might be mothballed (though the brand presumably won't be). But that's not a prediction: it's just a statement of basic commercial logic. If D&D can't be made a commercial success, well then why would a commercial enterprise continue to publish it? Of course, even if the TTRPG flops it might not be mothballed, if the view is taken that the TTRPG is needed as a type of core to keep the other, profitable, parts of the brand alive. But that's just another truism. It certainly doesn't shed any light on whether or not D&Dnext is in trouble.

 

[billd91]

I also don't see the big deal some posters make about a "Hasbro suit" being in charge. There seems to be this curiously widespread belief that a "suit" can't oversee the design and successful marketing of an RPG. I don't see any particular reason to think that's true. "Suits" oversee the design and marketing of bucketloads of other "cultural production": movies, TV shows, non-literary fiction (and plenty of literary fiction too), games, toys, etc. RPGs just don't seem that special to me in this respect: presumably Greg Leeds can read a summary of focus group reports and marketing surveys and whatever other tools they use as well as the next person!

Suits were responsible for poor time slotting for Firefly and running the episodes out of order, totally screwing its chances of gaining a solid audience. Suits forced Ridley Scott to put the cheesy voiceover in Blade Runner. Suits butchered Brazil. Suits killed Bakshi's attempt to make Lord of the Rings. Suits sued John Fogerty for sounding like, well, John Fogerty. Suits tried to force a relatively happy ending onto Se7en. Suits forced too many villains into both Spiderman 3 and Batman and Robin. Sometimes the suits make good business decisions - and sometimes their interference spells disaster.

Having a Hasbro suit in charge at WotC means there's probably no culture left from WotC's days of independence - the days when they came to TSR's rescue because they loved D&D and, thanks to their good fortune, had the money to spend for an iffy to moderate return. Would a Hasbro-run WotC do the same if TSR had survived until 2014 and was on the ropes now? I seriously doubt it. There is a world of difference between the culture of a corporation that has grown from the ground up, focused on a particular industry because it started out as their passion, and one that has been acquired by a larger corporation and had its leadership replaced. Hasbro isn't into WotC because they're passionate about Magic or D&D or even gaming. They're into WotC because it's a good investment for them and their stockholders. They won't make decisions with an eye toward whether they're good for the game in the long run or for the hobby, they'll make decisions because they maximize their stockholders' values. The passion for the game or hobby will not inform their decisions - or at least are very unlikely to unless they "go native".

 

[Zardnaar]

Suits were responsible for poor time slotting for Firefly and running the episodes out of order, totally screwing its chances of gaining a solid audience. Suits forced Ridley Scott to put the cheesy voiceover in Blade Runner. Suits butchered Brazil. Suits killed Bakshi's attempt to make Lord of the Rings. Suits sued John Fogerty for sounding like, well, John Fogerty. Suits tried to force a relatively happy ending onto Se7en. Suits forced too many villains into both Spiderman 3 and Batman and Robin. Sometimes the suits make good business decisions - and sometimes their interference spells disaster.

Having a Hasbro suit in charge at WotC means there's probably no culture left from WotC's days of independence - the days when they came to TSR's rescue because they loved D&D and, thanks to their good fortune, had the money to spend for an iffy to moderate return. Would a Hasbro-run WotC do the same if TSR had survived until 2014 and was on the ropes now? I seriously doubt it. There is a world of difference between the culture of a corporation that has grown from the ground up, focused on a particular industry because it started out as their passion, and one that has been acquired by a larger corporation and had its leadership replaced. Hasbro isn't into WotC because they're passionate about Magic or D&D or even gaming. They're into WotC because it's a good investment for them and their stockholders. They won't make decisions with an eye toward whether they're good for the game in the long run or for the hobby, they'll make decisions because they maximize their stockholders' values. The passion for the game or hobby will not inform their decisions - or at least are very unlikely to unless they "go native".

I think there are only 4 TSR era staffers left and none of them are game designers. Kim Mohan was the last one really left.

 

[pemerton]

Sometimes the suits make good business decisions - and sometimes their interference spells disaster.

Anyone can make a bad aesthetic decision, suit or otherwise. Anyone can make a bad business decision, too. And sometimes a bad business decision is a good aesthetic decision (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) and sometimes vice versa (any of the Star Wars prequels).

And suits can also give us things that are both aesthetically and commercially satisfying (I'll nominate The Avengers as a fairly recent example, because "the suits" decided it was worth paying to have both Robert Downey Jr and Mark Ruffalo in the same film, and decided to approve a script which let the two of them steal the show.)

Having a Hasbro suit in charge at WotC means there's probably no culture left from WotC's days of independence

<snip>

They're into WotC because it's a good investment for them and their stockholders. They won't make decisions with an eye toward whether they're good for the game in the long run or for the hobby, they'll make decisions because they maximize their stockholders' values.

The notion of "good for the game" or "good for the hobby" is problematic, I think. I mean, of course they won't just give their time and money away for free - which might be good for the hobby, in the sense of providing it philanthropic support - but I think that is a somewhat unrealistic expectation. (I live in a country in which the major daily national newspaper - The Australian - only exists because of the enthusiasm of Rupert Murdoch for dominating public debate in the country of his birth. No one expects that newspaper to still exist in its current form once Murdoch dies.)

I think there is also something of a paradox here, though: many D&D players seem to want a game produced with the vigour and spirit of an indie game, while having the market penetration and brand recognition that D&D currently enjoys. Obviously that's not in principle impossible (something like it actually occurred in the mid- to late 1970s), but I think it's unrealistic as an expectation. In the contemporary world, the only way you will reliably get blockbuster movies that all your friends and everyone on the internet has seen is if "suits" think they're worth investing in. Likewise for an RPG, I think.

 

[Hussar]

Sometimes the suits make good business decisions - and sometimes their interference spells disaster.

Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...k-D-amp-DN-is-In-Trouble/page46#ixzz2tCcmmhmv

I'll see your "suit" and raise you a nearly infinite number of gaming store owners who were gamers who thought they could run a business. I'll raise you TSR - a company run by gamers who thought they could run a business.

I mean, hrmmm, we have a current lawsuit trying to get the movie rights for one of the most valuable brands in toys, D&D, from a guy whose biggest claim to fame is ... well... probably the D&D movie.