Wizards of the Coast Is Sunsetting Sigil's Active Development

EN World has received confirmation that Wizards of the Coast is planning to transition Sigil, its just-released VTT, to a D&D Beyond feature with no large future development planned. Earlier this week, Wizards of the Coast laid off approximately 30 staff members tied to the development of Sigil, a new D&D-focused VTT system. Ahead of the layoff, Dan Rawson, senior vice president of Dungeons & Dragons, sent out an internal email confirming that the project was essentially being shuttered. Rascal was the first to report the news and EN World was able to independently confirm the accuracy of their report.

The email can be read below:

Dear Team, I want to share an important update regarding Sigil. After several months of alpha testing, we’ve concluded that our aspirations for Sigil as a larger, standalone game with a distinct monetization path will not be realized. As such, we cannot maintain a large development effort and most of the Sigil team will be separated from the company this week. We are, however, proud of what the Sigil team has developed and want to make sure that fans and players on DDB can use it. To that end, we will transition Sigil to a DDB feature. We will maintain a small team to sustain Sigil and release products already developed at no additional cost to users. To those moving on as a result of this decision, we will provide robust support, including severance packages, 2024 bonus, career placement services, and internal opportunities where possible.

I want to take a moment to praise the entire Sigil team for their incredible work to deliver this product to our community. One of the things I’m most proud of here at D&D is our strong sense of purpose. We aim to honor our current players while ensuring D&D continues to build connections and bring joy to future generations. And that’s what the Sigil team was doing. Although we haven’t fully realized our vision for Sigil to scale, the team should be proud of their achievements.”

A full breakdown of Sigil's tumultous development can be found here. Rascal has several additional details about recent events that led to Sigil's early demise.

 

[Azzy]

I bet Chris Cocks and his fellow Hasbnro executives will get their bonuses.

They always do.

 

[Clint_L]

They still have those three pillars, just not in house. They have licensing deals in place with Roll20, Foundry, Fantasy Grounds, and possibly others (?). So VTT is not one massive WotC pillar, but multiple smaller pillars. It wouldn't surprise me at all if when Talespire comes out of Early Access, they might also try and get a D&D license for official content.

WotC was discussing the pillars of its own D&D strategy, not what 3PP are doing. Which are, frankly, very small potatoes compared to what WotC envisaged in their original announcement for Sigil, and more relevant to the licensing discussion (see below). It is nice that WotC has continued to license with other VTT suppliers, but these are cottage businesses compared to what WotC envisaged. If any of them truly offered a competitive advantage, WotC would seek to buy them, as they did DDB.

You need to understand how nice licensing is, it's essentially free money. No investment of time and resources needed and when a project fails, that cost of failure is borne by someone else. The only thing that's needed is some form of licensing team as the only overhead. And while no single licensed project might be as profitable as BG3, all those smaller projects do add up.

Yes, I understand what licensing is, thank you (seriously, why do folks feel the need to imply that others are ignorant?). I also understand that it is likely handled under the purview of Hasbro, not WotC, and was thus not included as one of their original three pillars of D&D. And I further understand that Hasbro sees licensing as dramatically underperforming for the D&D brand. This point has been made explicitly by them: there is a strong disjunction between D&D's brand recognition ("10/10" according to them) and how much revenue it creates (around a tenth of Magic the Gathering, at that time, despite much stronger brand awareness). I have no doubt that Hasbro would love to see D&D produce serious licensing money on par with some of their other highly recognized brands, but they haven't cracked that nut, with BG3 standing out as the tantalizing exception.

The end result is that, for WotC, D&D remains primarily a bookseller. Which is what it has always been. However, the transition to digital likely makes it a much more profitable bookseller. The VTT as a new, comparable revenue stream is gone, and the scale of something like Foundry is negligible to a WotC/Hasbro.

 

[timbannock]

They always do.

"We made some really bad decisions that you warned us of, and when that it didn't work, neither do you."

 

[Parmandur]

My guess, without ever having looked at Sigil (the codes are still unread in my inbox) is they tried to make Sigil also serve as a VTT that actually followed D&D's rules and more difficultly, its physics.

Interestingly e ough...no, they didn't. It was not an integrated rules expression, more of a virtual Dwarf Fortress and Miniatures set.

 

[Clint_L]

"We made some really bad decisions that you warned us of, and when that it didn't work, neither do you."

Or, "hey, we are going to try something new. Would you like a job to see if you can make it work?" Hiring people to do a project that is not guaranteed to succeed is not necessarily villainous behaviour. The folks who took that job are not necessarily dupes.

In retrospect, there probably was never enough money in a VTT to justify the scale that WotC envisaged. But taking a swing is not the worst thing in the world.

 

[EthanSental]

I predict a year or 2 or 3 from now, this endeavor will only come up like gleemax to show when wotc misses the boat on something….but D&D in general will still be doing fine. They tried, wasn’t going as planned and stopped. I get it even if I was hoping to “buy” 3D minis and such from a marketplace.

And I mainly think the market wasn’t there for something like this so I don’t see a company like code monkey did with 3 etools and take what’s been created and flesh it out, as that company probably knows it’s a slim chance to be profitable…and where Wotc’s market research dept dropped the ball on good numbers.

 

[kenmarable]

How long can they rely on brand recognition alone?

That, to me, is a huge part of the problem. WotC no longer has any interest in being a "Publisher." They (executive management, of course) have not been shy for years to outright call themselves a "Brand Management" company.

They do not see themselves as the largest RPG Publisher, and in fact do not see themselves as even in the same industry as, say, Paizo. They see themselves as an under-sized Marvel that (in their minds) has near Marvel-level brand recognition and has no idea why they aren't making Marvel-sized money because of that.

They see "brand recognition = $" as fundamentally true as "E=mc2", and keep scratching their MBA brains trying to figure out why it isn't getting them more profits.

 

[Clint_L]

That, to me, is a huge part of the problem. WotC no longer has any interest in being a "Publisher." They (executive management, of course) have not been shy for years to outright call themselves a "Brand Management" company.

Do they actually call themselves that? Who are we talking about here? That sounds more like Hasbro than the guys running WotC, who are mostly from a gaming background and, credit where due, seem pretty passionate about publishing D&D.

They do not see themselves as the largest RPG Publisher, and in fact do not see themselves as even in the same industry as, say, Paizo. They see themselves as an under-sized Marvel that (in their minds) has near Marvel-level brand recognition and has no idea why they aren't making Marvel-sized money because of that.

This sounds more like Hasbro, who are very much IP-driven. I think they understand very well why they aren't making Marvel (Disney)-sized money, but MCUs aren't that easy to manifest, or DC would have succeeded ages ago with access to comparable IP. I think Hasbro, probably correctly, sees D&D as an IP that is weak at generating revenue despite having incredible cultural cachet. But this has always been an issue for a game that costs players a time investment more than a financial one. TSR basically went under because they couldn't diversify past being a niche book publisher.

 

[Clint_L]

To follow up on my point above: the main cost to playing D&D is time. It takes an incredible commitment from DMs, and a significant one from players. That's because it has always been designed as a kind of DIY game. Which makes it resistant to being easily monetized, IMO, for all sorts of reasons.

For example, IP. Okay, you've got the broad concept of D&D, but where are the marketable characters? Where is your Spiderman, Barbie, G.I. Joe, etc.? The main characters of D&D are unique to every campaign. Sure, you've got a few from the novels and sourcebooks that are known within serious D&D nerd circles, but ask 100 people on the street who "Drizz't" is, and you'll get 100 blank expressions. So making a D&D movie or TV show is hard, because what are you actually making? I thought Honour Among Thieves did a pretty great job of capturing the conceptual feel of a D&D game, and we saw how that struggled at the box office: despite great reviews and high fan appeal, it didn't break through to the muggles in a significant way.

So Hasbro has this thing that most people are broadly aware of, and that has passionate fans who are used to doing it for themselves. How do you monetize a game where the core concept has been "all you need is time, friends, and imagination"? I think the basic ethos of D&D is antithetical to significant monetization, and always has been. It's ideal for cottage industry-type entrepreneurs, not big corporate marketing campaigns.

And for video games.

 

[Chaltab]

The thing is, I'm not against D&D being monetized in principle, but they're so bad at it, both in the sense of monetizing it in ways that are unlikely to work... and bad in the sense of ethically dubious at best. They keep alienating customers for no discernible gain, and last I heard Hasbro still wasn't doing all that well.