WotCs early days, and saving D&D

[Balesir]

Hasbro will never relinquish the D&D trademark. It is locked away forever. If Hasbro shuts down the D&D publishing group at Wizards, D&D effectively disappears from the market. Sure, the "game" would live on as Pathfinder and Mutants and Masterminds and Spycraft and a dozen clones and retroclones. But D&D itself would go away.

*Shrug* - so what? I have played dozens of roleplaying sytems, including all editions of D&D. For long periods I avoided D&D because it didn't suit the style of play I wanted to pursue. I really like the current edition for what it does, but I don't really care two figs for the brand name/trademark(s) or their owner(s). To misquote Shakespeare, "the game's the thing!"; as long as we have that the IP holders can either make something I want and get my money (and maybe goodwill, even, if they act ethically and with virtue), or fail to and go to heck for all I care.

 

[TerraDave]

If Peter had really cared about the D&D brand, he would never have sold out to Hasbro. Hasbro will never relinquish the D&D trademark. It is locked away forever. If Hasbro shuts down the D&D publishing group at Wizards, D&D effectively disappears from the market. Sure, the "game" would live on as Pathfinder and Mutants and Masterminds and Spycraft and a dozen clones and retroclones. But D&D itself would go away. So I can't wait to see part two of this blog post.

But he got paid a LOT of money.





And, I don't believe that. If the brand does badly, and they think they can get rid of it, they will.

 

[Alzrius]

If Peter had really cared about the D&D brand, he would never have sold out to Hasbro. Hasbro will never relinquish the D&D trademark. It is locked away forever. If Hasbro shuts down the D&D publishing group at Wizards, D&D effectively disappears from the market. Sure, the "game" would live on as Pathfinder and Mutants and Masterminds and Spycraft and a dozen clones and retroclones. But D&D itself would go away. So I can't wait to see part two of this blog post.

Rick addressed this very point not too long ago, over on a thread at Grognardia (scroll down through the comments). The relevant post - answering the question of why Peter Adkison sold WotC to Hasbro - is as follows:

[MENTION=83838]cibet[/MENTION], that is a worthy question that deserves a straight answer. My sister just asked me about this today when we were discussing these posts.

There are two main reasons.

First, the truth is that the company was thriving, but the principals weren't. Everyone went deeply into debt to launch Wizards, and further to try to survive through the lean times of the lawsuit. Magic: The Gathering almost didn't happen at all. Friends and family teamed up to help people make rent and car payments to they wouldn't go bankrupt before the game could be released. We thought Magic was a blast to play, and the art for it looked gorgeous, so we hoped everyone would like it, but we didn't really know. It was an enormous gamble, and everyone put everything on the line.

When Magic hit it big, it was an exhilarating roller coaster and hugely gratifying, but we were all still broke. We got into this weird state where the company was thriving but the principals weren't. The new employees were fine, because they were being paid and weren't trying to dig out of deep personal debt, but the principals were drowning.

Wizards tried to address this problem by doing a stock buy-back some time before the Hasbro deal, and it did help a great deal, but mainly it put most of us back on track with where we would have been if we had normal paying careers and hadn't bet everything on Wizards. Most of the principals were still carrying some debt.

In the end, the principals were tired of being broke.

Second, and this was a critique I discussed repeatedly with some of the principals at the time long before things reached the breaking point, Wizards began with a startup culture of working long, hard hours, sacrificing like crazy to try to get things moving and to do a good job on them. As anyone who's been through a startup knows, this is both exciting and exhausting. At some point a company needs to transition out of the startup mode to avoid burning out its employees.

Wizards never did.

Several of us saw this problem coming. Everyone worked so hard for so long that they were burning themselves out even while they were having a blast. Houses fell into disrepair, people put on lots of weight and got sick a lot, marriages fell apart, and more, all while Wizards itself was thriving and everyone was having a blast working on something they loved.

Workaholism was epidemic at Wizards. Wizards invested in an exercise room, classes, great offices, and everything they could to make it a blast to work there, but that only made people not want to go home to the lives they'd been neglecting. The problem with working for your favorite company in the world is that you never go home. At least one person stopped going home and had to be told he wasn't allowed to live at work. More than anyone else, the principals were happy but exhausted and needed to stop trying to go go go at 110% all the time unless they wanted to die young.

In the end, the broke and burned out principals pretty much all needed the sale in order to get their lives back into order and stop being broke.

After leaving Wizards, more than one of the principals lost a bunch of weight and got their health back. Some rescued marriages while others moved on to new relationships. Some sold off neglected houses at a loss and bought new ones they committed to taking care of properly. The money itself spread far and wide, used to start new, more sustainable game companies; for healthcare and college funds for family members; and into retirement funds for parents and grandparents whose early loans made the company's survival possible during the lean times. A couple spent everything they made just getting back to break even. There are a few small piles of money here and there, but over half of it has gone back into the community that made it all possible.

In short, they had to sell the company to survive as individuals.

 

[WayneLigon]

Absolutely fascinating; looking forward to more posts from him.

I always thought Tyne's article on the early days was interesting.

 

[jmucchiello]

But if the game lives on, the brand is irrelevant.

By that argument there was nothing to save. We didn't need the OGL. If 4e has shown us anything it is that there is very little about D&D that is required to make a game called D&D. If wizards had tanked in 1999 someone would have stepped up to release a high fantasy RPG: Hackmaster, Tunnels and Trolls, MERP, etc could have become "D&D" for a lot of people.

Also, what game lives on? Again, if Hasbro pulls the plug on D&D, 4e will disappear into the night and I don't think it can be safely retro-cloned (unless Hasbro ignores it). Do you mean it lives on like TORG lives on? No one sells TORG (unless something has changed recently that I don't know about) but you can still use the books to play it. Is that living on?

And, I don't believe that. If the brand does badly, and they think they can get rid of it, they will.

Hasbro doesn't get rid of anything. They have been known to sit on a property for 20 years before reviving it. They collect trademarks like dragons collect copper pieces.

Rick addressed this very point not too long ago, over on a thread at Grognardia (scroll down through the comments). The relevant post - answering the question of why Peter Adkison sold WotC to Hasbro - is as follows:

That is sad.

 

[jmucchiello]

Rick addressed this very point not too long ago, over on a thread at Grognardia (scroll down through the comments). The relevant post - answering the question of why Peter Adkison sold WotC to Hasbro - is as follows:

During the negotiations for the purchase, Wizards came to believe that Hasbro valued the Wizards management team and strategy....

Central to this was the idea that Wizards's strategies had been successful, so they would be kept. This was not stated in writing in the purchase agreement, unfortunately, so Hasbro was not bound to follow through on this after the purchase, and they did not.

And just about every WTF we experienced from the outside of WotC, from the mass exodus of the principle ownership to the release of 3.5 to failing to keep the SRD up to date to the traditional Christmas lay offs, is explained.

Thanks for that link. That sentence was almost koan like in the manner in which it enlightened me.

 

[TarionzCousin]

By that argument there was nothing to save. We didn't need the OGL. If 4e has shown us anything it is that there is very little about D&D that is required to make a game called D&D. If wizards had tanked in 1999 someone would have stepped up to release a high fantasy RPG: Hackmaster, Tunnels and Trolls, MERP, etc could have become "D&D" for a lot of people.

This is opinion and baseless speculation. As such, it utterly fails to support your argument. You can't prove these "facts" so the conclusions are completely unsupported.... unless, of course, you've traveled alternate timelines and been witness to these events.

Were it not for Talislanta, Magic: The Gathering would probably never have happened, because Wizards of the Coast might not have survived long enough to produce it. And, of course, without Magic, Wizards would never have done well enough to save TSR and Dungeons & Dragons.

I never knew this. Thank you, Talislanta.

... and also thank you Lisa Stevens. No wonder Paizo is doing so well.

 

[M.L. Martin]

And just about every WTF we experienced from the outside of WotC, from the mass exodus of the principle ownership to the release of 3.5 to failing to keep the SRD up to date to the traditional Christmas lay offs, is explained.

No comment on the rest, but doesn't anyone else remember that the "traditional Christmas layoffs" are a WotC 'tradition' (more like an occasional habit) that not only predates Hasbro's acquisition of WotC, but WotC's acquisition of TSR?

 

[Tuft]

...Wizards came to believe that Hasbro valued the Wizards management team and strategies...

Thanks for that link. That sentence was almost koan like in the manner in which it enlightened me.

Having had the company were I work bought twice, I am not at all surprised. The first time they told us how much they valued the product line we were working on. One half year later, most of us were hired out as consultants. The second time they told us how much they valued our competency and how good it was that we worked close to the customer - while putting in a quota on how many new deals had to be transferred offshore to the Indian subsidiary... whether it suited the customer or not.

 

[Mercurius]

Ahh, the good old Orgy Days of Wizards of the Coast.

But this is an old story, and is the unspoken shadow side of the American Way: Start-up company makes it big by bringing something innovative and living by higher ideals. Then, Something Goes Wrong leading to the company being sold to/bought by Huge Corporation, which assimilates it into the collective. Buh-bye higher ideals or, at the least, they are stream-lined and whittled down to the ones that don't interfere with corporate profit.

In a sense it is the story of a once-almost-great-nation that is in decline.