WotC shocker (well it was to me)

[Xion_Anistu-san]

Just got the latest D&D podcast and was shocked to hear Dave Noonan and Sr. Editor Julia Martin, who was with D&D since TSR days. According to other articles online, there were 100 people laid-off in this latest reorganization.

Now as much as I don't like 4E, I truly hate the idea that people just got sacked only weeks before Christmas. That is no good business no matter how you look at it. Morale has got to be in the crapper out there. I feel sorry for everyone involved including the ones who didn't get a pink slip.

So hypothetically speaking, what would happen if the D&D line went belly up? What would your local game group do? What do you think would happen to the industry overall?

<Waits for Clarence or the Ghost of Christmas Future to show up>

[mikeejimbo]

*shrug* We'd keep playing 4E, probably, homebrewing new stuff when we got bored.

On the bright side though, GURPS might get more popular.

[Mercenary Pen]

Here's hoping that most of the die-hard RPG specialists who got the boot find other jobs within the industry (and fairly quickly)...

There is now a good variety of RPG talent out of work because of this, and those companies nipping at WotC's heels would be foolish to pass up a chance to hire said talent. It could well be that, in the space of a year, Dave Noonan is publishing material for *insert name of RPG publisher other than WotC here*

[R4ph]

People would just play one of the multitude of other Roleplaying Games instead, or continue using the DnD that already exists. DnD going away isn;t going to cause the entire hobby to die overnight.

[snoopy13a]

So hypothetically speaking, what would happen if the D&D line went belly up? What would your local game group do? What do you think would happen to the industry overall?

I doubt that the line would go belly up. I believe that another company would purchase it with the belief that they could make it leaner and more profitable.

[Starscream]

I doubt it will get that bad, but seeing as we're being hypothetical...

I guess I'd just stick to 3.5 mostly. I don't hate 4E, but even though I've given it a few play-throughs and enjoyed it, it never grew on me the way the last system did. I started out when I was ten playing 2E basic, lost interest for many years because I moved to a redneck town and there was nobody around who was into rpgs. Got back into it in college, and by then it was 2005 and 3.5 was king.

I could give a list of gripes about 4E, but it hardly seems necessary because I'm sure there are a thousand and one gamers on this site who have already done so, and they're probably the same ones. But I've always had one nice thing to say about it: it will get better.

With every new sourcebook released, a few of my complaints fade a bit. Maybe a new paragon path sounds like a lot of fun, or an item is awesome, or some new powers make a lousy class a good one. And I always felt that when the next core books are released, and I get my beloved monk and druid classes, I'll be much more enthusiastic about the system.

Still won't like it as much as 3.5, but great movies can have inferior sequels that are still fun to watch in their own right.

So if no new 4E material came out, my feelings for the system would probably just stay where they are, a grudging "meh".

[Ryuuk]

Just got the latest D&D podcast and was shocked to hear Dave Noonan and Sr. Editor Julia Martin, who was with D&D since TSR days. According to other articles online, there were 100 people laid-off in this latest reorganization.

At the moment, this isn't an isolated incident. To quote a tried an true NPC saying "*sigh* times are tough..."

If the whole thing went belly up though? Well, there's still plenty of books (I'm still 3.5), I'd probably continue as normal.

[OverdrivePrime]

If Wizards goes down and takes D&D with it? Pathfinder for the win.

[Kurald Galain]

Just got the latest D&D podcast and was shocked to hear Dave Noonan and Sr. Editor Julia Martin, who was with D&D since TSR days. According to other articles online, there were 100 people laid-off in this latest reorganization.

That's bad news! Did they cite any reason? I doubt it was subpar sales figures, so perhaps it's a victim of the bad economy?

[Dragonus45]

The moment the company went bankrupt there would be someone with cash looking to buy it up. That's how it works with bankruptcy everything gets sold and someone else buys the D&D brand name.

[Frerezar]

It'd mean that4e will stay as a reminder of what greed does to creativity. And hopefully someone will buy the rights and publish 3.5 again . Not likely but a guy can dream

[Krrth]

As a Brand Name, the use of the DnD logo has profit potential. Some company would snap up the rights, just to get the name. The resulting game might not share any resemblance to what we already have, but it should still exist.

[Fax Celestis]

The moment the company went bankrupt there would be someone with cash looking to buy it up. That's how it works with bankruptcy everything gets sold and someone else buys the D&D brand name.

That's exactly what happened to TSR.

[Zeful]

The moment the company went bankrupt there would be someone with cash looking to buy it up. That's how it works with bankruptcy everything gets sold and someone else buys the D&D brand name.

That's not what was asked. What was asked was about D&D going belly up not Hasbro/WotC.

And I stand by the assertion that if D&D stops being a profitable game, Hasbro will mothball it and keep the rights.

[Tacoma]

Our DM just started a 2E game last Saturday. So it's not like the success or failure of WoTC is going to affect me at all. It doesn't affect you unless you play 4E. Or are champing at the bit for 5E.

[Darrin]

So hypothetically speaking, what would happen if the D&D line went belly up? What would your local game group do? What do you think would happen to the industry overall?

It's puzzling, because historically, RPG sales tend to do *better* in a recession. Or maybe not exactly better, but not quite as bad as other entertainment sectors.

One of the reasons behind this may be because on a cost-per-hour basis, RPGs are one of the cheaper entertainment alternatives. One $30-40 book can conceivably keep multiple people occupied for hundreds of hours. Spend that money on a video game, and at best you can hope for 50 hours with some kind of Final Fantasy knockoff. Or take you family to the movies for the same money, and you may barely get two hours of entertainment.

WotC is in a little different situation because they are part of a much larger company that depends on retail sales, and Hasbro is bracing itself for a big slump in revenue. They are naturally going to look at cutting labor costs, and Hasbro has never really had a firm grasp of how much staff you really need to develop a strong RPG product line (then again, you could say no RPG company has understood this any better).

Another factor is how RPG books are being severely discounted or just eliminated altogether at most hobby/game shops. That started several years ago, so the current economic situation may not have much effect on that. Hasbro may not care about the smaller retail shops... I would guess what worries them most is what's happening at the big box stores like Walmart and Target. I'm not sure how much Hasbro is selling online... I imagine the majority of RPG sales are now via Amazon or some other online store, but even that might not be a big enough chunk of sales for Hasbro to worry too much about it this year.

Something else to keep in mind is it may just be cyclical. There was a big payroll purge after 3.0 was released. Most of the lead designers were laid off (Tweet, Cook, etc.). With the main 4E rulebooks out in stores, this allows WotC to cut down development costs and hire freelancers instead. Shifting to freelance contracts makes middle-managers very happy since they have a lot more flexibility when fighting over budget money. Freelancers can be added or ditched very quickly, and upper management is less likely to turn down "discretionary" spending.

The real panic is probably a little further down the road. Sometime around June or July '09, WotC is going to look at the adoption rate of 4E vs. 3.x, and someone's going to have to explain to the big scary Hasbro people why their biggest competitor is the previous edition, why third-party support has been slow to embrace 4E, and why their online strategy is still sucking up gobloads of cash with little to show for it.

[Frerezar]

I jut saw something like this a while back ago. A company in charge of a long running succesfull game decided to completly change the game, do a reboot per say, in order to ncrease profit. So it went all out with it and told everyoe tht it had been a succes, the best thing to ever happen to the company. Months later (after a few new sets of the game with the new format were out) they declared the rights were being sold, ad the game ended.
Anyway, all i want to say s that creating 4e femanded a lot of money, and that for what ive seen it hasnt been welcomed as the hasbro people expected, so its not that farfetched to see the product dying

[Tsotha-lanti]

So hypothetically speaking, what would happen if the D&D line went belly up? What would your local game group do? What do you think would happen to the industry overall?

The exact same thing that has happened over and over and over for the last 30+ years when RPGs have gone out of production?

People keep playing. If the game is as amazing, or the setting as stupendous, as, say, RuneQuest and Glorantha, fanzines and endless websites full of excellent content will pop up. (Seriously, no RPG has the same combination of quality and quantity for fansites and fan material.) And eventually a license is going to expire or become the property of someone interested in it, and a new version will come out.

[Oslecamo]

That's bad news! Did they cite any reason? I doubt it was subpar sales figures, so perhaps it's a victim of the bad economy?

Perhaps it was the 100 people guilty of all the errors in D&D history, who had managed to evade the radar untill now.

[LibraryOgre]

IIRC, there were a good number of layoff right after 3.0 was released, as well.

[Norsesmithy]

I can't say I was expecting this, but neither does it surprise me. If you look at their launch date, and the performance of the market overall in the short period after, they kinda picked a crappy time to roll out a new (and probably very expensive to produce) product line.

Do we know what departments the cuts happened in? Are they even all people who are assigned to the DND product line?

[Xion_Anistu-san]

That's bad news! Did they cite any reason? I doubt it was subpar sales figures, so perhaps it's a victim of the bad economy?

Yes, the new host mentioned you could read more about in Bill Slavisec's "Ampersand" article in the latest "Dragon."

[RPGuru1331]

That's bad news! Did they cite any reason? I doubt it was subpar sales figures, so perhaps it's a victim of the bad economy?

Probably. Things have been pretty horrid for a while. I'm just glad they had jobs this long, really.

[Tengu_temp]

If Wizards goes down and takes D&D with it? Pathfinder for the win.

I don't think anything short of divine hellish intervention is going to make Pathfinder even remotely as popular as any edition of DND ever was.

[Another_Poet]

If that happned I would love to see Paizo buy up the rights to D&D. Or, funnier yet, Blackmoor. But I don't think Arneson would bother with taking over a game like 4e or even 3e. Paizo would really be the best bet.

Sadly I do agree that it's more likely Hasbro would mothball or drastically remarket D&D rather than giving up the rights/license. No matter what happens, 4e won't be thrown away in favour of reviving 3.x. Sorry fellow 3e'ers. 4e might be scaled down to a small niche product or marketed more to tweens and kids but has a loyal enough following to still be profitable on the right scale.

Gaming is a long tail industry and it seems even the giant names like D&D have to play to that to make money.

edited to add: My hope is that Noonan will gather some of the best of his former coworkers and form a new company. I'd love to see what comes out of that sort of design team.

[Prometheus]

I'm sorry to hear that regular employees took the beating for this, but is it really all that surprising that the WotC is not doing so well lately? In my memory, they focused on commercializing and dumbing down MtG when pokemon and Yo-gi-oh were selling well (which turned out to be a fad) and they released 4E. I don't know how there other products are doing, but I wouldn't be surprised if this was reflective of a larger pattern of reacting to a money squeeze by making it worse.

[mikeejimbo]

Wait, does Wizards use freelancers?

[Xion_Anistu-san]

Do we know what departments the cuts happened in? Are they even all people who are assigned to the DND product line?

From the podcast, I would guess everyone involved in the lay-off was involved in the D&D product line. I don't have a subscription to Dragon to read the latest "Ampersand" article.

[Hzurr]

Hmm...people keep discussing 4E like it was a huge flop. Didn't WotC have to go back and do serious re-printing because the demand was so high? I mean, while I agree that 3.X has a fairly strong following, just from reading the boards here it seems like there's been a pretty large movement to 4E.

Also, a lot of the people who were let go might also have been the programmers and artists who were designing everything for D&DI. Now that it's more or less up and running, they only need to keep enough people to maintain it, rather than finish building it.

Add a crap economy, and getting rid of the (my assumption) fairly large influx of people they had to bring in to get 4E off the ground, and I'm not hugely suprised by this.

Odds are that a lot of what we'll see from WotC in the next year or two will be things that have already been completed by these people, and are capable of being tested/polished by a smaller number of designers.

Still though, losing your job right before Christmas sucks, although at least they're not alone (how many thousands have lost their job in the last month?)

[Another_Poet]

Wait, does Wizards use freelancers?

Only if they already have published gaming material under their belts. Or at least, that was the policy the last time I read their submissions guidelines which was over a year ago.