>The real problem is the managers at WoTC that don't really care about the games. They only care about money. I expect more bad things in the future.
WOTC is notorious for paying around 50% of the market rate and giving a bunch of free product to employees and generally convincing them that working for poor wages is worth it because of the games. I think senior management doesn't give a shit but middle management and below definitely cares about the games, they just lack the power/ ability to make major decisions.
> I actually think WotC has done a great job of stewarding the game.
I quit the game because I believe it's so far the opposite in the other direction. Secret lair sets with fomo limited time high cost mechanically unique cards. So much power creep, bans happening practically every set now, increasingly ridiculous monetization strategies, I could go on.
Even the OG golden goose TCG is dead to me now. I wish we could have a good card game but the TCG model is just doomed to head in this direction, I'll play all inclusive board games and card games now.
> have been doing a lot of good decision making in recent years.
Wait, what? Aren't these the same people who tried to rug-pull the D&D license and caused a bunch of MtG drama with new cards that almost crashed the card market? Perhaps those decrees came from Hasbro, but we outsiders can't really know that, can we?
* Wizards of the Coast (WoTC) has been tasked by Hasbro (which owns WoTC) to drastically increase profits over a few years.
* WoTC has been aggressively increasing prices on Magic the Gathering (MTG) and drastically increased the diversity of products. This overwhelmed even people who follow and produce MTG news. Wallet fatique is rampant and people are disgruntled.
* WoTC releases the 30th aniversary edition for MTG, which is 60 random cards for 1000 $ which are officially marked as non-tournament legal. The MTG community is furious and for once people from all corners of the community come together to boycott this product. The rage is great and enduring.
* WoTC fails to meet expectations and the stock prices plummet
* To do damage control, WoTC/Hasbro annouces a "fireside chat" for their shareholders where they try to explain the situation but basically just say "we did nothing wrong and we are trying to extract a lot of money from Dungeons and Dragons next"
* Unlike the MTG community, the DnD community is very good at organizing a unified response and the shitstorm came swiftly and took WoTC by surprise. (Don't mess with Dungeon Masters who know how to call together a group of people)
The real problem is the managers at WoTC that don't really care about the games. They only care about money. I expect more bad things in the future.
> this sounds like the way every other company operates. maximize profits above all else naturally resulting in the degradation of the product
Absolutely, that's the result of switching from a co-founder CEO that followed a humble philosophy to a mass market game industry CEO with own controversies.
> Can someone explain to me why WoTC is actually changing the license?
Well Hasbro wants to make money of third party D&D content, nothing more. Why were people still using D&D when non corporate alternatives exist?
The people at the head of these companies could be selling vacuum cleaners it wouldn't make a difference, at the end of the day it's all about maximizing short term profit.
> Why do we not crowdfund some excellent game designers to make a truly open set of RPGs?
No need to even do that, there is plenty of alternative RPG and game systems out there already. It's not about money. It's about principles. But people wants to play "D&D", Hasbro's IP, Hasbro rules and business practices...
But also let's not forget how some conferences managed to shut down and shun the competition by forbidding them to attend the conferences to promote their alternative creations, insuring Hasbro/WotC prominent market shares... There is a lot to say about that "community", a lot of corrupt individuals...
> The fact that they can't survive two years of a pandemic without losing hundreds of employees and accepting a merger is indicative of the relative illness of the entire game tool service industry. This is a decades-old company that didn't have enough war-chest to float a few bad years.
Bad years? I thought the pandemic was unusually good for at-home entertainment.
> This is not to say that I have any animosity towards the game’s creator. Given such a large price tag, it’s hard to imagine not accepting a buyout offer. But I resent that we live in a system where any independent creativity is exploited for financial gain.
That's sort of the trade, isn't it? If independent creativity is regularly exploited for profit, that means people are always incentivized to create more. Would they really create as much in a system that offered few or no incentives?
> So I guess my thinking is that the big problems came when game developers lost control of their companies
Some willingly sold their companies to bigger ones (Garriott sold Origin to EA, and Origin's legacy was lost forever since).
> But when gradually their companies hired professional management
Yet professional is what's badly needed. Look at the Doublefine mess with Broken Age (massively over budget, massively late, massively under-delivering in every area).
I worked for a competitor and this is single-handedly the most frustrating thing I had to deal with honestly.
Not because it’s not a noble objective, but because it was weaponised by a minority of people to control the studio in various ways, it was bullying in its purest form and extremely toxic - the environment felt really hostile, like saying something even moderately wrong would lead to an incursion. Saying anything against that behaviour meant you were somehow anti-feminist or misogynist or racist, even defending yourself. They were the arbiters of what D&I means and they can do no wrong.
To give you an example of what I mean: during the start of the pandemic the managing director of the studio said “we don’t know if this virus will be nothing, or the next Spanish flu, so we should take all necessary precaution in the worst case” - he was dragged publicly by our internal D&I delegation about the sheer racism of saying “Spanish” flu.
So, I treat strong D&I initiatives as a red flag, personally.
But I agree that EA is considered one of the better employers in the industry, even if the games are aggressively monetised, it seems that they try to take care of employees.
Yeah, version 1 was bad, (Leaping Lizards was clearly in over their heads) so Wizards stepped in and made everything utterly worse.
First they made a half-assed attempt at a "version 2", which they bungled so badly they had to actually shut the game down while they recovered the pieces. But this, rather than convincing them that they hadn't a clue how to write or operate MTGO, instead convinced them that they needed to double down. For version 3, they decided rewrite the entire thing from scratch. Sort of an unholy amalgamation of second-system effect, NIH syndrome, and the coding skills you'd expect from a company that had never made a computer game before.
Version 3 was hugely delayed, hugely overbudget, and...well...utter, utter crap. The UI was worse, many features were lost, performance was bad, stability was terrible; there was literally no advantage over version 2. It took them 5 years to launch it, more to make it playable, and when it was done, it was so bad I stopped player literally because I couldn't stand the client any more.
Apparently there's a version 4 now, but it's basically just 3.1; they didn't fix any of the core issues. If they could bring back something that looked and worked like version 2, I might start playing again, but really, every version they released was some form of pathetically bad. There's literally a half dozen half-assed shareware deck builders from 15 years ago that had better UIs than any MTGO client has ever had. :(
Even before Hearthstone, I used to wonder what might have been if Wizards had signed a deal with a "real" developer like Blizzard to build and run the game properly. With the launch of Hearthstone, I think we know. Oh well.
> He seemed to forget he was being paid $80k a year for his game ideas regardless of if they got used or not.
Money is one reason people do things, but rarely the only one. Especially smart, creative people. The notion that people lose the right to complain as long as the paychecks keep coming is poisonous.
> They understand the fundamental game mechanics to a competitive degree (starcraft 2, overwatch, los) and their games are incredibly
You and I know two completely different companies then. World of Warcraft BFA is, anecdotally, causing players to hemorrhage, and the only reason I have to report this anecdotally is because Blizzard stopped reporting their subscriber numbers after hemorrhaging players for boring and bad content. BFA was incredibly buggy and not even a half-finished game when released.
Their development process feels spreadsheet-driven and concerned primarily with keeping their subcount high through tedious content which takes long amounts of time, rather than keeping their subcount high with quality content that keeps the playerbase engaged.
Is it clear? Given the incredibly high turnover rate at any point of time in the games industry it does not sound like the worst assumption to make, true or not.
(And having worked in the industry myself not that long ago, none of my friends and colleagues from that time still work in it. But that is just anecdotal)
> I am simply surprised they manage to produce anything at all in such a culture, let alone a hit game.
They produced a hit game about a decade ago, as a far, far smaller and probably less dysfunctional company. Beyond maintaining it, they don't seem to have done much of note since.
WOTC is notorious for paying around 50% of the market rate and giving a bunch of free product to employees and generally convincing them that working for poor wages is worth it because of the games. I think senior management doesn't give a shit but middle management and below definitely cares about the games, they just lack the power/ ability to make major decisions.
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