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A Wizards re-org is long past due. While Magic has been an insanely profitable property for Hasbro, the D&D and other games have been a problem point for years.

New video game projects are particularly way past due. They've been letting money just fly away with their almost obscene disinterest in the market.

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
Wizards has been absorbed by Hasbro and Magic is in chaos.

What's the bad thing here? Because I googled it and this article from the WSJ doesn't seem to be painting a bad picture for WOTC? If anything it seems they'll be overseeing more stuff thanks to how well they performed over the past year.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/dungeons-dragons-gets-a-bigger-role-at-hasbro-11614254403

Nervousness because Wizards is no longer an independent subsidiary and is now directly tied to Hasbro's management. It means fewer decisions are made by Wizards itself and more will be made by Hasbro's rather aggressive profit projections. It's not a disaster or anything per se, but it's really disappointing to me. I think company's like Wizards produce better product when allowed to make choices internally without exterior interference.

Voss wrote:
A Wizards re-org is long past due. While Magic has been an insanely profitable property for Hasbro, the D&D and other games have been a problem point for years.

New video game projects are particularly way past due. They've been letting money just fly away with their almost obscene disinterest in the market.

I'd propose this change is worse for DnD, not better. Hasbro cares mostly about Magic, which is more profitable than their entire toy business. I find the idea that becoming directly under Hasbro's direction an odd way to improve DnD and Wizards is already on a big slate of multimedia projects including games and TV shows. Hasbro's been pushing more and more into Wizards the past 5-6 years and most of that time seen certain problems become more pronounced.

It's like the reverse situation of EA though. EA is apparently content to give DICE more freedom and let Respawn have more control of Titanfall. I find that promising, especially in the case of Battlefield. I wonder if this will carry over into their other properties and I can't help but wonder if the collapse of studio after studio and property after property has finally gotten EA to wonder if they should shake up their management strategies.

I think you're absolutely wrong. D&D has been utterly mismanaged for over a decade now, and they've given a lot of pink slips to designers since the launch of 4th edition to back that up.

They're effectively a ~6 person garage studio (with some part-time support and a lot of submission) barely cranking out a couple lackluster books a year. Half the books they've done lately are from outsiders (Matt Mercer or Penny Arcade), just give a style treatment and the D&D logo, or are very cursory setting books for Magic planes. With reprinted races and subclasses.

The in-studio books are piles of reprints and a melange of short pieces- races, subclasses, and terrible stand-alone subsystems you shouldn't ever use (they clearly haven't).
Take the Tasha's book: Artificier... again. Bladersinger (and a couple other subclasses)... again [and almost all of them are from their web series where they do back-of-the-napkin versions, publish them and the print a 'slightly revised' version for money.
Patrons... again (20 odd pages of a 200 page book). Rewrites of a bunch of third edition spells and items. 20+ pages of half-arsed puzzles, completely useless because they're in a players option book.

Best of all its got all the earmarks of a late edition book- 'character options' for races and classes, where you sub or simply add features as they try to work out what's popular and what's not so they know how to fix things for next edition. They're clearly throwing crap at the walls to see what sticks. Where at the same point we were with the 'Essentials' books for 4th edition and the Book of Nine Swords/Magic of Blue/etc period for 3.5 (which was a test run for the at will/encounter/daily powers they used in 4th)

I'm not gonna say DnD is perfect. I am gonna say that Hasbro isn't going to fix it. Magic is what they want because magic is where the money is.

 LordofHats wrote:
I'm not gonna say DnD is perfect. I am gonna say that Hasbro isn't going to fix it. Magic is what they want because magic is where the money is.

Well, obviously Magic. That's been clear for years- Magic is a Core property thats one of their top earners. D&D usually doesn't even get mentioned in their annual reports. When it does, 'still exists, not in the red' is basically the summary.

But like with Anthem, its better for someone to free up and resources and _try_ to accomplish something rather than continue to let idiots faff about in a corner, which is what's going on with both Bioware and the D&D subdivision.

As expected, today's Jimquisition sums this wet toot of a project well.

I loved Anthem when it first came out. The actual combat is a lot of fun and the graphics are great, but once I got through the main storyline it got real boring real fast.

 Necros wrote:
I loved Anthem when it first came out. The actual combat is a lot of fun and the graphics are great, but once I got through the main storyline it got real boring real fast.

Yup. Same as me. Loved the flying, combat was pretty cool, and I kinda liked the story. Graphics were good. Showed a lot of potential, and I just felt like all they needed to do was support the game! Write the entire release off as a beta, listen to the player feedback, and then just start patching/fixing everything. Alas, that never happened.

So long Anthem! You will be missed.