ICv2 had a chance to sit down with Wizards of the Coast CEO Greg Leeds last month for a wide-ranging conversation. In Part 1, we talked about WotC’s strategy for retailers, and in Part 2, we talk about getting product ideas from fans, media development of WotC properties, plans for Dungeons & Dragons and board games, and the top upcoming WotC products.

Tell us a little about the digital side of gaming at Wizards of the Coast.
Our philosophy on digital gaming is to make sure that everything we do enhances the analog side of gaming. If you look at what we have done with Duels of the Planeswalkers, we have made sure that anyone who gets into our brand, with Duels of the Planeswalkers, let’s say on X-box, then gets driven back to the stores where they can be a part of the gaming community that’s so important to their experience. For us, digital gaming is never an end in itself, and is never an experience in itself. What makes gaming great is the fact that you can get together with your friends and have that experience that goes well beyond whether you have won or lost on this particular evening.

What can you tell us about the Magic Celebration and how that worked?
Let me step back and say something on the Magic Core Set 2012. Magic Core Set 2012 is a continued evolution of combining our digital and paper experiences. We started doing that last year with our Core Set 2011. This year, with 2012, what we have done is integrate the experiences even more closely. With Duels of the Planewalkers 2012, for example, we spoil cards that will be coming out in the Core Set. So it creates early interest in the digital experience, but the digital experience by its very nature is somewhat limited in terms of the way you can play. You don’t have the endless opportunities for customization that you do with the paper game. So we try to get people excited about Duels of the Planeswalkers, and try to get people interested in the brand. We know that people will naturally go to their local hobby store and purchase Magic and get involved in their community from there.

Celebration ties a bow around the digital and analog experiences and shows how the products can be played together in a way that suits the Magic player at the time they are interested in playing.

There has been a two-year trend of trying to bring Magic Organized Play more into the stores instead of external venues; the most recent example would be moving the National Qualifiers. Tell us about the reason behind that strategy and what the player response has been.
For the past few years we have been focusing on making sure that the hobby gaming retail industry is as financially healthy as it possibly can be, because we know that the Magic community is generated in stores. It’s generated by people who are passionate about games, who can share their knowledge about games and share that habit of getting together on a regular basis and playing games. The decisions we have made, including our most recent decisions on the Pro Tour Qualifiers have to do with getting people into stores where they can spend their money and help the retailer, so the retailers can invest back in creating the community.

We’ve done this over a number of years, with a number of different decisions. On Internet policy for example, where you have to have a brick and mortar store to be able to be an authorized Internet retailer for our business. We have done it through some of the regional events. We have set up our WPN: the Wizard Play Network, such that the stores will run the events.

We often in our own offices say that the events are now “in store,” but honestly that’s not the critical factor for us. We have many store owners that run huge events outside their stores because at certain times it’s just impractical to have the play space. For us it’s more about making sure that the people who build the Magic and D&D community have the greatest financial resources to continue doing that. Whether they run the events in store or out of store doesn’t matter to us.

Having said all that, we do have Grand Prix events (which by the way we are having more and more of and are very important to our success), often run by store owners, but sometimes by the old fashioned Professional Tournament Organizers. So it’s not like we completely eliminated the relationship with those people that run events. But we are continually trying to make sure that stores get the greatest reward for the investment they put into the community.

What are the results of that multi-year strategy?
Over-all our business is up significantly. I think anyone you talk to about what’s going on with Magic and D&D will tell you that we are having very, very strong sales. We are having very strong sales in digital, and we’re having strong sales in mass market, but our strongest sales are in the hobby shops. So that’s working. The best evidence of this is if you just talk to retailers about the last couple of years, the number of players that have been playing Magic and D&D, with a program like D&D Encounters, which is just completing its second season, the numbers are not falling off at all in terms of participation. When you come to a place like Gen Con you can see that there are so many people interested in getting together and finding like-minded D&D players. They love getting together. Now it’s happening in stores every Wednesday night on a regular basis. We are continuing to invest in great D&D content--the kind of content that gets someone not only to play D&D but also to go on Wednesday night to their local store and play with their friends.

So, has the number of locations running events grown?
(Wizards of the Coast Vice President of Sales Scott Knoblich jumped in here.) Locations have grown a lot, but events in stores have doubled what location growth has been, and likewise participants (those are the people actually playing in events) have quantifiably grown double what our location growth has been.

(Leeds)The most important part for us in making stores successful is working with the stores to do what they do best, which is create great player experiences. What we’ve seen, and from your own publication, just think about how the retailers talk about their stores and how professional they are and how disciplined they are. It’s been a long, long-term trend; this isn’t something where a corner has just been turned. Over time stores have recognized that to compete in the leisure and entertainment industry they have to up their game and put on an experience that is not like the stereotypical hobby game store experience of the past. It’s something that would rival anything else a customer could do on a Wednesday night or Friday night. And stores are stepping up and doing this in ways you wouldn’t believe.

There’s a store in Seattle, Card Kingdom, that has for me probably the best experience for a gamer that I’ve seen: the rooms, the decorations... They don’t have snacks; they have a full functioning restaurant and bar which is super busy at night. They have a singles card operation for Magic like you have never seen in your life. They have D&D; they have miniature painting; they have the whole program. It’s a massive store. And what’s happened is... it’s working. Obviously it requires a massive amount of investment for the retrofit and the lease, but at the same time they are getting their payback. And there are other stores around the country and around the world that are doing the exact same thing: they are taking the money they are making in Magic, and reinvesting it back into the store to improve the player experience. If they improve the player experience it’s easier to attract more customers and customers who weren’t previously gamers and might have in the past, been turned off by that stereotypical gaming experience. Now they are opting to play a Friday night draft instead of going to a movie. It’s working for the stores.

You did something new this year: using what fans are doing in terms of their play and pulling that back into Wizards of the Coast and developing that into the Commander product. Tell us about that process, and is that something you will want to do again?
The lucky thing for us is that our fans are extremely vocal and we get a lot of input. Much of it is really helpful in designing our product. So on the Magic side with Commander--that was an idea that was born from the community. We had our research and development people connect with that community in a variety of different ways, formal and informal, and the result was the launch of Commander, which has been even beyond our high expectations for the product.

I will say that it’s indicative of the way we approach all of our product development across D&D and Magic. We are always in touch with our fans and we make sure we try to respond to what they are looking for in every product that we offer. Of course, we also try to surprise them but we surprise them in a way that’s consistent with what we know they want to see.

Your parent company Hasbro has a robust media development program for television and movies, to the point that they’re making movies about properties we never thought we’d see, like Battleship. Magic has had some great video game development but nothing in other media. Are there any prospects there?
I can’t give you any specific plans on making Magic, D&D or any of our brands into films, but we are very well connected with our Hasbro folks in Los Angeles. Something could happen, but I can’t say at this point. From a television standpoint there is also Hasbro Studios and we are looking into the future from a Wizards of the Coast standpoint to see if there are opportunities for Hasbro Studios to work on some of our properties, but at this stage there is no news on that.

This year there have been some new developments in Dungeons & Dragons, and people are trying to read between the lines. There have been some reductions in staff (a couple of long time people have left the D&D team), and also there has been a cutback in releases at the beginning of the year for D&D. Are you reducing your emphasis on the role-playing game exploitation of the D&D property?
No, we are not reducing the emphasis on the roleplaying game property for D&D. I need to correct you. We have had some long time staff leave, a couple of people, but we haven’t reduced the overall number of people working on D&D. We are constantly adjusting and tweaking our organization. I think that any healthy organization has some amount of movement. With Dungeons & Dragons, because of that direct personal relationship that our staff has with the gaming community, our ultimate customers, when someone changes it’s far more noticeable than it is in many other businesses. But, I can tell you that in my 20 years of management experience I don’t think that I have seen an organization more stable over a period of 15 years than we have had in Wizards of the Coast or D&D. You take the average tenure of our employees working on D&D and it’s extremely high. We will have and have had occasional turnover, but D&D is a healthy, thriving business on the role-playing side and will continue to be.

We are always looking at our releases trying to time them out and making sure we are putting out the optimal amount of content, which is a balance between our hardest core fans that could never get enough, and our newer fans who are trying to get involved in the property but can’t be overwhelmed by having too much information or feel like they can’t keep up. So our programs on D&D are designed to optimize that balance of keeping our most faithful fans happy and be able at the same time to bring in new fans to the property. And that’s how we are working on our release schedule.

I will also say that our release schedule is related to what we were talking about earlier: trying to drive people into the stores to play D&D and of course while they are there, purchase some D&D products. That’s the optimal balance we are trying to hit with our program.

Another area of D&D that’s been successful recently is the board games based on the D&D universe. Tell us about that program and where you see it going.
Yes, the board game side of our business has been very successful, but we want to be careful that we don’t over saturate the market with the D&D board games, so we are constantly on the lookout for (just as we side on the RPG side) what is the optimal balance of the number of releases. We have been very satisfied with the releases we have had and we will continue to have board games releases in the future but we will do it in a measured way and not try to overstep success and keep the market excited and interested for all the next products.

In terms of being sensitive to what the fans are saying, there are rumors that you are looking at some of your old products even all the way back to 1st edition D&D. Are you looking at bringing back any of those products in a collector format or on any other basis?
We are always on the lookout for what opportunities can come up based on what our fans are interested in from the past. I think the “red box” launch was a good example of trying to take advantage of interest in a retro product. We will always be looking for that, but at this point we have nothing to announce along those lines.

I wanted to ask about the Book of Vile Darkness, tied to the Syfy project in development. That’s the only mature readers product in the D&D line. Can you talk about the place of this kind of product in the overall D&D line and do you see more mature product as an opportunity?
The 4E Book of Vile Darkness will not be labeled a ‘mature content’ book, but it does allow for dungeon masters to broaden their campaigns to include darker subject matter as desired by many players. The beauty of D&D is that every group is free to invent, imagine and explore their own adventures and stories according to the interests of the party. We try to provide a variety of materials that cater to a reasonably wide variety of interests.

Anything new going on at Avalon Hill?
We will be investing in new Avalon Hill titles over a period of time. But once again, from a board game standpoint, like the D&D response I gave you, we’ll do it in a measured way.

Did the consolidation of Hasbro’s game operations in Massachusetts and Rhode Island have any effect on Wizards of the Coast?
No. The Wizards business will continue to operate as an independent wholly owned subsidiary of Hasbro, so the consolidation of the gaming business of Hasbro from Massachusetts to Rhode Island won’t have any direct impact on our business. However, we have always had a very close relationship with Hasbro to find ways to take advantage of opportunities where they can help us or we can help them, and in the new gaming situation in Rhode Island that will continue to happen.

Tell us a little bit about the products you are most excited about over the next six months to a year.
It’s difficult to choose which new launch we are most excited about. In terms of the most exciting launch for Magic, we have Innistrad. This takes Magic to a whole new level from a mechanics standpoint and from a property and story-telling standpoint. It’s just outstandingly fun and appealing. The artwork is great; the graphics are fantastic. So it’s got that combination of hard-core game appeal with beautiful dramatic storytelling. Innistrad is something that honestly I can’t wait for. I sit in meetings where they show artwork, and I’m mesmerized. We bought a brand new high end projector just so we at our own office can look at this artwork and enjoy it as much as our fans do.

On the D&D side it would be Neverwinter. We are standing here in the middle of the Wizards booth which is dedicated to the Neverwinter launch. It’s a multi-layered cake of offerings for the D&D customer. We know they are going to be excited this fall.

Those are the two biggest things I’m excited about.

No, we are not reducing the emphasis on the roleplaying game property for D&D. [...] We are always looking at our releases trying to time them out and making sure we are putting out the optimal amount of content, which is a balance between our hardest core fans that could never get enough, and our newer fans who are trying to get involved in the property but can’t be overwhelmed by having too much information or feel like they can’t keep up.

Manchu wrote:Does someone want to try explaining this?

Manchu wrote:

No, we are not reducing the emphasis on the roleplaying game property for D&D. [...] We are always looking at our releases trying to time them out and making sure we are putting out the optimal amount of content, which is a balance between our hardest core fans that could never get enough, and our newer fans who are trying to get involved in the property but can’t be overwhelmed by having too much information or feel like they can’t keep up.

Does someone want to try explaining this?

Manchu wrote:

No, we are not reducing the emphasis on the roleplaying game property for D&D. [...] We are always looking at our releases trying to time them out and making sure we are putting out the optimal amount of content, which is a balance between our hardest core fans that could never get enough, and our newer fans who are trying to get involved in the property but can’t be overwhelmed by having too much information or feel like they can’t keep up.

Does someone want to try explaining this?

Da Boss wrote:I'd imagine that sort of strategy shift could lead to a temporary stalling in releases.

Balance wrote:Might be intended as a look back at how previous editions... definitely 2nd and 3rd... got to a point where the product line was very difficult to explain. Tons of core rule,s rules add-ons, setting-specific and optional books, etc. And for 3.0, the third party books.

Balance wrote: In D&D terms, finding the racial template/class/kit/prestige/paragon path/feat so they can be a half elf, half dragon vampire with a coke habit and Charlie Sheen as their diety.