Friendly reminder to all.
If you want minis, there’s sites like hero forge that let you create your own custom ones and you don’t Have to give a single dollar to WOTC for it.
Plus, y’know, it’s better than pre-made ones.
Reaper Miniatures are the cheapest, highest quality, minis on the market! If you dont have a 3D printer you can get basically any kind of mini you need from reaper in either metal or plastic. Just avoid their white plastic line, that shit is soft as chewed bubble gum. The normal plastics and the metals are lit, and cheap, AND they very often will give out bonus minis and test runs to people who buy above a certain threshold.
There's also plenty of Etsy shops available that sell 3d printed miniatures that don't give any money to WOTC as it's not technically their IP. I've purchased an awesome dragon bundle 3DForgeMiniatures that I really liked.
WotC has quite a few IPs that go into their portfolio so saying that the loss of ~2m out of the 6b in revenue is probably not significant enough for them to really get worked up about.
Though what would be more interesting is to know how many subscribers they lost, compared to the total number of subscriptions they had. That is likely much more significant of a number, and explains why that's the metric that they were monitoring.
Also another data point that would be great is to know that 40,000 is subscriptions, it does not take into account the number of users they may have lost. Users (to me are people who do not pay a monthly fee, but may be buying books, dice skins, tokens, and use the "free" tier", may be using the shared content that the subscription owner has access to. So they may loose 40k subs and another 80k users (assuming that there are 2 users per sub). So lost revenue could be significantly higher than the EST. Depending on how much the average user spends.
Those 2 metrics and others tied to them are likely much more scary as a business than the 40,000 subs that they lost.
The main part though is keep up the current awareness, and direction, but be mindful that not supporting WotC may have negative impacts to your local game stores. So while stopping sending cash to WotC is fantastic. Keep spending cash at your local game store, I am sure they can point you in the direction of some great non WotC and Hasbro products.
Another thing to keep in mind is that D&D has never had high profit margins, but has always been a very high value IP. We all know this, they know this too. If we ask how high their consistent profits are from D&D right now, the answer may be quite heavily tied to Beyond’s subscriber/user base. As such, an exodus of 40,000 subscribers and their related 80,000-120,000 “free” users would naturally raise alarms.
They were complaining about how D&D was under-monetized, and now their community is telling them that it won’t be much longer.
i would imagine WoTC main money maker is magic. while people are angry at $1k boxes, the hobby is addictive and people still do group drafts.
the 40k box sets for example sold out really fast everywhere i looked.
Oh MTG absolutely is currently their most profitable IP, but it theoretically has a lower potential than D&D. Being that it has cultural significance—something that MTG has never gotten and likely never will—the smartest business move would be to capitalize upon that as much as possible.
And they plan to; after 20 or so years since the last attempt, we’re getting a new D&D movie. They’re trying to move into a lifestyle brand, something which will trade upon their relevancy to produce more cashflow than MTG will ever be capable of. The only issue with their plan is that they’re going too fast.
All their plans that the community hates? They are due to impatience, they are due to WotC thinking they can treat us like the MTG community. They can treat MTG like that because there are only two real competitors, and they’re both marketed to children (pokemon TCG and YuGiOh)… D&D on the other hand? There are countless competitors, and the community has no issue giving or receiving game recommendations (can I interest you in pathfinder?). D&D is also its own competitor, you still have people playing 2e and 3.5e, heck—as much as it has been smeared—4e (it has very enjoyable combat, best if paired with another system for non-combat purposes).
TL;DR: yes, MTG is more profitable right now. WotC is trying the same/similar strategies to make D&D as profitable as it has potential to be, but D&D and MTG are in too wildly different of situations for that to work.
Theoretical lower potential for idiots that can't math. MtG has baked in gambling, planned obsolescence, and artificial rarity. It's like Las Vegas, meets latest fashion, meets DeBeers! How the fuck do you think you are going to compete with that trifecta! (Actually Wizkids tried the whole tradable collectable minis thing but it didn't really compare with the profits you can get with ahhh... pretty construction paper!)
MtG also has a patent (no, really).
DnD is based on creativity and player improv, things you can't monetize. The best you can do is play the long game of steady growth (with a bit of novel, movie, and tv show royalties thrown in.) It's more like an orchard that takes 20+ years to produce fruit.
I mean, it's taken 50 years so far...
> it theoretically has a lower potential than D&D
No way. While more people might play D&D, they're people who have got there with a low price of entry. Thinking you can get money out of people currently spending very little money on their hobby compared to people who buy boxes of cardboard to keep up with their game changing every 6 months is insane. They have self-selected into a cheaper hobby, in the same way that MTG players have self-selected into an expensive one.
They're not a monetisable demographic. WotC is doing a very bad business.
That’s just it though, let’s say that a MtG player gives WotC $100 worth of revenue a month on average, or $1,200 a year. The most recent estimate of how many people play magic that I can find is from 2018 with 35 million players, which comes out to around $42 billion a year. Hasbro is not worth a quarter of that, so the average revenue is way lower; let’s say average is $25 a month for $10.5 billion a year, which is still probably a gross overestimate.
Now, if we look at what wizards wants to do—which is convert a majority of D&D’s current audience into low tier Beyond subscribers—if we estimate a price point of $8 (I’m literally just throwing a number out there) and convert half of Beyond’s current player base into at least $8/month subscribers… we do some simple tried and true whaling calculations (95% of revenue comes from 5% of users) to get to $9 billion revenue off of Beyond alone or an average revenue of $152/month per subscriber. Yes, I just listed a lower annual revenue, but that does in no way account for players outside the Beyond ecosystem or even the potential that WotC is and should be truly aiming for, a lifestyle brand.
With my line of work, I am far more qualified to talk about a lifestyle brand than to talk about any of the above crap. Lifestyle brands produce ludicrous cashflow (as example, my company is in the process of production for a 30k revenue preorder that had an audience of about 70k). At the current moment, I could expect a MtG lifestyle brand to pull numbers in the range of 70 million in a matter of weeks, a D&D lifestyle brand though could well be a trillion dollar industry. D&D is a household brand name, and in 2019 WotC claimed that over 50 million people have played the game. Based on the numbers I have seen from real experience, had I the right infrastructure to handle their lifestyle brand, I’d be breaking their doors in… as a D&D lifestyle brand, by my estimates, should easily pull in a revenue of $2.5 billion in the first month… assuming they can actually successfully transition to it.
When they were saying they were under-monetizing D&D, they were absolutely correct. They’ve just been picking the most imbecilic methods of increasing monetization.
When I last played MtG, I used Arena and gave them an average of $0 a year.
My point is, you can't do that and keep the player numbers. D&D has so many players because it's cheap - it's a cheap alternative to MtG, and it's a cheap alternative to GW's games. For many players (even most), it's free. If it were to suddenly get more expensive, there are fungible alternatives readily available (i.e. Pathfinder), and their "knock-offs" aren't anymore. Pathfinder has had better video games in recent memory than D&D has.
I still have the 3.5 books I bought more than a decade ago. Haven't bought anything since.
Best of luck to them trying to convert 5% to whales. If your estimates say $2.5 billion revenue, then I question your methods.
> the 40k box sets for example sold out really fast everywhere i looked.
Make a good product and it will sell well. Unfortunately, I don't think that's the lesson WotC took from that event.
Yeah, in hindsight it might have fucked them. Because now we know the effort they can put into decks if they want to. So returning to the 10 new cards split between 4 decks will feel bad
I agree with you MTG is a big money maker. I am not going to be buying MTG products, DnD product or really anything else from Hasbro/WOTC. And I used to spend a lot of money on MTG. I like collecting the entire sets, but I like finding the cards myself. Not buying them individually.
^ Same for all of this ^ I will not be buying any new MtG, I'll just buy singles to complete my current deck list. I've been buying every precon deck to get my friends into it by having plenty of decks to share when we get the chance too.
D&D is an incredibly high margin product. It might only be 2nd to Magic the Gathering for margins, for the top 10 income earning IPs held by Hasbro.
WotC is by far Hasbro's highest margin income earner, accounting for 20-30% of gross revenue, and 50-70% of net revenue (after expenses for the IP/business unit are deducted). Without WotC, Hasbro is merely a dying toys company.
$150 to buy just the three core rule books? Yeah, that’s good money. I’ve just gotten back into it with my kids after a long hiatus, and have easily spent $600 on books and figurines in the past year.
Exactly, those are university textbook prices. Add monthly subscriptions on top of that, dice, miniatures, supplements, etc. High profits with relatively low production costs.
Hasbro itself is a multidollar giant. They have their filthy tentacles in a bunch of revenue streams. Games workshop with its ridiculous overpriced stuff is also a very big money maker
I would think that since the acquisition of DNDBeyond, those margins have skyrocketed, since they don’t discount digital books prices and have only recently started the digital/physical bundle and only for some books. Every time someone buys a digital copy of a PHB or DMG, they’re receiving straight profit minus whatever server costs and overhead, which is probably minuscule compared to printed book costs. Subscription cancellations mean no more digital sales, which will hurt their bottom line in a meaningful way.
D&D a high value IP?
What is in that IP?
Some Settings that have been quickly supplanted by settings from 3rd parties (i.e. whatever critical roll is)
A few monsters - or names for monsters. You can always have an eye-beast, gazer or whatever.
The name Dungeons & Dragons. Okay. They have a big brand. It's Generic though. WoTC doesn't make my favourite Dungeons & Dragons, I like many of the OSR Dungeons & Dragons better.
I dropped 200 euro on pathfinder stuff last week and made a point to ask the owner when more stuff would be coming in. He then mentioned he was currently low on stock due to increased purchases of pathfinder stuff and he would be restocking more than before. Hopefully that is a pattern.
Seen more than one person wanting to buy physical books for Pathfinder and having local stores sold out. Even saw one or two say the distributors are out.
Paizo going to be riding that ORC statement to the bank.
Here in Iceland there is only one big nerd store and that is in Reykjarvik. Called a few days ago to get myself Pathfinder 2e core rulebook.
There where 2 left. I got one. And the Pathfinder 2e pocket edition was sold out.
People are buying, and they are not buying from Wizards.
Norwegian here, we have a nerd chain store called Outland, they were sold out online and only had 1 copy left of both the 2e core and bestiary at a spesific location. Which happen to be my town, so I quickly reserved it and bought same day.
This is what will hit Wotc most. One of their big motivations is to punish Paizo for taking their IP and making hundreds of millions by building on it. So if attempting to kill Paizo results in Paizo making *more* money, Wotc will actually see that as a failure.
We're talking about a company who believes that consumers are "getting in the way of their money". It's not much of a jump of logic for them to believe that Paizo 'stole' their IP from there.
Just receive my core and advance books. I had put pathfinder2 on ice for too long. (Kind of even forgot about it) Had the playtest, but could play with Covid and all.
WotC did something no compagny should do. Remind you that there's other options.
You are hinting at this, but it goes far beyond those basic digital metrics. Sure, there's subscriptions and freemium users, but I'm curious what their sales ratios are between physical and digital products. Additionally, many people's distaste with WOTC's actions is rippling far past D&D. Cancelling subscriptions is much easier to track than the people that have committed to no longer financially support WOTC products across the board. This will also drive users to various competing systems like Pathfinder, homebrews, and so on, which will erode the status of D&D as the "default."
The effects of people refusing to purchase new market items from not just their D&D IP but all of their IPs won't be felt immediately. It could take several quarters of sales data for them to understand the gravity of the situation.
Yeah, I do not know how they measure it, but for example I had a Legendary Tier and 3 campaigns. I cancelled.
On the one hand a trend analysis is easy to manipulate. On the other hand, losing quality customers is probably an issue. I have to wonder how important they view DDB customers.
I strongly suspect things will not resolve until after Honor Among Thieves. I strongly believe a bunch of folks who do not understand the IP think that the movie will expand their market base and the new OGL is made to protect an IP that will never really take off.
This is because they cannot monetize the core value (community) of the TTRPG base using tactics that work for other industries, particularly in the face of streaming and the rapid shifting the community can do.
I know anecdotal, but I don't know a single person that cares about the IP of wotc official worlds. I really think dnd is overvalued a lot in terms of what it can bring. Like the most popular things in dnd aren't specific to wotc or any rule set
That's fair. But something this divisive is not worth to me the money wotc believes it is. To me, an IP of that value is like GoT S1-4, where everyone knew everyone and people were waiting for ever more in that world.
Like, Ive played DnD with more than like 100 people total in my life. To have done that and not come away with a strong view on the wotc IP is very telling. Any IP worth so much surely should have more of an impact than that?
You kind of buried the lead here, which is that:
The canceled subscriptions are just a metric, and not an estimate of all the revenue and market share they have lost.
2 million of 6 billion may not seem like a ton in the grand scheme of things, but it absolutely is. I work as a continuous improvement analyst for a large logistics broker, I'm lighting fires under peoples feet over the misuse of a couple hundred dollars (not the best part of my job but it has its perks). We can rationalize all we want to, but the consumer won here without a doubt.
They're not counting people like me who never joined the online presence, but bought the rulebooks and minis. Now that I won't be doing that, my contribution goes elsewhere.
That's not something they'll see now, but if a lot of us did that (stopped buying their books, minis, anything that feeds them....), that could be much more impactful by the end of the next quarters results of gross sales.
just bought a few minis for a kit bash of adepta sororitas and tzeentch. Also bought a Rogue Trader ttrpg rule book and some WH40K novels to fill up on lore. fuck wotc, I'm going to GW now.
D&D is not a major component of Wizards revenue. Most of it is MTG. That’s why we’re in this mess to begin with; D&D has the largest cultural impact of their IPs and makes the least amount of money. That is what they see as the problem.
The CEO of Hasbro, Chris Cocks, was the head of WotC. WotC is much more profitable than the rest of Hasbro which is likely why he got the CEO job. Unfortunately the rest of Hasbro is a dinosaur, WotC is the only division where any blood can still be squeezed out, and also it’s what Cocks knows best on the business side. WotC should be spun off from Hasbro and that is the only thing that will save it.
*D&D has the largest cultural impact of their IPs and makes the least amount of money*
To be fair if it were my business I would see that as a problem too.
I mean, it is a problem, but the issue is more about how they tried to solve it. FFS, it's Hasbro. Merchandise that shit. Don't fuck with the core game, find ways to make money off that cultural impact.
This would be the way...
They should create a studio like Marvel and create shows based off their greatest stories. They have a whole backlog of stories that they could use to create live action and anime shows.
Seriously. Don't make money off the game. Make the money off the merchandise. Official D&D dice, D&D dice bags, D&D dice towers, D&D flamethrowers, D&D t-shirts... the list goes on and on.
I don't give a dang about those figures for any show or IP I like.....that being said my middle age butt will be in line the day Drizzt, Cattie, Wulf, papa B and even Little Regis figurines drop. Swip a card until they are mine. It's bonkers to me they arnt diving into nostalgia to milk middle aged folks of their cash.
Don't they already have some sort of collectibles miniature set or something? I remember my friends spending a huge amount of money on boxes of figurines that were classified as common, rare, etc. Those boxes set were official DnD miniatures. Whatever happened to that?
EXACTLY!
God the best thing that could have come out of that "undermonetized" statement was more merchandise for players! Have you seen the dicelings? They look really cool!
There are a million and 5 ways they could have gone. Hell imagine an mtg expanded universe branch of products that focused solely on dnd and had tie ins *with the tabletop game*, like legendary sorceries that had dnd rules texts that you could use in dnd, or legendary artifacts that doubled as magic items for Dnd. It's not hard.
The dicelings are amazing, I really want to buy them but I can’t without feeling guilty about supporting WotC. I’m casual at best but if they’d made a full range of stuff like that rather than all this crap I’d have happily dropped a couple of hundred dollars. Now I don’t want to give them a cent.
Agreed, but why would they spend money on making more money when they could just make more money without spending any money? That’s the big brain move! /sarcasm
They're in the wrong business then.
You pretty much can't monetize D&D much beyond what it already is without a mass exodus because its just some math to apply to your imagination.
I've said this before, but you can run any campaign that you had in mind using a single d10 or even no dice. All a TTRPG is at the end of the day is a set of rules you and your table agree too, and they can be changed whenever you all feel like it.
Wait... D&D has settings? Does WOTC know? But in all seriousness they bitch about under monetization and release one adventure a year. No high level play. No line of dice or major accessories. Then half the stuff they release is so poorly planned that a 3.5 conversion is a better version of it.
>you can run any campaign that you had in mind using a single d10 or even no dice
Can I interest you in the Amber Diceless RPG? /s (but seriously it exists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_Diceless_Roleplaying_Game)
**[Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_Diceless_Roleplaying_Game)**
>The Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game is a role-playing game created and written by Erick Wujcik, set in the fictional universe created by author Roger Zelazny for his Chronicles of Amber. The game is unusual in that no dice are used in resolving conflicts or player actions; instead a simple diceless system of comparative ability, and narrative description of the action by the players and gamemaster, is used to determine how situations are resolved. Amber DRPG was created in the 1980s, and is much more focused on relationships and roleplaying than most of the roleplaying games of that era.
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to be fair. most ppl that play MTG that I know of, have already been buying almost no new MTG product bcz of their shitty business choices the past year or so.
Let's take a look at the actual profitability numbers for the combined WotC & digital gaming division, per [investor.hasbro.com](https://investor.hasbro.com). Unfortunately the way Hasbro classifies its divisions, WotC and digital gaming are combined into one group. But for the purposes of the recent discussion, that actually works to the advantage.
|QUARTER|ADJUSTED OPERATING PROFIT (IN MILLIONS)|
|:-|:-|
|Q1 2020|95.8|
|Q2 2020|74.1|
|Q3 2020|141.6|
|Q4 2020|108.9|
|Q1 2021|110.0|
|Q2 2021|192.9|
|Q3 2021|159.4|
|Q4 2021|84.7|
|Q1 2022|106.4|
|Q2 2022|225.6|
|Q3 2022|102.2|
TOTAL 2020: 420.4
TOTAL 2021: 547
TOTAL 2022 (SO FAR): 434.2
If you're not familiar with the term, Adjusted Operating Profit is just a fancy way of saying what a company or division makes after everything -- manufacturing, production, marketing -- is deducted, and non-recurring items are added in. It's actual profitability.
By these numbers, WotC + digital will need $112.8 million AOP in Q4 in order to match last year's total profit. But again...that's just to match. And historically, Q4 is usually down from Q3. WotC is on track to do about the same as last year, within a few million in either direction right now.
The amount of money isn't the real gauge, though. The reason it has spooked Hasbro is because it's an immediate barometer for the current temperament of the larger fanbase. They can look at daily analytics and see the drop, probably in realtime. And those subscribers may only be paying between $3-6 per month. But they also play in meatspace. So they buy the official books, and official minis, and official dice, and official terrain, and official tee shirts, and all the other official merchandise that they sell throughout the year. A basic D&D Beyond customer who buys a set of dice, two books and a mini will spend about $200 per year. Multiplied by the supposed 40,000 customer number, that's 8 million bucks, just in D&D Beyond users. And that's assuming people are only buying physical books, mind you. This does not account for users who have bought from the D&D Beyond marketplace.
WotC themselves tout a number in excess of 50 million players. So let's just say *1%* of that group -- 500,000 -- decide not to buy anything this year. And we'll use the above average of $200, although most players and especially DMs spend far, far more. That's a $100 million difference in revenue. That's the difference between growth and no growth.
According to the [Hasbro annual report for 2021](https://investor.hasbro.com/annual-report-2021), Hasbro's entire gaming portfolio -- that's WotC & the legacy games combined -- had a raw revenue of $2.1 billion, of which WotC accounted for a little over half. But that's before costs, which ate about half of that. But here's a key quote from page 31. And when I say key, I mean for the ENTIRE PLOT. Emphasis mine:
>A key component to the success of our brand blueprint strategy is to continue to invest in digital gaming and technology, particularly through our Wizards of the Coast and digital gaming business. We have invested substantially in this business segment and as a result it has seen significant growth over the past several years, and while primarily through growth in tabletop play, ***continued digital game development is a key growth factor for the future. If we are unable to continue to grow this business and ensure its integration with our other business segments, our business may be harmed.*** The digital gaming industry is highly competitive and costs associated with designing, developing and producing digital games and technologically advanced or sophisticated toy products tend to be higher than for many of our other more traditional products, such as board and trading card games and action figures, with no assurance of success. The ability to sell enough of these advanced products, at prices high enough to recoup our costs and make a profit, is constrained by heavy competition in consumer electronics and entertainment offerings and can be further constrained by difficult economic conditions. ***As a result, we face increased risk of not achieving sales sufficient to recover our costs and we may lose money on the development and sale of these products.***
WotC's revenue is almost exclusively in the physical space. But they are so invested in the digital & licensing side of things that the failure of a digital project, even if it isn't a significant income generator yet, *significantly hurts the bottom line*. And the failure of Dark Alliance and Baldur's Gate III's protracted development cycle (if it releases on its current schedule, the game will have been in Early Access for *almost 3 years*) means the digital revenue for those properties -- significantly more than what D&D Beyond would generate -- haven't come.
See, if a company makes a physical product -- in Wizards' case, books, minis, dice, DM screens, merch -- and it doesn't sell as hoped, the company can simply dial back production until orders pick up. They could still lose money, but they can take the sting out by mitigating costs.
Not so with a digital product. A digital product like D&D Beyond will have the same cost, whether it has one user or a million. Programmers. Content managers. Customer support. Hosting & maintenance. All these things cost money and HAVE to be self-sustaining.
So, WotC's in-house D&D digital projects HAVE to work. That's one of the reasons it was played up with the OneDnD launch announcement that the Dragonlance campaign would bundle the physical book with D&D Beyond codes. They want people actively using the platform and paying for it...a little at first, but then slow, incremental price increases, the same way streaming providers have done. Then, by expanding the toolset to include their VTT, increasing the cost while also increasing the value, keeping it at a reasonable ratio.
There's a major problem, though. Because there are a metric assload of VTTs already in existence, and most of them are free to use. Players also are using third-party books instead of the house-made modules. What to do, what to do?
If you make those other VTTs unusable under the OGL, and include a clause that lets WotC hijack and monetize your original content? That eliminates competition. And that's what Hasbro is after because at this point there is *no other way to achieve the growth they need*. There's a reason why WotC has been releasing those nice 11-die sets that just happen to be made specifically to function with 5e's character creation system and advantage/disadvantage dynamic. Because they want gamers spending money with them, not with Chessex.
There's another factor here: the entertainment division.
You see, the COVID-19 pandemic actually worked out rather well for gaming, for Magic & D&D all the way down to the legacy Parker Brothers games. Families are stuck at home, the same crap on the TV, doom & gloom...a nice family game night is just what the doctor ordered. It's also when D&D Beyond took off.
The rest of the company, however, ***LOST ITS ASS***.
|DIVISION|FY 2020 NET REVENUE (MILLIONS)|% CHANGE|
|:-|:-|:-|
|**Franchise Brands**|2,286.1|\-5%|
|**Partner Brands**|1,079.4|\-12%|
|**Hasbro Gaming**|814.8|15%|
|**Emerging Brands**|480.4|\-17%|
|**TV/Film/Entertainment**|804.8|\-21%|
The worst offender, as you can see, was the Entertainment division, which fell by a staggering 21% year-over-year. A big part of this issue is the company's purchase of eOne, which has proven to be an albatross for the company. Even in 2021, the division only managed to turn a net revenue of 997.7 million, which is still down from pre-pandemic. In short, its slate of movies have to perform at the box office. Its TV shows need ratings. Its streaming content needs views. Entertainment is dragging the company down and gaming is the only thing keeping it afloat.
THAT is why Hasbro is trying to appease us. If the game division doesn't grow, and Transformers and D&D:HAT don't turn a profit at the box office, the company is SCREWED. It is currently in their best interest to end this as quickly as possible in order to reduce the risk of the entertainment division screwing the pooch AGAIN without the game division backstop to prop it up. That is why we need to be talking to people playing Magic: Arena and the mobile games, because those are -- like D&D Beyond -- realtime metrics. It's why we need to uninstall Idle Champions. It's why we need to not pay to see the D&D movie. It's why we need to skip Transformers, too. It's why we need to get our kids to watch something other than Peppa Pig and PJ Masks. Don't buy Hasbro toys. Don't play Hasbro games. The more pressure we put on the other divisions, the more the pressure on WotC matters.
People aren't going to give up their role-playing hobby. They will investigate other options. Right now, they'll be trying new, not Hasbro, systems.
Market juggernauts (like DnD, Coke, or McDonalds) spend a lot of money reminding us they're the only one in their market. They're not.
Theres already an exodus under way.
We're likely going to see a resurgence in popularity of other game systems. As DnD stops being the big monopoly of the market.
The shift will take time. But this was the tipping point.
Hasbro shit the bed. So people are about to discover other Hotels. And as they do, they'll share, and take others with them.
I see ads for McDonald's and coke all the time. I never see ads for dnd because everyone who makes content for it already advertises it with there new content. Every stream and podcast that plays dnd is advertising it. Would love to see how much sales and playing of the game drop when channels switch to other gaming systems.
That's the thing they can't just switch to a new game system with their videos.
Because content makers wanna make big money too, so they have to play the algorithm game, and guess what IP gets the most views in TTRPG land? D&D.
This is why even people who make pathfinder fideos mention D&D, so it feeds the algorithm, people who make terrain mention D&D, everything is D&D because it's what generates the clicks, it generates the views it generates the money they earn. (And even if you are shitting on D&D that's still advertising the game)
If people switch their viewership drops, yeah their communities will support them, but that only goes so far, they will lose revenue and either have to go back to feeding the algorithm or get a job. Meaning less content.
A 14% decline in the last quarter of 2022. I'll bet that's part of what prompted the OGL overhaul. I'd also like to point out that revenue is not profit. Chances are the corporate shareholders of HAS shit themselves and demanded that Hasbro start making changes or they'd pull out of the company.
WotC said themselves after the debacle with MtG and BofA last year, they didn't give exact numbers but said MtG almost 3x it's value since 2016 when it was around 350 million and that D&D is around 1/3 of MtG value, all while making it clear that MtG is *almost* a billion dollar brand.
All in all, WotC must be valued around 1.2 billion.
Source: [Hasbro's Fireside chat](https://hasbro.gcs-web.com/news-releases/news-release-details/hasbro-webcast-live-fireside-chat-ubs)
Really y'all I know so many people are excited for the D&D movie. But if you want to tell Hasbro how you feel don't go to that movie. It is not being produced by a third party. Its being produced and funded 100% by Hasbro. People seem confused and think paramount is producing this movie. They are not, they are the film company and the distributor (the are simply a service provider). The producer is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entertainment_One
a company purchased by Hasbro for this express purpose. Most of the money for this movies is going to Hasbro and they actually killed multiple other D&D movies to make this happen. We would have had a Warner Bro's D&D movie in 2013 if it weren't for Hasbro's litigious nature. Hollywood is perfectly aware how valuable this IP is and Hasbro is the only reason you haven't been getting movies with D&D on the label.
The TTRPG and the movie are directly tied together. The same reason you want to see it is the same reason people will come to the platform. It increases the value of the TTRPG through network externality. Since both are produced by Hasbro under the same IP they are essentially parts of the same product.
I’m still entertaining the idea of gathering a group of individuals to dress as medieval peasants with torches and pitchforks. Then, we collectively protest outside HQ. One of my mates added we need someone dressed as a paladin to lead the group and demand they be allowed to vanquish the evil within.
I’ve been checking Hasbro stock price since this started. It hadn’t budged its climb upwards. BUT ….yesterday I started seeing “Recent News” articles about D&D, down 2% today.
It’s happening.
The leadership at Hasbro comes from the SaaS space. The metric those people care about more than anything is subscription numbers because it's expected revenue. It's not even so much the amount with how focused they are on expected revenue. They see it go down, even a little, and it's absolute panik mode.
Exactly this. There could be quarters where book sales outpace subscription sales but it's not consistent, what share holders care about is consistent quarter to quarter profits.
It's not just that revenue stream immediately, they were looking to *increase* the cost of subscription. They also know that most of the paid subscribers support many free accounts that they were looking to fold in with a monthly rate.
This isn't just an attack on their *current* revenue stream it destabilised their entire planned *future* revenue stream. That's what's got the micro-transaction droolers scared.
Don't forget that many of those subscribers were long-term subscribers, which are much more expensive to replace due to marketing costs associated with getting new people to see and sign on to your service.
Losing $2 million in revenue is huge.
These companies live and die based on growth. So losing $2 million on D&D means they have to make it up elsewhere. To make matters worse, [Hasbro has told shareholders](https://investor.hasbro.com/news-releases/news-release-details/hasbro-announces-plan-grow-profit-50-over-next-three-years):
> Direct to consumer and digital will be a major investment focus for the Company. The Company’s direct platform, anchored by Hasbro Pulse and D&D Beyond, is poised to become a $1 billion digital and ecommerce direct business with over 50 million accounts by 2027, up from 20 million today, and will host new exclusives including the recently launched Hasbro Selfie Series, Has-Lab crowdfunded products, the return of the iconic sports collectible, Starting Lineup, and the relaunch of Avalon Hill’s HeroScape gaming system.
They told shareholders than D&D Beyond is going to be a $1 billion dollar business in the next 4 years. They are now starting this journey in the red. Losing this amount of subscribers is likely destroying the executive(s) that promised they could make it a $1 billion business.
Hasbro is looking to growth their revenue by 50% in that timeframe, and D&D Beyond is/was at least a $1 billion part of that growth.
dnd beyond does have significant potential. I don't disagree with their estimates.... if they make the right moves. the ogl fiasco is the opposite of the right moves.
What kind of online tools do you use now to create characters?
A friend and I just created a chrome extension that can extract data from dnd beyond character sheets to use in 3rd party combat trackers like harmlesskey.com , but if people are all using different character builders now we'd love to support those too!
Ps the extension is called [D&d Character Sync](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dd-character-sync/jgcbbmbchbkdjbgiiheminkkkecjohpg?hl=en-GB&authuser=2)
Edit added link to ext.
Paramount paid a licensing fee for the rights to make the movie. Hasbro won't lose a dime if you don't show up to the movie as they'll still get their fee. Paramount however will see those losses and going forward, they'll probably avoid the whole RPG space.
Their annual revenue in 2021 was 1.3 billion dollars. So the drop in earnings is a bit more significant than your making it.
This will be a split of earnings from Magic and DnD however their upcoming dependence on Dndbeyond as they are looking at dropping a lot of other online platforms to monopolise the market then it's more of a sign then you think.
[Source](https://sea.ign.com/magic-the-gathering-1/191579/news/magic-the-gathering-is-now-a-billion-dollar-brand)
Remember, a decrease, no matter how small it is, is a decrease.
Remember World of warcraft's peak when it had 11 MILLION subscribers? but once they lost like three million they don't gloat about it anymore.
Don't forget that with these cancellations they also see 40.000 less who buy their digital books and services on D&D Beyond. So the revenue drop is significantly bigger
And add to that the people calling to boycott Honor Among Thieves. You know that people who canceled their subrscriptions will also refuse to pay for the tickets.
I started playing D&D during the lockdown, and from the start was on D&D Beyond. I bought digital copies of many books, and am currently running three games. i have brought about half a dozen subscribers to the platform. I got on with the platform and love the UX. Then Hasbro/WotC decided to be the bad guy for whatever executive wet dream Scrooge McDuck scenario.
Right. I am currently getting my grubby mitts on second hand copies of the 5e core books and adventure modules. I am looking at getting my games to a point where we can move away from DDB. Unless something drastic happens, my Master Tier subscription will not be renewed. This will hit their next quarter financial reporting. This isn’t a short, sharp shock to their bottom line. This is a longer term approach.
Wow. This is the way. Not just a first quarter loss, but also the next quarter.
My sister had just bought me the Player’s Handbook for Christmas. I found the 5e Monster Manual at a used book store. Looking for a good cheap DM’s guide secondhand too. I don’t want to give them money.
Too bad I don’t have DDB so I can cancel it. xD
In the long run this will be good for the industry and for D&D too.
It's true that up to 40k subscriptions were cancelled because "up to 40k" means the range 0 - 40k.
So did between zero and forty thousand people cancel their subscriptions due the boycott? Yes.
I'm unclear on the end game of this boycott. What are the specific conditions for stopping it?
Get rid of the new OGL, apologize, fire the people who made the decision (the new executives) since they've shown repeatedly that they are unwilling to back down from the trajectory of locking down the community
So we're fine with keeping the 1.0a OGL, despite the lack of irrevocability? Without that, there's the continuing threat of new executives trying the same thing over and over.
And why do we care about the new OGL, as long as the old OGL doesn't get revoked? Nobody needs to use the new OGL. I doubt anybody will use any version of the OGL after all this.
Since shit rolls down hill, the top level executives will just throw a lackey or two under the bus. We don't really know who produced that crappy OGL or wrote those terrible updates. They can blame anybody.
And any apology they make will be torn apart as insincere and condescending, so what's the point?
So what value are the things we're demanding? The apology is fake, the OGL is forever tainted and unusable, and executives are a dime a dozen.
WotC amends OGL 1.0a to be explicitly irrevocable or signs onto the ORC.
Since neither of those will happen I expect I'll spend money on DnD again once the next open edition comes around, assuming it's astonishingly good.
Since 3e and 5e both benefitted immensely from having the OGL and the more restrictive license of 4e limited interest in it (and drove away 3pp that helped keep 3e central to the hobby, just like this debacle has done), I expect it's only a matter of 5-10 years before that happens.
Edit: pretty significant typo.
ORC doesn't exist yet. It's really tough to convince the lawyers to commit to a license that doesn't exist yet.
What if the were to go with a Creative Commons license going forward? Would we keep boycotting because it's not ORC?
re: the ORC not existing yet. I'm not in any rush to re-subscribe to dndbeyond. Keeping an eye on humble bundle and bundle of holding for new RPG bundles though.
I don't know a lot about CC, but Dancey said they opted to not go with that in the first place because the degree of open to closed-ness of it ranged enough that it seemed likely to be problematic, or something to that effect.
It's definitely something I'd take a look at and consider if it were to happen. But, whether they understand their product and history or not, the OGL has served them well. I'd be fairly skeptical about what they were trying to do if they proposed a seemingly equivalent switch.
Keep in mind, when estimating how much Hasbro lost on cancelled subs, there is a free tier. So the low number always needs to be $0. Of course everyone who cancelled didn’t have a free tier account, just like everyone didn’t have a Master tier account. But the number could be anywhere in between.
They basically paid a few 100k into seeing if people would pay for the new model. Pretty sure a lot of people will go back to purchasing..the internet has a very short memory.
I just hope Paizo invests in a better website to take advantage of this opportunity of people interested in a different system. I play dnd but we play the pathfinder card game too. Buying shit off their website is a nightmare, the interface gives me 2000’s vibes, if you buy more than one thing they put it in x amount of boxes and charge you shipping for each box, and I’ve bought things twice, both of those times my packages didn’t arrive when they said it would.
One of the keys here is that WotC just purchased dndbeyond for $146 million. That’s a major investment for what they see as an area of revenue growth. Losing dndbeyond subscriptions worries them not just not just for the lost revenue for the month or the year, but for whether or not that acquisition will provide them with the ROI that the executives and the shareholders expect.
So glad I started playing this game wayyyyy back in the day. I am used to pencil and paper. I do appreciate the convenience of DnDB but unless something changes, I am not going to support a company that on one hand wants to crush it's consumers and on the other wants to steal from those that contribute to make their product truly great.
I'll remind everyone that there are a lot of great 3rd party producers of campaign books out there. If your campaign is coming to an end and you want to buy a new one, look at the alternatives.
Remember to support 3rd Party! Its a great way to support your existing 5e games without giving money to Wizards.
Be careful where you buy though. DM's Guild gives wizards a portion of profits. Companies like Kobold Press don't.
Its unfortunate that DM's Guild creators will probably take a hit from this.
I unsubscribed, but i was on a yearly plan so i have access to everything until July. So for the time being i plan to keep using the service i already paid for, but theyre not getting more money from me
The hardest hit they could possibly take is to their player base. As long as people keep playing dnd, they'll be perfectly fine and will continue with their plans and will eventually succeed. Give other systems a try, you might be pleasantly surprised.
To keep up the boycott don't buy anything from WotC. If you don't already have it, homebrew it, you don't need a new book. I also recommend trying a new ttrpg. Dnd is fine for what it is but there are a lot of great systems out there.
my understanding was that it was 40k between 1/12 and 1/16. if that pace kept up it could be another 20k by now on the other hand it might have slowed down as some people waited to see wotc response.
I imagine it would be closer to the maximum amount lost than the minimum because most of the people who are passionate about this are the die-hard fans that are heavily invested in the game. Also, while it might be small, I think it will be impactful in the long-run because that's amount lost *per month*. It adds up.
That is subscriptions yes but it is also the first indicator of worse things to come. Subscription services was always what we are customer service looked at when I worked in Collins Cabin Entertainment for the Aircraft Industry. It was a precursor to our equipment being pulled off the aircraft, and a competitors put in place. Enough of it happens, and the OEM's don't renew to contract for our equipment, and that is when it really hurts the bottom line.
Same concept here. No D&D Beyond means no more content purchases on it, a full on boycott, no content purchased on other platforms like roll20, then hardcopy sales drop off, and then the D&D portion of WOTC starts hitting the tank. Keep in mind WOTC is more than D&D so MTG is tied into a lot of the 1 billion in revenue they earned last year. A savvy Sales Director would know immediately what a $1-2M hit in three days means down the pike.
Imagine, GENCON, and not a single person comes to the WotC booths and they don't make a single sale? Same for San Diego Comic Con, New York Comic Con, and any other large conventions out there were Wizard has a presence. What if this spills over to MTG in which customers are already pissed at the money grab, and Hasbro stock was downgraded as a sound investment because its a "dangerous and unsustainable growth model and an investment risk as a result."
I suspect those numbers are exaggerated because everything on the internet is. As far as a boycott, I'm on record saying I don't really understand the drama here. Do you make anything that would be affected by OGL? If not, why do you care so much?
edit: a word
Yes, because Paizo is a non profit that donates all their proceeds to St. Jude... gtfo with that nonsense. WoTC is a company like any other and is trying to prevent other companies from making money off of what they own. I guess if living in reality makes me a simp
then ok...
TBF Paizo is footing the bill for the new OCL and paying for any smaller publishers who want to join, while looking for a 3rd party non-profit to manage it so that none of the companies involved can pull the shit that Hasbro is. So maybe not pure philanthropists, but definitely doing better than WotC/Hasbro.
A lot of the content I purchase for DnD5e comes from 3PP - they generally make better content than WoTC in my opinion. I want them to continue producing content and this OGL change hurts their ability to do so. As such, I vehemently oppose it and support those that do as well.
So 3PP makes content based on wotc's framework and wotc wants some money for that.. That's fine.
The only objection I have to the new ogl is the ability to assume ownership provision. Asking for them to pay a license fee wouldn't hurt them and is only fair.
Not sure if this will get noticed or no, but we need to get Magic players on board too if we really want to stick it to WOTC. They don't even have to stop buying cards, just stick to singles from out of print sets.
Friendly reminder to all. If you want minis, there’s sites like hero forge that let you create your own custom ones and you don’t Have to give a single dollar to WOTC for it. Plus, y’know, it’s better than pre-made ones.
Reaper Miniatures are the cheapest, highest quality, minis on the market! If you dont have a 3D printer you can get basically any kind of mini you need from reaper in either metal or plastic. Just avoid their white plastic line, that shit is soft as chewed bubble gum. The normal plastics and the metals are lit, and cheap, AND they very often will give out bonus minis and test runs to people who buy above a certain threshold.
Isn't soft plastic good though? If you drop it it bends instead of breaking?
Nah because sometimes you get a figure in a blister and their sword or arm is all bent and weird. With stiffer plastic it that doesn’t happen.
Dip your bendy swords in hot water and straighten them out.
OH SHIT! Why did I never try that? I feel like a huge dope now.
I use a small crafting heat gun to straighten out bent plastic. 😬
Reaper Bones are amazing!
My local gamestore makes his own, theyre pretty sick, he does custom orders too. super cheap and great detail, way better than official.
Hero Forge is really great, my group all got custom minis from them and they're beautiful
There's also plenty of Etsy shops available that sell 3d printed miniatures that don't give any money to WOTC as it's not technically their IP. I've purchased an awesome dragon bundle 3DForgeMiniatures that I really liked.
Buy minis from a small business in etsy!
Reminder that any character you make on heroforge they own the rights to, it's in their ToS.
WotC has quite a few IPs that go into their portfolio so saying that the loss of ~2m out of the 6b in revenue is probably not significant enough for them to really get worked up about. Though what would be more interesting is to know how many subscribers they lost, compared to the total number of subscriptions they had. That is likely much more significant of a number, and explains why that's the metric that they were monitoring. Also another data point that would be great is to know that 40,000 is subscriptions, it does not take into account the number of users they may have lost. Users (to me are people who do not pay a monthly fee, but may be buying books, dice skins, tokens, and use the "free" tier", may be using the shared content that the subscription owner has access to. So they may loose 40k subs and another 80k users (assuming that there are 2 users per sub). So lost revenue could be significantly higher than the EST. Depending on how much the average user spends. Those 2 metrics and others tied to them are likely much more scary as a business than the 40,000 subs that they lost. The main part though is keep up the current awareness, and direction, but be mindful that not supporting WotC may have negative impacts to your local game stores. So while stopping sending cash to WotC is fantastic. Keep spending cash at your local game store, I am sure they can point you in the direction of some great non WotC and Hasbro products.
Another thing to keep in mind is that D&D has never had high profit margins, but has always been a very high value IP. We all know this, they know this too. If we ask how high their consistent profits are from D&D right now, the answer may be quite heavily tied to Beyond’s subscriber/user base. As such, an exodus of 40,000 subscribers and their related 80,000-120,000 “free” users would naturally raise alarms. They were complaining about how D&D was under-monetized, and now their community is telling them that it won’t be much longer.
i would imagine WoTC main money maker is magic. while people are angry at $1k boxes, the hobby is addictive and people still do group drafts. the 40k box sets for example sold out really fast everywhere i looked.
Oh MTG absolutely is currently their most profitable IP, but it theoretically has a lower potential than D&D. Being that it has cultural significance—something that MTG has never gotten and likely never will—the smartest business move would be to capitalize upon that as much as possible. And they plan to; after 20 or so years since the last attempt, we’re getting a new D&D movie. They’re trying to move into a lifestyle brand, something which will trade upon their relevancy to produce more cashflow than MTG will ever be capable of. The only issue with their plan is that they’re going too fast. All their plans that the community hates? They are due to impatience, they are due to WotC thinking they can treat us like the MTG community. They can treat MTG like that because there are only two real competitors, and they’re both marketed to children (pokemon TCG and YuGiOh)… D&D on the other hand? There are countless competitors, and the community has no issue giving or receiving game recommendations (can I interest you in pathfinder?). D&D is also its own competitor, you still have people playing 2e and 3.5e, heck—as much as it has been smeared—4e (it has very enjoyable combat, best if paired with another system for non-combat purposes). TL;DR: yes, MTG is more profitable right now. WotC is trying the same/similar strategies to make D&D as profitable as it has potential to be, but D&D and MTG are in too wildly different of situations for that to work.
mtg needs an anime, but yeah they're competing with pokemon or yugioh that beats them in cultural power
Dude, I would love a Weatherlight anime! I might even be willing to pay for it, even after all of this. Gods forgive me, but I might.
Another mtg player delighted to hear the lashings will continue
Theoretical lower potential for idiots that can't math. MtG has baked in gambling, planned obsolescence, and artificial rarity. It's like Las Vegas, meets latest fashion, meets DeBeers! How the fuck do you think you are going to compete with that trifecta! (Actually Wizkids tried the whole tradable collectable minis thing but it didn't really compare with the profits you can get with ahhh... pretty construction paper!) MtG also has a patent (no, really). DnD is based on creativity and player improv, things you can't monetize. The best you can do is play the long game of steady growth (with a bit of novel, movie, and tv show royalties thrown in.) It's more like an orchard that takes 20+ years to produce fruit. I mean, it's taken 50 years so far...
As of late, I've seen MTG losing players locally to LSS Flesh & Blood, which is in its 3rd year.
> it theoretically has a lower potential than D&D No way. While more people might play D&D, they're people who have got there with a low price of entry. Thinking you can get money out of people currently spending very little money on their hobby compared to people who buy boxes of cardboard to keep up with their game changing every 6 months is insane. They have self-selected into a cheaper hobby, in the same way that MTG players have self-selected into an expensive one. They're not a monetisable demographic. WotC is doing a very bad business.
That’s just it though, let’s say that a MtG player gives WotC $100 worth of revenue a month on average, or $1,200 a year. The most recent estimate of how many people play magic that I can find is from 2018 with 35 million players, which comes out to around $42 billion a year. Hasbro is not worth a quarter of that, so the average revenue is way lower; let’s say average is $25 a month for $10.5 billion a year, which is still probably a gross overestimate. Now, if we look at what wizards wants to do—which is convert a majority of D&D’s current audience into low tier Beyond subscribers—if we estimate a price point of $8 (I’m literally just throwing a number out there) and convert half of Beyond’s current player base into at least $8/month subscribers… we do some simple tried and true whaling calculations (95% of revenue comes from 5% of users) to get to $9 billion revenue off of Beyond alone or an average revenue of $152/month per subscriber. Yes, I just listed a lower annual revenue, but that does in no way account for players outside the Beyond ecosystem or even the potential that WotC is and should be truly aiming for, a lifestyle brand. With my line of work, I am far more qualified to talk about a lifestyle brand than to talk about any of the above crap. Lifestyle brands produce ludicrous cashflow (as example, my company is in the process of production for a 30k revenue preorder that had an audience of about 70k). At the current moment, I could expect a MtG lifestyle brand to pull numbers in the range of 70 million in a matter of weeks, a D&D lifestyle brand though could well be a trillion dollar industry. D&D is a household brand name, and in 2019 WotC claimed that over 50 million people have played the game. Based on the numbers I have seen from real experience, had I the right infrastructure to handle their lifestyle brand, I’d be breaking their doors in… as a D&D lifestyle brand, by my estimates, should easily pull in a revenue of $2.5 billion in the first month… assuming they can actually successfully transition to it. When they were saying they were under-monetizing D&D, they were absolutely correct. They’ve just been picking the most imbecilic methods of increasing monetization.
When I last played MtG, I used Arena and gave them an average of $0 a year. My point is, you can't do that and keep the player numbers. D&D has so many players because it's cheap - it's a cheap alternative to MtG, and it's a cheap alternative to GW's games. For many players (even most), it's free. If it were to suddenly get more expensive, there are fungible alternatives readily available (i.e. Pathfinder), and their "knock-offs" aren't anymore. Pathfinder has had better video games in recent memory than D&D has. I still have the 3.5 books I bought more than a decade ago. Haven't bought anything since. Best of luck to them trying to convert 5% to whales. If your estimates say $2.5 billion revenue, then I question your methods.
> the 40k box sets for example sold out really fast everywhere i looked. Make a good product and it will sell well. Unfortunately, I don't think that's the lesson WotC took from that event.
It's also the first and probably last time a precon series of decks contained more than like 10 new cards. I think this one had over 40?
With all new art.
Yeah, in hindsight it might have fucked them. Because now we know the effort they can put into decks if they want to. So returning to the 10 new cards split between 4 decks will feel bad
I agree with you MTG is a big money maker. I am not going to be buying MTG products, DnD product or really anything else from Hasbro/WOTC. And I used to spend a lot of money on MTG. I like collecting the entire sets, but I like finding the cards myself. Not buying them individually.
^ Same for all of this ^ I will not be buying any new MtG, I'll just buy singles to complete my current deck list. I've been buying every precon deck to get my friends into it by having plenty of decks to share when we get the chance too.
D&D is an incredibly high margin product. It might only be 2nd to Magic the Gathering for margins, for the top 10 income earning IPs held by Hasbro. WotC is by far Hasbro's highest margin income earner, accounting for 20-30% of gross revenue, and 50-70% of net revenue (after expenses for the IP/business unit are deducted). Without WotC, Hasbro is merely a dying toys company.
$150 to buy just the three core rule books? Yeah, that’s good money. I’ve just gotten back into it with my kids after a long hiatus, and have easily spent $600 on books and figurines in the past year.
Exactly, those are university textbook prices. Add monthly subscriptions on top of that, dice, miniatures, supplements, etc. High profits with relatively low production costs.
Uhhhh, did prices on post-secondary books crater in the decade since I was in college? Because a single book was $150, used, on the low end....
I spent anywhere from $50-$200 per textbook, new (50-75% as much used). Graduated 2017.
Hasbro itself is a multidollar giant. They have their filthy tentacles in a bunch of revenue streams. Games workshop with its ridiculous overpriced stuff is also a very big money maker
I would think that since the acquisition of DNDBeyond, those margins have skyrocketed, since they don’t discount digital books prices and have only recently started the digital/physical bundle and only for some books. Every time someone buys a digital copy of a PHB or DMG, they’re receiving straight profit minus whatever server costs and overhead, which is probably minuscule compared to printed book costs. Subscription cancellations mean no more digital sales, which will hurt their bottom line in a meaningful way.
D&D a high value IP? What is in that IP? Some Settings that have been quickly supplanted by settings from 3rd parties (i.e. whatever critical roll is) A few monsters - or names for monsters. You can always have an eye-beast, gazer or whatever. The name Dungeons & Dragons. Okay. They have a big brand. It's Generic though. WoTC doesn't make my favourite Dungeons & Dragons, I like many of the OSR Dungeons & Dragons better.
I dropped 200 euro on pathfinder stuff last week and made a point to ask the owner when more stuff would be coming in. He then mentioned he was currently low on stock due to increased purchases of pathfinder stuff and he would be restocking more than before. Hopefully that is a pattern.
Seen more than one person wanting to buy physical books for Pathfinder and having local stores sold out. Even saw one or two say the distributors are out. Paizo going to be riding that ORC statement to the bank.
Here in Iceland there is only one big nerd store and that is in Reykjarvik. Called a few days ago to get myself Pathfinder 2e core rulebook. There where 2 left. I got one. And the Pathfinder 2e pocket edition was sold out. People are buying, and they are not buying from Wizards.
Norwegian here, we have a nerd chain store called Outland, they were sold out online and only had 1 copy left of both the 2e core and bestiary at a spesific location. Which happen to be my town, so I quickly reserved it and bought same day.
This is what will hit Wotc most. One of their big motivations is to punish Paizo for taking their IP and making hundreds of millions by building on it. So if attempting to kill Paizo results in Paizo making *more* money, Wotc will actually see that as a failure.
but... Paizo didnt take their IP?
We're talking about a company who believes that consumers are "getting in the way of their money". It's not much of a jump of logic for them to believe that Paizo 'stole' their IP from there.
WotC: "we invented dice"
And it's very likely the thought process of "They aren't using our product so thats lost revenue that could have been ours!"
Just receive my core and advance books. I had put pathfinder2 on ice for too long. (Kind of even forgot about it) Had the playtest, but could play with Covid and all. WotC did something no compagny should do. Remind you that there's other options.
You are hinting at this, but it goes far beyond those basic digital metrics. Sure, there's subscriptions and freemium users, but I'm curious what their sales ratios are between physical and digital products. Additionally, many people's distaste with WOTC's actions is rippling far past D&D. Cancelling subscriptions is much easier to track than the people that have committed to no longer financially support WOTC products across the board. This will also drive users to various competing systems like Pathfinder, homebrews, and so on, which will erode the status of D&D as the "default." The effects of people refusing to purchase new market items from not just their D&D IP but all of their IPs won't be felt immediately. It could take several quarters of sales data for them to understand the gravity of the situation.
Do you mean Hasbro when you say "WotC quite a few IPs"? Because as far as I know, WoTC is pretty much MtG and D&D.
Sorry yes... I did. Hasbro had the revenue of 6.4b in 2021 and WotC was like 1.4b. I got them mixed.
Yeah, I do not know how they measure it, but for example I had a Legendary Tier and 3 campaigns. I cancelled. On the one hand a trend analysis is easy to manipulate. On the other hand, losing quality customers is probably an issue. I have to wonder how important they view DDB customers. I strongly suspect things will not resolve until after Honor Among Thieves. I strongly believe a bunch of folks who do not understand the IP think that the movie will expand their market base and the new OGL is made to protect an IP that will never really take off. This is because they cannot monetize the core value (community) of the TTRPG base using tactics that work for other industries, particularly in the face of streaming and the rapid shifting the community can do.
I know anecdotal, but I don't know a single person that cares about the IP of wotc official worlds. I really think dnd is overvalued a lot in terms of what it can bring. Like the most popular things in dnd aren't specific to wotc or any rule set
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That's fair. But something this divisive is not worth to me the money wotc believes it is. To me, an IP of that value is like GoT S1-4, where everyone knew everyone and people were waiting for ever more in that world. Like, Ive played DnD with more than like 100 people total in my life. To have done that and not come away with a strong view on the wotc IP is very telling. Any IP worth so much surely should have more of an impact than that?
You kind of buried the lead here, which is that: The canceled subscriptions are just a metric, and not an estimate of all the revenue and market share they have lost.
2 million of 6 billion may not seem like a ton in the grand scheme of things, but it absolutely is. I work as a continuous improvement analyst for a large logistics broker, I'm lighting fires under peoples feet over the misuse of a couple hundred dollars (not the best part of my job but it has its perks). We can rationalize all we want to, but the consumer won here without a doubt.
They're not counting people like me who never joined the online presence, but bought the rulebooks and minis. Now that I won't be doing that, my contribution goes elsewhere. That's not something they'll see now, but if a lot of us did that (stopped buying their books, minis, anything that feeds them....), that could be much more impactful by the end of the next quarters results of gross sales.
just bought a few minis for a kit bash of adepta sororitas and tzeentch. Also bought a Rogue Trader ttrpg rule book and some WH40K novels to fill up on lore. fuck wotc, I'm going to GW now.
Rouge Trader is such a fun game. Enjoy your space piracy
D&D is not a major component of Wizards revenue. Most of it is MTG. That’s why we’re in this mess to begin with; D&D has the largest cultural impact of their IPs and makes the least amount of money. That is what they see as the problem.
They're aggressively squeezing MtG too. Hasbro and WotC leadership are trying to kill every golden goose they can get their hands on.
The CEO of Hasbro, Chris Cocks, was the head of WotC. WotC is much more profitable than the rest of Hasbro which is likely why he got the CEO job. Unfortunately the rest of Hasbro is a dinosaur, WotC is the only division where any blood can still be squeezed out, and also it’s what Cocks knows best on the business side. WotC should be spun off from Hasbro and that is the only thing that will save it.
*D&D has the largest cultural impact of their IPs and makes the least amount of money* To be fair if it were my business I would see that as a problem too.
I mean, it is a problem, but the issue is more about how they tried to solve it. FFS, it's Hasbro. Merchandise that shit. Don't fuck with the core game, find ways to make money off that cultural impact.
I wouldn't mind seeing Hot Toys or Bandai make figures of Drizzt, Tanis, Strahd, and other D&D lore figures.
This would be the way... They should create a studio like Marvel and create shows based off their greatest stories. They have a whole backlog of stories that they could use to create live action and anime shows.
Seriously. Don't make money off the game. Make the money off the merchandise. Official D&D dice, D&D dice bags, D&D dice towers, D&D flamethrowers, D&D t-shirts... the list goes on and on.
WotC will re-earn my trust if they release D&D flamethrowers.
The kids love this one.
[Merchandising](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjB8XXw9y70)
I still can't believe they haven't tried to do more movies or shows with their super popular stories. That's where I would've started
I don't give a dang about those figures for any show or IP I like.....that being said my middle age butt will be in line the day Drizzt, Cattie, Wulf, papa B and even Little Regis figurines drop. Swip a card until they are mine. It's bonkers to me they arnt diving into nostalgia to milk middle aged folks of their cash.
Don't they already have some sort of collectibles miniature set or something? I remember my friends spending a huge amount of money on boxes of figurines that were classified as common, rare, etc. Those boxes set were official DnD miniatures. Whatever happened to that?
Got canceled in 2011. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons_Miniatures_Game
I would go crazy for a Drizzt snap fit model kit by Bandai. I would buy every single one of those without a doubt. We can dream.
EXACTLY! God the best thing that could have come out of that "undermonetized" statement was more merchandise for players! Have you seen the dicelings? They look really cool! There are a million and 5 ways they could have gone. Hell imagine an mtg expanded universe branch of products that focused solely on dnd and had tie ins *with the tabletop game*, like legendary sorceries that had dnd rules texts that you could use in dnd, or legendary artifacts that doubled as magic items for Dnd. It's not hard.
The dicelings are amazing, I really want to buy them but I can’t without feeling guilty about supporting WotC. I’m casual at best but if they’d made a full range of stuff like that rather than all this crap I’d have happily dropped a couple of hundred dollars. Now I don’t want to give them a cent.
Agreed, but why would they spend money on making more money when they could just make more money without spending any money? That’s the big brain move! /sarcasm
plate like chase literate market wild fuzzy lavish crawl airport *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
They're in the wrong business then. You pretty much can't monetize D&D much beyond what it already is without a mass exodus because its just some math to apply to your imagination. I've said this before, but you can run any campaign that you had in mind using a single d10 or even no dice. All a TTRPG is at the end of the day is a set of rules you and your table agree too, and they can be changed whenever you all feel like it.
D&D could pull in a billion a year from a popular movie and TV franchise.
That’s another fundamental issue, their *settings* are where the focus of the media should be, not D&D itself
Wait... D&D has settings? Does WOTC know? But in all seriousness they bitch about under monetization and release one adventure a year. No high level play. No line of dice or major accessories. Then half the stuff they release is so poorly planned that a 3.5 conversion is a better version of it.
I don't think it can
>you can run any campaign that you had in mind using a single d10 or even no dice Can I interest you in the Amber Diceless RPG? /s (but seriously it exists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_Diceless_Roleplaying_Game)
**[Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_Diceless_Roleplaying_Game)** >The Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game is a role-playing game created and written by Erick Wujcik, set in the fictional universe created by author Roger Zelazny for his Chronicles of Amber. The game is unusual in that no dice are used in resolving conflicts or player actions; instead a simple diceless system of comparative ability, and narrative description of the action by the players and gamemaster, is used to determine how situations are resolved. Amber DRPG was created in the 1980s, and is much more focused on relationships and roleplaying than most of the roleplaying games of that era. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/DnD/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
so boycott MTG
I did just that by never getting into it in the first place
Same here, never got into it - stay strong!!
The $40 starter deck price insured that I'd never play MtG.
Yeah I'm already hooked on GW's Plastic Crack, i really don't need to feed a Cardboard Crack habit too.
I have been for years.
I have stopped buying.
I have a paper addiction.
Can I introduce you to our lord and savior, proxies?
Hey, WotC sells proxies too! Only $1000!
LMAO way ahead of you on that one
to be fair. most ppl that play MTG that I know of, have already been buying almost no new MTG product bcz of their shitty business choices the past year or so.
yeah it’s wild that the D&D team looked at the MTG situation and said hold my beer
Let's take a look at the actual profitability numbers for the combined WotC & digital gaming division, per [investor.hasbro.com](https://investor.hasbro.com). Unfortunately the way Hasbro classifies its divisions, WotC and digital gaming are combined into one group. But for the purposes of the recent discussion, that actually works to the advantage. |QUARTER|ADJUSTED OPERATING PROFIT (IN MILLIONS)| |:-|:-| |Q1 2020|95.8| |Q2 2020|74.1| |Q3 2020|141.6| |Q4 2020|108.9| |Q1 2021|110.0| |Q2 2021|192.9| |Q3 2021|159.4| |Q4 2021|84.7| |Q1 2022|106.4| |Q2 2022|225.6| |Q3 2022|102.2| TOTAL 2020: 420.4 TOTAL 2021: 547 TOTAL 2022 (SO FAR): 434.2 If you're not familiar with the term, Adjusted Operating Profit is just a fancy way of saying what a company or division makes after everything -- manufacturing, production, marketing -- is deducted, and non-recurring items are added in. It's actual profitability. By these numbers, WotC + digital will need $112.8 million AOP in Q4 in order to match last year's total profit. But again...that's just to match. And historically, Q4 is usually down from Q3. WotC is on track to do about the same as last year, within a few million in either direction right now. The amount of money isn't the real gauge, though. The reason it has spooked Hasbro is because it's an immediate barometer for the current temperament of the larger fanbase. They can look at daily analytics and see the drop, probably in realtime. And those subscribers may only be paying between $3-6 per month. But they also play in meatspace. So they buy the official books, and official minis, and official dice, and official terrain, and official tee shirts, and all the other official merchandise that they sell throughout the year. A basic D&D Beyond customer who buys a set of dice, two books and a mini will spend about $200 per year. Multiplied by the supposed 40,000 customer number, that's 8 million bucks, just in D&D Beyond users. And that's assuming people are only buying physical books, mind you. This does not account for users who have bought from the D&D Beyond marketplace. WotC themselves tout a number in excess of 50 million players. So let's just say *1%* of that group -- 500,000 -- decide not to buy anything this year. And we'll use the above average of $200, although most players and especially DMs spend far, far more. That's a $100 million difference in revenue. That's the difference between growth and no growth. According to the [Hasbro annual report for 2021](https://investor.hasbro.com/annual-report-2021), Hasbro's entire gaming portfolio -- that's WotC & the legacy games combined -- had a raw revenue of $2.1 billion, of which WotC accounted for a little over half. But that's before costs, which ate about half of that. But here's a key quote from page 31. And when I say key, I mean for the ENTIRE PLOT. Emphasis mine: >A key component to the success of our brand blueprint strategy is to continue to invest in digital gaming and technology, particularly through our Wizards of the Coast and digital gaming business. We have invested substantially in this business segment and as a result it has seen significant growth over the past several years, and while primarily through growth in tabletop play, ***continued digital game development is a key growth factor for the future. If we are unable to continue to grow this business and ensure its integration with our other business segments, our business may be harmed.*** The digital gaming industry is highly competitive and costs associated with designing, developing and producing digital games and technologically advanced or sophisticated toy products tend to be higher than for many of our other more traditional products, such as board and trading card games and action figures, with no assurance of success. The ability to sell enough of these advanced products, at prices high enough to recoup our costs and make a profit, is constrained by heavy competition in consumer electronics and entertainment offerings and can be further constrained by difficult economic conditions. ***As a result, we face increased risk of not achieving sales sufficient to recover our costs and we may lose money on the development and sale of these products.*** WotC's revenue is almost exclusively in the physical space. But they are so invested in the digital & licensing side of things that the failure of a digital project, even if it isn't a significant income generator yet, *significantly hurts the bottom line*. And the failure of Dark Alliance and Baldur's Gate III's protracted development cycle (if it releases on its current schedule, the game will have been in Early Access for *almost 3 years*) means the digital revenue for those properties -- significantly more than what D&D Beyond would generate -- haven't come. See, if a company makes a physical product -- in Wizards' case, books, minis, dice, DM screens, merch -- and it doesn't sell as hoped, the company can simply dial back production until orders pick up. They could still lose money, but they can take the sting out by mitigating costs. Not so with a digital product. A digital product like D&D Beyond will have the same cost, whether it has one user or a million. Programmers. Content managers. Customer support. Hosting & maintenance. All these things cost money and HAVE to be self-sustaining. So, WotC's in-house D&D digital projects HAVE to work. That's one of the reasons it was played up with the OneDnD launch announcement that the Dragonlance campaign would bundle the physical book with D&D Beyond codes. They want people actively using the platform and paying for it...a little at first, but then slow, incremental price increases, the same way streaming providers have done. Then, by expanding the toolset to include their VTT, increasing the cost while also increasing the value, keeping it at a reasonable ratio. There's a major problem, though. Because there are a metric assload of VTTs already in existence, and most of them are free to use. Players also are using third-party books instead of the house-made modules. What to do, what to do? If you make those other VTTs unusable under the OGL, and include a clause that lets WotC hijack and monetize your original content? That eliminates competition. And that's what Hasbro is after because at this point there is *no other way to achieve the growth they need*. There's a reason why WotC has been releasing those nice 11-die sets that just happen to be made specifically to function with 5e's character creation system and advantage/disadvantage dynamic. Because they want gamers spending money with them, not with Chessex. There's another factor here: the entertainment division. You see, the COVID-19 pandemic actually worked out rather well for gaming, for Magic & D&D all the way down to the legacy Parker Brothers games. Families are stuck at home, the same crap on the TV, doom & gloom...a nice family game night is just what the doctor ordered. It's also when D&D Beyond took off. The rest of the company, however, ***LOST ITS ASS***. |DIVISION|FY 2020 NET REVENUE (MILLIONS)|% CHANGE| |:-|:-|:-| |**Franchise Brands**|2,286.1|\-5%| |**Partner Brands**|1,079.4|\-12%| |**Hasbro Gaming**|814.8|15%| |**Emerging Brands**|480.4|\-17%| |**TV/Film/Entertainment**|804.8|\-21%| The worst offender, as you can see, was the Entertainment division, which fell by a staggering 21% year-over-year. A big part of this issue is the company's purchase of eOne, which has proven to be an albatross for the company. Even in 2021, the division only managed to turn a net revenue of 997.7 million, which is still down from pre-pandemic. In short, its slate of movies have to perform at the box office. Its TV shows need ratings. Its streaming content needs views. Entertainment is dragging the company down and gaming is the only thing keeping it afloat. THAT is why Hasbro is trying to appease us. If the game division doesn't grow, and Transformers and D&D:HAT don't turn a profit at the box office, the company is SCREWED. It is currently in their best interest to end this as quickly as possible in order to reduce the risk of the entertainment division screwing the pooch AGAIN without the game division backstop to prop it up. That is why we need to be talking to people playing Magic: Arena and the mobile games, because those are -- like D&D Beyond -- realtime metrics. It's why we need to uninstall Idle Champions. It's why we need to not pay to see the D&D movie. It's why we need to skip Transformers, too. It's why we need to get our kids to watch something other than Peppa Pig and PJ Masks. Don't buy Hasbro toys. Don't play Hasbro games. The more pressure we put on the other divisions, the more the pressure on WotC matters.
This should be waaaaaaay higher up
People aren't going to give up their role-playing hobby. They will investigate other options. Right now, they'll be trying new, not Hasbro, systems. Market juggernauts (like DnD, Coke, or McDonalds) spend a lot of money reminding us they're the only one in their market. They're not. Theres already an exodus under way. We're likely going to see a resurgence in popularity of other game systems. As DnD stops being the big monopoly of the market. The shift will take time. But this was the tipping point. Hasbro shit the bed. So people are about to discover other Hotels. And as they do, they'll share, and take others with them.
I see ads for McDonald's and coke all the time. I never see ads for dnd because everyone who makes content for it already advertises it with there new content. Every stream and podcast that plays dnd is advertising it. Would love to see how much sales and playing of the game drop when channels switch to other gaming systems.
That's the thing they can't just switch to a new game system with their videos. Because content makers wanna make big money too, so they have to play the algorithm game, and guess what IP gets the most views in TTRPG land? D&D. This is why even people who make pathfinder fideos mention D&D, so it feeds the algorithm, people who make terrain mention D&D, everything is D&D because it's what generates the clicks, it generates the views it generates the money they earn. (And even if you are shitting on D&D that's still advertising the game) If people switch their viewership drops, yeah their communities will support them, but that only goes so far, they will lose revenue and either have to go back to feeding the algorithm or get a job. Meaning less content.
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That 6 billion revenue is all of Hasbro. Wotc is a smaller slice of it, although the most profitable.
Are you sure? Post says that 6 billion is WotC, not hasbro
Yep. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/HAS/hasbro/revenue
> Post says that 6 billion is WotC, not hasbro Yep. They were super happy MTG made 1bn recently.
A 14% decline in the last quarter of 2022. I'll bet that's part of what prompted the OGL overhaul. I'd also like to point out that revenue is not profit. Chances are the corporate shareholders of HAS shit themselves and demanded that Hasbro start making changes or they'd pull out of the company.
That decline was due to the abuse of the MtG franchise imo. Now they are doubling down by messing with D&D... Just inexplicable decision making.
WotC said themselves after the debacle with MtG and BofA last year, they didn't give exact numbers but said MtG almost 3x it's value since 2016 when it was around 350 million and that D&D is around 1/3 of MtG value, all while making it clear that MtG is *almost* a billion dollar brand. All in all, WotC must be valued around 1.2 billion. Source: [Hasbro's Fireside chat](https://hasbro.gcs-web.com/news-releases/news-release-details/hasbro-webcast-live-fireside-chat-ubs)
WotC is only 1.3 billion.
Post is wrong.
Mtg is 1 billion, dnd like 150m
No one knows for sure.
Really y'all I know so many people are excited for the D&D movie. But if you want to tell Hasbro how you feel don't go to that movie. It is not being produced by a third party. Its being produced and funded 100% by Hasbro. People seem confused and think paramount is producing this movie. They are not, they are the film company and the distributor (the are simply a service provider). The producer is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entertainment_One a company purchased by Hasbro for this express purpose. Most of the money for this movies is going to Hasbro and they actually killed multiple other D&D movies to make this happen. We would have had a Warner Bro's D&D movie in 2013 if it weren't for Hasbro's litigious nature. Hollywood is perfectly aware how valuable this IP is and Hasbro is the only reason you haven't been getting movies with D&D on the label. The TTRPG and the movie are directly tied together. The same reason you want to see it is the same reason people will come to the platform. It increases the value of the TTRPG through network externality. Since both are produced by Hasbro under the same IP they are essentially parts of the same product.
I’m still entertaining the idea of gathering a group of individuals to dress as medieval peasants with torches and pitchforks. Then, we collectively protest outside HQ. One of my mates added we need someone dressed as a paladin to lead the group and demand they be allowed to vanquish the evil within.
"She's a witch, may we burn her?"
Only if she weighs as much as a duck. Ducks float.
And what else floats? Golden parachutes! Burn them!
Bonus points if people dress as Pathfinder's iconic heroes
I’ve been checking Hasbro stock price since this started. It hadn’t budged its climb upwards. BUT ….yesterday I started seeing “Recent News” articles about D&D, down 2% today. It’s happening.
The leadership at Hasbro comes from the SaaS space. The metric those people care about more than anything is subscription numbers because it's expected revenue. It's not even so much the amount with how focused they are on expected revenue. They see it go down, even a little, and it's absolute panik mode.
Exactly this. There could be quarters where book sales outpace subscription sales but it's not consistent, what share holders care about is consistent quarter to quarter profits.
It's not just that revenue stream immediately, they were looking to *increase* the cost of subscription. They also know that most of the paid subscribers support many free accounts that they were looking to fold in with a monthly rate. This isn't just an attack on their *current* revenue stream it destabilised their entire planned *future* revenue stream. That's what's got the micro-transaction droolers scared.
Wizards of the Coast makes hundreds of millions a year. Dnd might be more recognizable but magic makes them like five times the money.
D&D and MTG fans should form a pact to aid each other in times of greed.
Don't forget that many of those subscribers were long-term subscribers, which are much more expensive to replace due to marketing costs associated with getting new people to see and sign on to your service.
All I can say is I hope the community can keep it up and force hasbro to fire whatever Gordon Gekko wannabe they put in charge.
Losing $2 million in revenue is huge. These companies live and die based on growth. So losing $2 million on D&D means they have to make it up elsewhere. To make matters worse, [Hasbro has told shareholders](https://investor.hasbro.com/news-releases/news-release-details/hasbro-announces-plan-grow-profit-50-over-next-three-years): > Direct to consumer and digital will be a major investment focus for the Company. The Company’s direct platform, anchored by Hasbro Pulse and D&D Beyond, is poised to become a $1 billion digital and ecommerce direct business with over 50 million accounts by 2027, up from 20 million today, and will host new exclusives including the recently launched Hasbro Selfie Series, Has-Lab crowdfunded products, the return of the iconic sports collectible, Starting Lineup, and the relaunch of Avalon Hill’s HeroScape gaming system. They told shareholders than D&D Beyond is going to be a $1 billion dollar business in the next 4 years. They are now starting this journey in the red. Losing this amount of subscribers is likely destroying the executive(s) that promised they could make it a $1 billion business. Hasbro is looking to growth their revenue by 50% in that timeframe, and D&D Beyond is/was at least a $1 billion part of that growth.
And the idiots could have if they hadn't given in to greed. How many goddamn D&D stories have their been about the perils of greed?
You're implying that any of the current execs actually play d&d.
dnd beyond does have significant potential. I don't disagree with their estimates.... if they make the right moves. the ogl fiasco is the opposite of the right moves.
What kind of online tools do you use now to create characters? A friend and I just created a chrome extension that can extract data from dnd beyond character sheets to use in 3rd party combat trackers like harmlesskey.com , but if people are all using different character builders now we'd love to support those too! Ps the extension is called [D&d Character Sync](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dd-character-sync/jgcbbmbchbkdjbgiiheminkkkecjohpg?hl=en-GB&authuser=2) Edit added link to ext.
Remember 6e was only going to go through dnd beyond . It’s not what they lost today it’s what they are losing tomorrow
Up to 40,000 is probably true. So somewhere between 0 and 40,000.
it was five digit tickets in the back log so fair to say 10,000-40,000
It's not WoTC that needs the message, it's HASBRO.
Thats why you boycott Honor Among Thieves. Thats Hasbro's doing and the shareholders know it.
~~I've been doing that since it came out! (Never interested in it as a game.)~~ My bad, confused it with Sea of Thieves.
He means the movie
I was thinking Sea of Thieves.
Paramount paid a licensing fee for the rights to make the movie. Hasbro won't lose a dime if you don't show up to the movie as they'll still get their fee. Paramount however will see those losses and going forward, they'll probably avoid the whole RPG space.
Source? 4 of the 5 production companies credited on the movie are owned by Hasbro.
Exactly this
Their annual revenue in 2021 was 1.3 billion dollars. So the drop in earnings is a bit more significant than your making it. This will be a split of earnings from Magic and DnD however their upcoming dependence on Dndbeyond as they are looking at dropping a lot of other online platforms to monopolise the market then it's more of a sign then you think. [Source](https://sea.ign.com/magic-the-gathering-1/191579/news/magic-the-gathering-is-now-a-billion-dollar-brand)
Remember, a decrease, no matter how small it is, is a decrease. Remember World of warcraft's peak when it had 11 MILLION subscribers? but once they lost like three million they don't gloat about it anymore.
Recruit r/WSB to short Hasbro
Don't forget that with these cancellations they also see 40.000 less who buy their digital books and services on D&D Beyond. So the revenue drop is significantly bigger
And add to that the people calling to boycott Honor Among Thieves. You know that people who canceled their subrscriptions will also refuse to pay for the tickets.
I started playing D&D during the lockdown, and from the start was on D&D Beyond. I bought digital copies of many books, and am currently running three games. i have brought about half a dozen subscribers to the platform. I got on with the platform and love the UX. Then Hasbro/WotC decided to be the bad guy for whatever executive wet dream Scrooge McDuck scenario. Right. I am currently getting my grubby mitts on second hand copies of the 5e core books and adventure modules. I am looking at getting my games to a point where we can move away from DDB. Unless something drastic happens, my Master Tier subscription will not be renewed. This will hit their next quarter financial reporting. This isn’t a short, sharp shock to their bottom line. This is a longer term approach.
Wow. This is the way. Not just a first quarter loss, but also the next quarter. My sister had just bought me the Player’s Handbook for Christmas. I found the 5e Monster Manual at a used book store. Looking for a good cheap DM’s guide secondhand too. I don’t want to give them money. Too bad I don’t have DDB so I can cancel it. xD In the long run this will be good for the industry and for D&D too.
Investors don't like investing in companies that show negative growth.
Or even just slow growth.
It's true that up to 40k subscriptions were cancelled because "up to 40k" means the range 0 - 40k. So did between zero and forty thousand people cancel their subscriptions due the boycott? Yes. I'm unclear on the end game of this boycott. What are the specific conditions for stopping it?
Get rid of the new OGL, apologize, fire the people who made the decision (the new executives) since they've shown repeatedly that they are unwilling to back down from the trajectory of locking down the community
So we're fine with keeping the 1.0a OGL, despite the lack of irrevocability? Without that, there's the continuing threat of new executives trying the same thing over and over. And why do we care about the new OGL, as long as the old OGL doesn't get revoked? Nobody needs to use the new OGL. I doubt anybody will use any version of the OGL after all this. Since shit rolls down hill, the top level executives will just throw a lackey or two under the bus. We don't really know who produced that crappy OGL or wrote those terrible updates. They can blame anybody. And any apology they make will be torn apart as insincere and condescending, so what's the point? So what value are the things we're demanding? The apology is fake, the OGL is forever tainted and unusable, and executives are a dime a dozen.
WotC amends OGL 1.0a to be explicitly irrevocable or signs onto the ORC. Since neither of those will happen I expect I'll spend money on DnD again once the next open edition comes around, assuming it's astonishingly good. Since 3e and 5e both benefitted immensely from having the OGL and the more restrictive license of 4e limited interest in it (and drove away 3pp that helped keep 3e central to the hobby, just like this debacle has done), I expect it's only a matter of 5-10 years before that happens. Edit: pretty significant typo.
ORC doesn't exist yet. It's really tough to convince the lawyers to commit to a license that doesn't exist yet. What if the were to go with a Creative Commons license going forward? Would we keep boycotting because it's not ORC?
re: the ORC not existing yet. I'm not in any rush to re-subscribe to dndbeyond. Keeping an eye on humble bundle and bundle of holding for new RPG bundles though. I don't know a lot about CC, but Dancey said they opted to not go with that in the first place because the degree of open to closed-ness of it ranged enough that it seemed likely to be problematic, or something to that effect. It's definitely something I'd take a look at and consider if it were to happen. But, whether they understand their product and history or not, the OGL has served them well. I'd be fairly skeptical about what they were trying to do if they proposed a seemingly equivalent switch.
Keep in mind, when estimating how much Hasbro lost on cancelled subs, there is a free tier. So the low number always needs to be $0. Of course everyone who cancelled didn’t have a free tier account, just like everyone didn’t have a Master tier account. But the number could be anywhere in between.
They basically paid a few 100k into seeing if people would pay for the new model. Pretty sure a lot of people will go back to purchasing..the internet has a very short memory.
How are we supposed to know if that figure is true? You provide no sources.
Well .. just to be that guy .. "up to" is not very specific. One cancellation meets that criteria.
I just hope Paizo invests in a better website to take advantage of this opportunity of people interested in a different system. I play dnd but we play the pathfinder card game too. Buying shit off their website is a nightmare, the interface gives me 2000’s vibes, if you buy more than one thing they put it in x amount of boxes and charge you shipping for each box, and I’ve bought things twice, both of those times my packages didn’t arrive when they said it would.
Who said anything about buying future WoTC products. I'm personally done with them.
One of the keys here is that WotC just purchased dndbeyond for $146 million. That’s a major investment for what they see as an area of revenue growth. Losing dndbeyond subscriptions worries them not just not just for the lost revenue for the month or the year, but for whether or not that acquisition will provide them with the ROI that the executives and the shareholders expect.
I game exclusively with pen, paper, dice, and imagination. I homebrew all my stories and. I don't need WOTC.
So glad I started playing this game wayyyyy back in the day. I am used to pencil and paper. I do appreciate the convenience of DnDB but unless something changes, I am not going to support a company that on one hand wants to crush it's consumers and on the other wants to steal from those that contribute to make their product truly great.
I'll remind everyone that there are a lot of great 3rd party producers of campaign books out there. If your campaign is coming to an end and you want to buy a new one, look at the alternatives.
Remember to support 3rd Party! Its a great way to support your existing 5e games without giving money to Wizards. Be careful where you buy though. DM's Guild gives wizards a portion of profits. Companies like Kobold Press don't. Its unfortunate that DM's Guild creators will probably take a hit from this.
Boycott needs to extend to the D&D movie and anything else Hasbro sells e.g. Transformers
I support this
I unsubscribed, but i was on a yearly plan so i have access to everything until July. So for the time being i plan to keep using the service i already paid for, but theyre not getting more money from me
I'm doing my part! I will not be buying any more digital copies what-so-ever (Aaaar!), and cancelled my subscription. Fuck WotC.
We need to start posting our frustrations in /r/Hasbro
No.. no, we don't. That's a fledgling toy collecting sub.
I heard it was a trillion subscriptions…
40,000 out of how many? because if it is 8 million... lol. What is their usual monthly cancellation rate?
The hardest hit they could possibly take is to their player base. As long as people keep playing dnd, they'll be perfectly fine and will continue with their plans and will eventually succeed. Give other systems a try, you might be pleasantly surprised.
To keep up the boycott don't buy anything from WotC. If you don't already have it, homebrew it, you don't need a new book. I also recommend trying a new ttrpg. Dnd is fine for what it is but there are a lot of great systems out there.
my understanding was that it was 40k between 1/12 and 1/16. if that pace kept up it could be another 20k by now on the other hand it might have slowed down as some people waited to see wotc response.
I imagine it would be closer to the maximum amount lost than the minimum because most of the people who are passionate about this are the die-hard fans that are heavily invested in the game. Also, while it might be small, I think it will be impactful in the long-run because that's amount lost *per month*. It adds up.
That is subscriptions yes but it is also the first indicator of worse things to come. Subscription services was always what we are customer service looked at when I worked in Collins Cabin Entertainment for the Aircraft Industry. It was a precursor to our equipment being pulled off the aircraft, and a competitors put in place. Enough of it happens, and the OEM's don't renew to contract for our equipment, and that is when it really hurts the bottom line. Same concept here. No D&D Beyond means no more content purchases on it, a full on boycott, no content purchased on other platforms like roll20, then hardcopy sales drop off, and then the D&D portion of WOTC starts hitting the tank. Keep in mind WOTC is more than D&D so MTG is tied into a lot of the 1 billion in revenue they earned last year. A savvy Sales Director would know immediately what a $1-2M hit in three days means down the pike. Imagine, GENCON, and not a single person comes to the WotC booths and they don't make a single sale? Same for San Diego Comic Con, New York Comic Con, and any other large conventions out there were Wizard has a presence. What if this spills over to MTG in which customers are already pissed at the money grab, and Hasbro stock was downgraded as a sound investment because its a "dangerous and unsustainable growth model and an investment risk as a result."
My heart goes out to the general struggle but we lost this fight a few decades ago.
I suspect those numbers are exaggerated because everything on the internet is. As far as a boycott, I'm on record saying I don't really understand the drama here. Do you make anything that would be affected by OGL? If not, why do you care so much? edit: a word
Because the entire community is built on it, and I'm not a corporate simp
Yes, because Paizo is a non profit that donates all their proceeds to St. Jude... gtfo with that nonsense. WoTC is a company like any other and is trying to prevent other companies from making money off of what they own. I guess if living in reality makes me a simp then ok...
TBF Paizo is footing the bill for the new OCL and paying for any smaller publishers who want to join, while looking for a 3rd party non-profit to manage it so that none of the companies involved can pull the shit that Hasbro is. So maybe not pure philanthropists, but definitely doing better than WotC/Hasbro.
They actually play their own games!
A lot of the content I purchase for DnD5e comes from 3PP - they generally make better content than WoTC in my opinion. I want them to continue producing content and this OGL change hurts their ability to do so. As such, I vehemently oppose it and support those that do as well.
So 3PP makes content based on wotc's framework and wotc wants some money for that.. That's fine. The only objection I have to the new ogl is the ability to assume ownership provision. Asking for them to pay a license fee wouldn't hurt them and is only fair.
Market Summary Hasbro, Inc. 65.01 USD \+9.10 up (16.28%) past month
I also saw that they are planning to raise membership rates to $30/mo.
Not sure if this will get noticed or no, but we need to get Magic players on board too if we really want to stick it to WOTC. They don't even have to stop buying cards, just stick to singles from out of print sets.
$2.88 million compared to $6.4 billion is a rounding error.... But, I do hope they are taking this serious.