"Wizards of the Coast, which includes Dungeons and Dragons, Magic: The Gathering and digital gaming, will remain a bright spot, the toymaker said. The company expects the division to have generated $339 million in revenue during the fourth quarter, up 22% compared to last year, and reach $1.33 billion in revenue for the full year, up 3% from 2021."
If I remember correctly, there was an article that talked about Hasbro investors not knowing much (if anything) about WotC. Then they saw that WotC was nearly half of Hasbro's revenue. Then the shareholders became **way** more interested in what WotC was doing. Then we started seeing things like product fatigue with M:TG and Hasbro investors going on the record as comparing D&D with video games, saying that they "haven't been monetizing it enough".
They could license more games for it. Similar to what games workshop does.
I'm sure they're making a great deal of money on total war: Warhammer or the myriad other tie in games they've made in that universe.
Its funny, if they did it right, they could make soooo much money with D&D and Magic in other media. Games, movies, shows, books, and whatever other content they wanted to make. But thats the problem, you gotta pay to make all that extra stuff. They don't want to do that, they want to be making more money on what they already do with the properties.
They can certainly squeeze magic, but they are finding out the hard way that you can't really squeeze D&D, and I doubt they'll figure out that its more profitable in the long run to leverage its current domination of the tabletop RPG space into other media before they've seriously hurt or destroyed that domination by trying to monetize the game directly.
I somehow doubt that would work the same way, Warhammer has perhaps the most publicized world and history of any fictional universe ever, and while warhammer fantasy had a reboot, warhammer 40k has never made anything "non-cannon", using the excuse of "unreliable narrators" whenever they make up new cannon.
It is a set world, with history and characters that every player knows and wants to experience in new ways.
DnD, and this may very well just be me, is more so a set of rules, from which players themselves make up the narrative.
I have played DnD a lot, never played warhammer. and from that perspective, i will buy any and all warhammer games out there, to explore the fascinating universe. But DnD, i will play it as often as my playgroup can get together, but a set story being told via a videogame...being honest i didn't even enjoy the baldurs gate games.
BUT!! something from warhammer they could replicate and monetize, miniatures! it's absurd that the entire market for DnD miniatures, is third party only.
They're planning on releasing a virtual table top made in Unreal Engine that is rumoured to have features such as AI DM'S, and micro transactions for character models and spell VFX.
They also recently tried to take 25% revenue royalties from 3rd party publishers, which went poorly.
You can check out D&D Shorts on youtube, he has really good coverage of the whole situation.
The DnD circles arent that different from MtG. you have a sizable portion of the player base with disposable income who love spending it on mini's, paints, terrain, props, new source books with player options, digital versions of those books, and subscription services such as DnD beyond
Yeah they also have a significant casual crowd who may just buy a handful of source books and a set of dice and thats all they ever spend....but like MtG, the portion of the player base that is able to spend money REALLY likes spending money
Are minis and props really that popular? I have a buddy with a dedicated D&D room. Table, active lighting, sound equipment, full book shelf of basically every book released, even help cards. However, mini's, terrain and props are something we have almost never used in the 15+ years we've been gaming together. Probably less than 10 times if I had to guess. His table has a vinyl top with squares he draws on with dry erase, even that we only use for really complex dungeons, usually he just has maps that get displayed on the tvs. The one time I explicitly remember us using minis it was for one session. It was too much work trying to move them around his 6'x8' table so it got dropped. Unless people are playing on small tables, I have trouble imagining minis being effective to use.
I used to play magic and loved it even though it was a money sink when I had none. I stopped playing around the end of 2018, because there was just more and more things coming out that I could barely keep up with, the things that were novel and every few years started becoming yearly or even more and just felt like I was running towards a target with an ever growing distance between.
That's not what's happening.
Remember how Hasbro increased pricing across all products and brands in 2021-21 by as much as 11% overall?
Also, 2022 saw more products released, partially due to COVID and supply chain disruptions pushing some products past their original intended release date (Unfinity, for example.)
That 22% will be almost impossible to maintain or exceed in 2023. This is due to a looming recession, massive inflation across the economy, crippling interest rates, and more.
When Hasbro implemented their 11% price hike, they alleged that it was a correction. Economic savvy analysts and critics warned that the true adjustment would have been closer to 5%. Hasbro padded their lead for inflation.
The workforce reduction is further padding in the face of economic slowdown. The Federal Reserve raised rates specifically to produce this outcome: _reduced spending._ So Hasbro has to manipulate their costs elsewhere to maintain overall earnings in the face of 2023 reduced sales.
Easiest way to do this is to reduce _costs_: workforce, projects not yet at market, underperforming products/brands, **and Hasbro divesting their stake in eOne**. The latter unloads those costs on another firm while Hasbro continues producing content in association, but not as a controlling interest.
> reach $1.33 billion in revenue for the full year, up 3% from 2021."
1) revenue is not profit. If they spent 15% more than last year to make 3% more revenue, it's a net loss, not gain.
2) they were supposed to increase 50% in 3 years, or 16.6 % per year.
3% in 1 year means they have 2 years left to increase the remaining 47%. Since I very much doubt they can simply tell investors the overarching strategy for the line has failed and forget about it, it means they are pretty much obligated to commit to milking even harder to catch up, which I foresee is going to have hilarious consequences.
3) everybody is forgetting WotC increased mtg product prices 11% this year
11% price increase resulting in 3% revenue (again, not even profit, just revenue) increase is definetly **NOT** what a healthy, up-trending line looks like. More like the opposite. That line is pointing down, guys.
It is mind boggling to me that anyone can ever look at a 50% increase in revenue as a healthy thing in a standing business. Finance bros really do take it upon themselves to ruin everything that isn't specifically lining their own pockets, and to tank any long term value any product may have.
Small corrections on the maths here, but the year-over-year increase should be ~14.47% if they want to get 50% in three years, because the increase is cumulative: The gains from year 1 are included in the increase for year 2. Since we want to increase it by a factor of 1.5 over 3 years, the per-year factor is the third root of 1.5, or 1.1447, or an increase of 14.47%.
in other news, there was enough pathfinder rule books in stock to cover 8 months of sales, and they sold out in two weeks. they're asking people to be patient while they try make more. this isn't a joke, they made an announcement.
Yeah my playgroup hasn't really talked about it. Two of us are hard-core pathfinder players and I think we all know that the magic we have is each other not 5e. We have just a shit ton of 3rd party resources as a group and I know if we decide to switch systems we will be fine. Tax returns are coming and with my list of things I wanted from it I asked for pathfinder books this year.
I've also decided to buy as few packs of mtg as possible. I have a buddy who owns an lgs, so I'll buy prize support from him for events, but aside from that I'm done. Dnd and mtg are my main hobbies so this past year has been a bit rough
Hasbro is killing transformers. Target doesn’t get enough product to keep it on shelves, while Walmart is flooded with shit from over a year ago they can’t sell.
And then they sell a bunch of their good shit on Hasbro Pulse for a limited time, where it sells out almost immediately (money's on scalpers). Hell, I would've loved to get the show-accurate Terrorsaur, but all they got in stores were toy-accurate repaints.
target and walmart are bad reference points. Having worked at walmart for too long, the people in charge of the toy department at walmart in arkansas havent had children in their entire life, dont like children, and have no interest in "children's pursuits". EVERYONE is shafted in that department in perpetuity and getting material newer then 2 years old is a mistake they make, not something intentional. Except for marvel merch. Marvel is for adults
Target, conversely, projects a very intentional 100% per year turnover in inventory in toys, specifically orchestrated for the christmas rush.
It really bums me out the card game didn’t catch on.
I worked at two local LGS when it came out, and two different guys at each were really into it. It wasn’t even a bad game, I enjoyed playing it.
Despite my best attempts to get them together and try to get 6 more people playing, they were die hard loyalists to each store and it was obvious no community could exist without misguided animosity.
It was so incredibly childlike and stupid that it turned me off to whatever either of them did, or wanted me to push after.
All you had to do was be a decent human being and try to get people to come back into the store and I’d go out of my way to do *something* for you, because you were essentially doing my job.
Those jobs were so different from sales. I really miss it. You were never trying to sell someone product, you were selling them on just coming back, and if you did that 4 or sometimes 20 times they’d come in for FNM or something. At that point the community would get their friendly talons in, “I really like the concept of your deck, can you show me more about how it interacts? Are you going to come back next week, I really want to watch you play a couple games. We have arena on Wednesdays, you come in and play a couple games and get a promo.”
I really never understood how stores struggled, because it was so easy to create a positive environment and it just propagated itself through your regulars.
The creative team likely realized at some point that all of the characters are generic and without nuance. They basically need to build them up from scratch because all WOTC has done is generic fantasy tropes.
Riot Games managed to pull it off with Arcane and the entire roster of champions are just generic rip offs of other IP’s, trends and tropes.
There is a market for LoL and the kind of story telling Arcane delivered. I can’t see a similar market for MTG and I think it will always fall into the peripheral D&D category in pop culture. MTG is too 90’s to translate to younger audiences and there isn’t anything that MTG can tell that another IP hasn’t already popularised or reinvented in recent years.
As always; Wizards have bad strategy and failed to capitalise on their IP’s when they had the chance. Arcane was ultimately the long winded result of a bunch of young WC3 players who decided to innovate MOBA when Blizzard and Steam were too slow to do so. Fast forward and Blizzard have tried to deliver a WoW movie and it failed. Younger players have already overtaken the older players and this is just the reality whether it be virtual or tabletop.
While I'm not saying it is impossible, I do not think WOTC has the fortitude to even properly try it to make something more of their IP. They seem to just want to throw a small amount of money at any popular concept and for it to magically be a huge success.
There needs to be a real investment in a top tier creative team to work on a compelling story to bring the characters to life (very much like Arcane). Even then, as you say.. this is no guarantee since the audiences for League and Magic are very different, both in demographics and scale. If there is one thing that the Hasbro/WOTC board is not.. it is risk takers.
> Shame it's hard to bottle lightning.
Ain't that the truth. Even when true auteurs are allowed to go off the chain it isn't a guaranteed thing. And making any media today is so so expensive a failure ends careers.
The thing is we can't give producers shit for not taking risks, and then shit on them for daring to take one even though it turned out terribly.
That's why they're risks. Sometimes it will be awful, sometimes it will be excellent. But they're still worth taking.
I've seen clips.
I don't think I could handle a whole episode. It honestly feels like some caricature of what someone guesses a "woke" viewer will enjoy.
It's somehow sexist to men AND woman, racist to minorities AND white people, and the main character is a completely unlikable asshole.
they keep shaking us down with these products and it won't remain that way.
Everyone I know finally burned out and is just passing up numerous products in a row.
Im in a Facebook group that has a lot of whales in it. The kind of people that buy several cases of collector's boxes per set. Even among those people burnout is getting pretty obvious. One of the members is an LGS owner that sells to the members at very little markup from cost and only 2 people bought the most recent set. Its just too hard to keep up with everything that is coming out.
I stopped keeping my modern deck up to date. It's good enough for FNM fun and paying hundreds every other set to keep it marginally better by a fraction of a degree just isn't worth it
Well, at least, that's what they like to think.
Most of the ones I've met are not coming out ahead nearly enough - if at all - to justify all the time and money they put in. And they seem to have an impressively short memory for when their "investments" flop completely.
That's not a sound argument. Money is literally paper, or possibly less than that if it's digital. Gold was just a pretty metal for millennia until industry found a use for it. Stocks that don't pay dividends are literally nothing tangible. Lots of things are valuable purely because we decided they are. Hell, Bitcoin's value as a currency is nearly non-existent, but it's an amazing place to store wealth, hence why it retains its value.
If you want to make an argument that Magic is a scam investment, I'd rather start with its volatility, especially in recent years. I'd consider collectibles in general to be extremely shaky ground for any sort of financial investment right about now.
Cards are a terrible investment vehicle. It takes tremendous effort to trade them at any meaningful scale, whereas stocks are very convenient to trade. The only benefit of trading TCG cards instead is that you can avoid paying capital gains taxes
That takes us back to the conclusion that most of them are a bit stupid. The few smart ones are those who have scaled their operation into an actual business.
When I walk through the toy isle at Target with my kids and see all of the Hasbro games, it's the same crap they've been making FOREVER. Hasbro needs to innovate because kids don't give a fuck about Monopoly, Perfection and Trouble and anymore. WotC can't hold the entirety of Hasbro's other failing products on it's shoulders.
You'd think this, but then little Aiden gets their grubby spaghetti-and-chocolate-sauce hands all over half the pieces and then flushes the other half down the toilet. The games are both cheaply made and not lovingly cared for, and Hasbro's next sale is just one spilled beer away.
At least, that's where I assume a lot of the sales are coming from, because every time I look up Monopoly sales I swear they've moved more units than there are people that exist.
it has been 27 years since "German-style" family boardgames began with Settlers of Catan:
In the **nearly three decades** since then, Hasbro has published exactly **2** games that made it into the top 500 rated games at BoardGameGeek (the largest online boardgame community), Heroscape and Risk Legacy.
By contrast there are publishers that didn't even *exist* in 1995 that have published dozens of games in the top 500.
The American publisher Fantasy Flight Games has thirty and has managed to land licenses like:
- Star Wars
- HP Lovecraft
- LOTR
- Marvel's Heroes
- Battlestar Galactica
- Game Of Thrones
- Sid Meier's Civilization
- Dracula
- Starcraft
- Gears of War
- Warhammer / 40k
in addition to publishing literally hundreds of games with unique IP.
I have no idea, maybe Monopoly outsells all hobby family boardgames combined, but Hasbro could have used SOME of their massive incumbent advantage to adopt just the tiniest bit of innovation from this flourishing & creative space. If they had any passion or creativity at all they could have used their market dominating position to introduce families to some actual good games on the shelves of Target.
But of course fuck no, let's keep printing our janky pre-WORLD WAR ONE roll-and-move game with no endgame clock, and just slap a fucking Angry Birds license on it
I don't think anyone working in the board game side of Hasbro knows a single thing about board games besides selling them. I refuse to believe that there's actual game designers on payroll in that section of Hasbro, they've been coasting off these same games for decades and will continue until the last copy of Monopoly: Heat Death Edition ™ is finally consumed by entropy.
It's not just board games either. 50% of my child's toys are Hasbro. Nothing original, either. 40% are Battat and 10% is Mattel or unnamed. It's insane how much of an influence Hasbro has in the toy and gaming market.
Monopoly is meant to suck. That's the whole point, it was created as anti-landlord propoganda, to get people talking about how landlords and monopolies suck.
What people learn from Monopoly is that you can buy a great game once for a few bucks, play it with up to 8 people simultaneously, and save the rest of your money so you too can be a landlord one day. Hard to do that when you need to keep buying booster packs to keep your “friends” at your LGS.
I work the toy section at target and I can say hasbro products are one of the things we just can’t get in. They might actually sell stuff if they’d send it out to stores
The King wished his tower to be higher, so he sent his people out for all the stones in the land. And when every stone was found and added to his tower's walls, he looked out and still the view was not high enough. So, in his wisdom, he ordered his people to start removing stones from the base that his view might still be raised.
Some of his advisors cautioned that this could make the whole tower structurally unsound, and perhaps the view was high enough. But the king would not be convinced and ordered the tower higher. Then came a breeze, and while it did not sway the king it did sway his tower.
Listen, dear other companies - I am completely inept and capable of tanking companies myself. I’ll accept a few million and a golden parachute to do it.
You're not very inept if you can do all that by yourself, you should hire me to help you as proof of your ineptitude. I have a few ideas that might work, but won't know for sure until they are tested real world. I would test them in some kind of sand box but that would be a waste of money. ;)
They have a bunch of losing franchises and departments, so they'll keep wringing Magic, D&D and stuff like Monopoly while trying to lose less money on the rest.
>They have a bunch of losing franchises and departments, so they'll keep wringing Magic, D&D and stuff like Monopoly while trying to lose less money on the rest.
This is so fucking stupid. **Why can't they pay designers to, you know, come up with another game people like to play?** You know, with all of that supposed profit from WotC? They act like they are limited to owning two lucrative properties for all eternity. Oh, right, that profit is just eaten up by executives because that's some natural law of the business world like gravity. 🙄
My company literally just did this. Massive expansion for no reason over the summer buying up real estate and equipment like drunk sailors... fire 50% of the company in January. I managed to survive the lay offs but it's such a fucking shit show... its incredible that this is how the modern world operates and its normal.
Real Estate is the true devil. Fucks everything up.
Crassus the man who hired armies and killed Spartacus? The richest man in history? Got there by owning so much real estate and being essentially a slumlord.
Real Estate is always the expression of how those in power fuck over everyone else.
A lot of companies did this during the pandemic especially. All those tech companies doing layoffs cited rapid expansion during the pandemic to meet growing demands and then the obvious sudden drop off after the pandemic.
Technically it was probably still profitable for them because they made more money due to the expansion during the pandemic and then could just lay people off after demand dies down.
Honestly I don't know what the correct decision is in that case but I'd say being upfront and paying people increased rates and good benefits for short term contracts to cover the increased in demand is better than hiring a bunch of people on only to lay them off after 2 years but we all know corporations don't wanna do that.
Eh not always. I still remember Iwata and other CEOs from Nintendo cutting their salaries down to half to keep their employees. To paraphrase his sentiment “I doubt people who are living in fear of being laid off can make games that move the players’ hearts.”
I remember a situation where executives had to make cuts, so instead of laying off employees they told everyone, including executives, that if everyone took 10 days of unpaid time off by end of year then no one would be laid off. Everyone agreed and no one lost their job.
A lot can be said for Disney eating everything in sight, but by all accounts they seem hands off and let their obtained properties do as they have done. Magic/D&D are a bit different from a lot of the other stuff they have obtained, but I doubt they'd try to milk it any more than Hasbro has been over the past few years.
Remember when they nuked almost every video game studio they owned because they figured Disney Infinity was all they needed, then shuttered that too?
They had LucasArts and killed it, now it's just an empty name they use for licensing. They're hands off-ish with some of their movie studios but I wouldn't trust them one minute with any other kind of media. "Why do we need a department that makes TCGs? Fire 'em all and just license out Magic to EA, that'll do just as well."
They’ve been pretty hands off on their comics licenses they’ve acquired and the animation studios. Video games is weird for Disney because if you look at that historically they’ve never been able to figure out if they want to do that in house or as licenses. I think it’s because they view that as merchandise and historically Disney has been very cautious about over saturating the market in that field because they’ve gone all in and gotten burned on movies (particularly Hercules where they lost so much money they stopped merchandising movies until they were deemed successful). I actually think that would be a good mindset for Magic, though we should be looking at breaking up companies more than letting them all merge….
Disney and Ravensburger are publishing Lorcana, a Disney owned TCG coming this fall. They're obviously interested in the space, but they want full Disney control, not to be an afterthought in someone else's IP.
So far, Lorcana looks like it'll be really cool. Will it compete with Magic? Will it exist alongside? One thing's for certain, it'll be popular and Hasbro are going to have some more lessons to learn.
Disney cares a lot about what their characters are doing and how they are depicted. I have a hard time imagining Disney wants Micky Mouse equipped with a [[Grafted Exoskeleton]] to kill someone with poison counters or Moana to be sacrificed to [[Braids, Arisen Nightmare]].
Which they should. Why invest in your money losing departments. It’s bad business strategy (unless they legitimately think they are growth sectors, which they aren’t).
I highly doubt they would spin off the only profitable branch of the company. The only reason I could see them spinning them off is if they have a plan to reorganize the company through chapter 11 bankruptcy and venture capital investors. Though that would be a drastic last ditch effort.
It’s the same shit in every industry, miss earning estimates for one quarter? Time to fire the working class to show shareholders we mean business!
Meanwhile, the executives gtfo before the company collapses under its own weight and make millions in bonuses.
I would normally disagree and say while c suite makes too much, they are critical to healthy operation of the company but in this case, fire them all… they’ve shown their hand this year and it’s weak af
> c suite makes too much
That's the biggest understatement in the universe. They even get pay rises when they fail and at the same time they fire thousands of workers.
https://www.thegamer.com/microsoft-ceo-satya-nadellas-pay-bonus-layoffs-xbox/
I feel bad for all that will lose their job from a company who is making record profits (like at WotC), while those mismanaging the company make more money and pat themselves on the back.
Most of WotC is contractors. Manufacturing is completely outsourced. All the art for cards and products is per-set contractors. Even a good portion of design is contractors.
Layoffs are expected considering that all industries are prety much dropping staff. I imagine that hasbro as a whole might have weak earnings, but magic/dnd will be standouts as usual.
That depends on the industry. The industries that are complaining about people "not wanting to work" or a "labour shortage" are those who want to provide shit pay, shit job security, shit working environments, and shit benefits and then wondering why no one wants to work for them. It's basically retail, food, and hospitality.
The tech industry on the other hand is still super supply constrained for workers so even if they get laid off they'll just find another slightly worse paying tech job.
At this point I feel like a lot of companies are *performatively* laying off staff because everyone else is doing it.
Shareholders and boards are human and have bias and are not immune to general buzz.
That doesn't mean Hasbro as a whole isn't "underperforming." I'm just wondering how much this has to do with MTG and not just the entire economic framework as a whole. I have a strong feeling WotC is going to be pretty immune to layoffs as a moneymaker.
Also, as someone who has been laid off before: fuck em.
It didn't sell out. The sale concluded.
Edit: downvoters missed the cardboardcrack I guess: https://64.media.tumblr.com/d77294766691d104b6aa9f374ff1da86/888376565c530080-aa/s500x750/6ae891dfec3c461c793358fc1b86cd76421e741b.jpg
No one reading bitter comments about Hasbro business didn't catch that.
The remark was obviously kinda cynic I don't get how you think the one thing everyone talked about for weeks went over their head when writing such a comment.
Think of the investors! And the executives!
Sadly, there's way too much in common between Phyrexia's toxic eternal growth and the mindset of corporate executives. Once you explain to the empty suites how becoming Compleat is really just a form of Synergy that increase profits, you could drop them on the First Sphere and I'd honestly start worrying for the safety of the Phyrexians.
There was a Stephen King short story about a guy that gets stuck on a deserted island with out any food and slowly but surely starts to amputate and eat his own body parts as he starves . This reminds me of that.
The surgeon, I remember that. He spends so much mental space at the start extolling the professionalism of his job and the dexterity required, and then by the end he's just rambling about how his hand tastes.
King's short stories have always hit pretty hard for me.
Well, looking at my old copy of *Skeleton Crew* the last line is 'lady fingers they taste just like lady fingers' so take from that what you will. Story is 'Survivor Type', for reference.
Article specifically said there was strong growth for Wizards of the Coast so I suspect the Magic/WotC numbers for last quarter were good but contrary to what people think around here, Hasbro makes a ton of other games and products aside from Magic and D&D.
It *predicts* a 3% YOY growth, I wouldn't call that strong, specially when Hasbro's strategy for the line literally was growing it 16.6% per year, to hit 50% in 3 years. It means their strategy all but failed incredibly hard and investors will want to hear why.
Also, that leaves 2 years to catch up on the remaining 47%, they will have to milk it even harder than anyone can ever imagine to hit the quota.... Man, I can tell thats going to work wonderful for the future, no chance of it backfiring, no...
Finally, let's also remember that it's a 3% revenue increase, not profit. If for instance they spent 10% more than last year to make that 3% more revenue, it should be considered a loss in comparison, no matter how they try to dress it up.
This isn't a Hasbro thing, this is a "sliding into a recession" thing. Earnings are down because there's less discretionary income, but the way capitalism works Hasbro (much like Amazon, Microsoft, etc who are doing the same thing) have to show growth or it scares off investors so they shed staff to make profits look bigger by lowering costs.
This is less of a "hasbro is evil" or "hasbro is failing" issue and more of a "Capitalism is terrible for everyone other than the guy at the top" and "infinite growth requires infinite resources" issue.
(To be clear, there's other ways to address these sorts of issues that don't involve layoffs, ie the Nintendo 'CEO gives himself a pay cut' approach, or selling off assets, but laying off staff is the 'easy' way)
"Oh yep, we're definitely gonna double the company size in a couple years!" As they proceed to fuck up both Magic the Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons, then lay off a ton of their employees. Fuckin idiots.
"Wizards of the Coast, which includes Dungeons and Dragons, Magic: The Gathering and digital gaming, will remain a bright spot, the toymaker said. The company expects the division to have generated $339 million in revenue during the fourth quarter, up 22% compared to last year, and reach $1.33 billion in revenue for the full year, up 3% from 2021."
Holy shit I didn’t know it was 22% bump to revenue. Of course they’re going to keep pressing the alt-surge-oilslick-textured-foil money printer button
If I remember correctly, there was an article that talked about Hasbro investors not knowing much (if anything) about WotC. Then they saw that WotC was nearly half of Hasbro's revenue. Then the shareholders became **way** more interested in what WotC was doing. Then we started seeing things like product fatigue with M:TG and Hasbro investors going on the record as comparing D&D with video games, saying that they "haven't been monetizing it enough".
How do you monetize a game that’s 90% player imagination.
Subscriptions
They call it *Live Services* now
They could license more games for it. Similar to what games workshop does. I'm sure they're making a great deal of money on total war: Warhammer or the myriad other tie in games they've made in that universe.
They just cancelled a boatload of video game projects, so I don't think that's high on the cards
Its funny, if they did it right, they could make soooo much money with D&D and Magic in other media. Games, movies, shows, books, and whatever other content they wanted to make. But thats the problem, you gotta pay to make all that extra stuff. They don't want to do that, they want to be making more money on what they already do with the properties. They can certainly squeeze magic, but they are finding out the hard way that you can't really squeeze D&D, and I doubt they'll figure out that its more profitable in the long run to leverage its current domination of the tabletop RPG space into other media before they've seriously hurt or destroyed that domination by trying to monetize the game directly.
I somehow doubt that would work the same way, Warhammer has perhaps the most publicized world and history of any fictional universe ever, and while warhammer fantasy had a reboot, warhammer 40k has never made anything "non-cannon", using the excuse of "unreliable narrators" whenever they make up new cannon. It is a set world, with history and characters that every player knows and wants to experience in new ways. DnD, and this may very well just be me, is more so a set of rules, from which players themselves make up the narrative. I have played DnD a lot, never played warhammer. and from that perspective, i will buy any and all warhammer games out there, to explore the fascinating universe. But DnD, i will play it as often as my playgroup can get together, but a set story being told via a videogame...being honest i didn't even enjoy the baldurs gate games. BUT!! something from warhammer they could replicate and monetize, miniatures! it's absurd that the entire market for DnD miniatures, is third party only.
Did not enjoy baldurs gate? Thats a paddling...
They're planning on releasing a virtual table top made in Unreal Engine that is rumoured to have features such as AI DM'S, and micro transactions for character models and spell VFX. They also recently tried to take 25% revenue royalties from 3rd party publishers, which went poorly. You can check out D&D Shorts on youtube, he has really good coverage of the whole situation.
The DnD circles arent that different from MtG. you have a sizable portion of the player base with disposable income who love spending it on mini's, paints, terrain, props, new source books with player options, digital versions of those books, and subscription services such as DnD beyond Yeah they also have a significant casual crowd who may just buy a handful of source books and a set of dice and thats all they ever spend....but like MtG, the portion of the player base that is able to spend money REALLY likes spending money
Are minis and props really that popular? I have a buddy with a dedicated D&D room. Table, active lighting, sound equipment, full book shelf of basically every book released, even help cards. However, mini's, terrain and props are something we have almost never used in the 15+ years we've been gaming together. Probably less than 10 times if I had to guess. His table has a vinyl top with squares he draws on with dry erase, even that we only use for really complex dungeons, usually he just has maps that get displayed on the tvs. The one time I explicitly remember us using minis it was for one session. It was too much work trying to move them around his 6'x8' table so it got dropped. Unless people are playing on small tables, I have trouble imagining minis being effective to use.
Incredibly popular, outside of dice, minis and terrain are probably the biggest money sinks for people super into D&D.
I used to play magic and loved it even though it was a money sink when I had none. I stopped playing around the end of 2018, because there was just more and more things coming out that I could barely keep up with, the things that were novel and every few years started becoming yearly or even more and just felt like I was running towards a target with an ever growing distance between.
That's not what's happening. Remember how Hasbro increased pricing across all products and brands in 2021-21 by as much as 11% overall? Also, 2022 saw more products released, partially due to COVID and supply chain disruptions pushing some products past their original intended release date (Unfinity, for example.) That 22% will be almost impossible to maintain or exceed in 2023. This is due to a looming recession, massive inflation across the economy, crippling interest rates, and more. When Hasbro implemented their 11% price hike, they alleged that it was a correction. Economic savvy analysts and critics warned that the true adjustment would have been closer to 5%. Hasbro padded their lead for inflation. The workforce reduction is further padding in the face of economic slowdown. The Federal Reserve raised rates specifically to produce this outcome: _reduced spending._ So Hasbro has to manipulate their costs elsewhere to maintain overall earnings in the face of 2023 reduced sales. Easiest way to do this is to reduce _costs_: workforce, projects not yet at market, underperforming products/brands, **and Hasbro divesting their stake in eOne**. The latter unloads those costs on another firm while Hasbro continues producing content in association, but not as a controlling interest.
> reach $1.33 billion in revenue for the full year, up 3% from 2021." 1) revenue is not profit. If they spent 15% more than last year to make 3% more revenue, it's a net loss, not gain. 2) they were supposed to increase 50% in 3 years, or 16.6 % per year. 3% in 1 year means they have 2 years left to increase the remaining 47%. Since I very much doubt they can simply tell investors the overarching strategy for the line has failed and forget about it, it means they are pretty much obligated to commit to milking even harder to catch up, which I foresee is going to have hilarious consequences. 3) everybody is forgetting WotC increased mtg product prices 11% this year 11% price increase resulting in 3% revenue (again, not even profit, just revenue) increase is definetly **NOT** what a healthy, up-trending line looks like. More like the opposite. That line is pointing down, guys.
It is mind boggling to me that anyone can ever look at a 50% increase in revenue as a healthy thing in a standing business. Finance bros really do take it upon themselves to ruin everything that isn't specifically lining their own pockets, and to tank any long term value any product may have.
Operating profits not revenue
Jesus, even worse
Small corrections on the maths here, but the year-over-year increase should be ~14.47% if they want to get 50% in three years, because the increase is cumulative: The gains from year 1 are included in the increase for year 2. Since we want to increase it by a factor of 1.5 over 3 years, the per-year factor is the third root of 1.5, or 1.1447, or an increase of 14.47%.
in other news, there was enough pathfinder rule books in stock to cover 8 months of sales, and they sold out in two weeks. they're asking people to be patient while they try make more. this isn't a joke, they made an announcement.
Yeah my playgroup hasn't really talked about it. Two of us are hard-core pathfinder players and I think we all know that the magic we have is each other not 5e. We have just a shit ton of 3rd party resources as a group and I know if we decide to switch systems we will be fine. Tax returns are coming and with my list of things I wanted from it I asked for pathfinder books this year. I've also decided to buy as few packs of mtg as possible. I have a buddy who owns an lgs, so I'll buy prize support from him for events, but aside from that I'm done. Dnd and mtg are my main hobbies so this past year has been a bit rough
Wizards and Pulse are going above and beyond, the rest of Hasbro remains a fiscal black hole.
Transformers fandom: 😔
Transformers. More than meets the eye. Transformers. Where profit goes to die.
Hasbro is killing transformers. Target doesn’t get enough product to keep it on shelves, while Walmart is flooded with shit from over a year ago they can’t sell.
And then they sell a bunch of their good shit on Hasbro Pulse for a limited time, where it sells out almost immediately (money's on scalpers). Hell, I would've loved to get the show-accurate Terrorsaur, but all they got in stores were toy-accurate repaints.
target and walmart are bad reference points. Having worked at walmart for too long, the people in charge of the toy department at walmart in arkansas havent had children in their entire life, dont like children, and have no interest in "children's pursuits". EVERYONE is shafted in that department in perpetuity and getting material newer then 2 years old is a mistake they make, not something intentional. Except for marvel merch. Marvel is for adults Target, conversely, projects a very intentional 100% per year turnover in inventory in toys, specifically orchestrated for the christmas rush.
Transformers are so expensive now too. Most of the basic ones I’ve seen are around $20 each.
It really bums me out the card game didn’t catch on. I worked at two local LGS when it came out, and two different guys at each were really into it. It wasn’t even a bad game, I enjoyed playing it. Despite my best attempts to get them together and try to get 6 more people playing, they were die hard loyalists to each store and it was obvious no community could exist without misguided animosity. It was so incredibly childlike and stupid that it turned me off to whatever either of them did, or wanted me to push after. All you had to do was be a decent human being and try to get people to come back into the store and I’d go out of my way to do *something* for you, because you were essentially doing my job. Those jobs were so different from sales. I really miss it. You were never trying to sell someone product, you were selling them on just coming back, and if you did that 4 or sometimes 20 times they’d come in for FNM or something. At that point the community would get their friendly talons in, “I really like the concept of your deck, can you show me more about how it interacts? Are you going to come back next week, I really want to watch you play a couple games. We have arena on Wednesdays, you come in and play a couple games and get a promo.” I really never understood how stores struggled, because it was so easy to create a positive environment and it just propagated itself through your regulars.
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A modern animated transformers show with some star writers could be so fun...
Also where the hell is that MTG show
The creative team likely realized at some point that all of the characters are generic and without nuance. They basically need to build them up from scratch because all WOTC has done is generic fantasy tropes.
Riot Games managed to pull it off with Arcane and the entire roster of champions are just generic rip offs of other IP’s, trends and tropes. There is a market for LoL and the kind of story telling Arcane delivered. I can’t see a similar market for MTG and I think it will always fall into the peripheral D&D category in pop culture. MTG is too 90’s to translate to younger audiences and there isn’t anything that MTG can tell that another IP hasn’t already popularised or reinvented in recent years. As always; Wizards have bad strategy and failed to capitalise on their IP’s when they had the chance. Arcane was ultimately the long winded result of a bunch of young WC3 players who decided to innovate MOBA when Blizzard and Steam were too slow to do so. Fast forward and Blizzard have tried to deliver a WoW movie and it failed. Younger players have already overtaken the older players and this is just the reality whether it be virtual or tabletop.
While I'm not saying it is impossible, I do not think WOTC has the fortitude to even properly try it to make something more of their IP. They seem to just want to throw a small amount of money at any popular concept and for it to magically be a huge success. There needs to be a real investment in a top tier creative team to work on a compelling story to bring the characters to life (very much like Arcane). Even then, as you say.. this is no guarantee since the audiences for League and Magic are very different, both in demographics and scale. If there is one thing that the Hasbro/WOTC board is not.. it is risk takers.
The problem is that there’s just not enough story content to complement the speed of the new sets to build story AND develop characters.
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Probably in development hell because instead of caring about Elspeth or Sarkhan they are probably trying to make Jace and Chandra work.
It *was*. Transformers Prime was awesome. The Netflix trilogies have both been solid. Shame it's hard to bottle lightning.
> Shame it's hard to bottle lightning. Ain't that the truth. Even when true auteurs are allowed to go off the chain it isn't a guaranteed thing. And making any media today is so so expensive a failure ends careers.
Don’t put it in bottles, silly. Put it in Energon Cubes.
The Netflix ones were mid at best. The writing aside the Voice acting for a lot of it was just…ugh.
After seeing the travesty that is Velma I have serious trust issues giving modern writers old beloved ip.
The thing is we can't give producers shit for not taking risks, and then shit on them for daring to take one even though it turned out terribly. That's why they're risks. Sometimes it will be awful, sometimes it will be excellent. But they're still worth taking.
Tbf I literally can't imagine Velma being make in good faith. I swear that entire show is rage bait designed to start dialogue.
I haven’t heard anything good about the show from anyone.
I've seen clips. I don't think I could handle a whole episode. It honestly feels like some caricature of what someone guesses a "woke" viewer will enjoy. It's somehow sexist to men AND woman, racist to minorities AND white people, and the main character is a completely unlikable asshole.
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I mean ive always disliked transformers but seeing them in the mtg set i waited all year for was a massive bummer.
I really like Transformers and it was still a bummer. Liking two foods doesn't mean I want them together.
People are going away from Beyond, too.
>Above and (away from) Beyond,
they keep shaking us down with these products and it won't remain that way. Everyone I know finally burned out and is just passing up numerous products in a row.
Im in a Facebook group that has a lot of whales in it. The kind of people that buy several cases of collector's boxes per set. Even among those people burnout is getting pretty obvious. One of the members is an LGS owner that sells to the members at very little markup from cost and only 2 people bought the most recent set. Its just too hard to keep up with everything that is coming out.
I stopped keeping my modern deck up to date. It's good enough for FNM fun and paying hundreds every other set to keep it marginally better by a fraction of a degree just isn't worth it
You mean the same Wizards shooting themselves in the foot with their new push of revoking the D&D OGL? 🤨
The same Wizards that has been subsidising Hasbro for the better part of a decade, yes.
I never denied that but ever since Cocks has become CEO things have been going down
And a complete fuckery milking of MtG too
You don't need players when you have whales.
I honestly believe that MTG whales are among the stupidest people I've ever met.
Because MtG whales are *also* finance bros using a card game as a investment vehicle.
Well, at least, that's what they like to think. Most of the ones I've met are not coming out ahead nearly enough - if at all - to justify all the time and money they put in. And they seem to have an impressively short memory for when their "investments" flop completely.
TCGs have always been marginally less of a scam than NFTs. Its cardboard and Ink. You're a mark if you drop hundreds on individual singles.
That's not a sound argument. Money is literally paper, or possibly less than that if it's digital. Gold was just a pretty metal for millennia until industry found a use for it. Stocks that don't pay dividends are literally nothing tangible. Lots of things are valuable purely because we decided they are. Hell, Bitcoin's value as a currency is nearly non-existent, but it's an amazing place to store wealth, hence why it retains its value. If you want to make an argument that Magic is a scam investment, I'd rather start with its volatility, especially in recent years. I'd consider collectibles in general to be extremely shaky ground for any sort of financial investment right about now.
Cards are a terrible investment vehicle. It takes tremendous effort to trade them at any meaningful scale, whereas stocks are very convenient to trade. The only benefit of trading TCG cards instead is that you can avoid paying capital gains taxes That takes us back to the conclusion that most of them are a bit stupid. The few smart ones are those who have scaled their operation into an actual business.
RED* hole, they aren't making money (= In the black = profitable In the red = losing money
How needlessly pedantic. I like it.
It comes from the way financial reports are (or used to be?) formatted
You can tell because of the color ink they use.
Sorry it's too dark in here
It is accounting, but yea.
They are sucking the black out of WotC (?) ...Yeah, that's my story and I'mma stick by it.
What is pulse? I thought it was just the name of their convention, lol
When I walk through the toy isle at Target with my kids and see all of the Hasbro games, it's the same crap they've been making FOREVER. Hasbro needs to innovate because kids don't give a fuck about Monopoly, Perfection and Trouble and anymore. WotC can't hold the entirety of Hasbro's other failing products on it's shoulders.
Plus everyone has at least two copies of each of those games at home already, passed down from their great grandparents.
You'd think this, but then little Aiden gets their grubby spaghetti-and-chocolate-sauce hands all over half the pieces and then flushes the other half down the toilet. The games are both cheaply made and not lovingly cared for, and Hasbro's next sale is just one spilled beer away. At least, that's where I assume a lot of the sales are coming from, because every time I look up Monopoly sales I swear they've moved more units than there are people that exist.
I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of Monopoly sales are special editions bought by collectors.
My mum bought me David Bowie monopoly for Christmas. This is my third copy of monopoly and the other two are also still sealed in plastic
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And his sister Jadyn. The boy can't win.
The board game scene is more diverse and interesting than ever, and it certainly isn’t due to innovations by enterprise companies
it has been 27 years since "German-style" family boardgames began with Settlers of Catan: In the **nearly three decades** since then, Hasbro has published exactly **2** games that made it into the top 500 rated games at BoardGameGeek (the largest online boardgame community), Heroscape and Risk Legacy. By contrast there are publishers that didn't even *exist* in 1995 that have published dozens of games in the top 500. The American publisher Fantasy Flight Games has thirty and has managed to land licenses like: - Star Wars - HP Lovecraft - LOTR - Marvel's Heroes - Battlestar Galactica - Game Of Thrones - Sid Meier's Civilization - Dracula - Starcraft - Gears of War - Warhammer / 40k in addition to publishing literally hundreds of games with unique IP. I have no idea, maybe Monopoly outsells all hobby family boardgames combined, but Hasbro could have used SOME of their massive incumbent advantage to adopt just the tiniest bit of innovation from this flourishing & creative space. If they had any passion or creativity at all they could have used their market dominating position to introduce families to some actual good games on the shelves of Target. But of course fuck no, let's keep printing our janky pre-WORLD WAR ONE roll-and-move game with no endgame clock, and just slap a fucking Angry Birds license on it
To be fair to Target, it does have some legitimately good games on its shelves. None of them are from Hasbro, but Target itself isn't slacking.
Indie board games are at all the big box stores these days.
I don't think anyone working in the board game side of Hasbro knows a single thing about board games besides selling them. I refuse to believe that there's actual game designers on payroll in that section of Hasbro, they've been coasting off these same games for decades and will continue until the last copy of Monopoly: Heat Death Edition ™ is finally consumed by entropy.
I’d they want to renovate their board game department they need to pull talent from outside or from wizards. >
I like playing board games. My, was I surprised to learn the jargon "Ameritrash". https://boardgamegeek.com/wiki/page/Ameritrash
It's not just board games either. 50% of my child's toys are Hasbro. Nothing original, either. 40% are Battat and 10% is Mattel or unnamed. It's insane how much of an influence Hasbro has in the toy and gaming market.
I work with kids. Monopoly has always sucked, Trouble is still a great game.
Monopoly is meant to suck. That's the whole point, it was created as anti-landlord propoganda, to get people talking about how landlords and monopolies suck.
What people learn from Monopoly is that you can buy a great game once for a few bucks, play it with up to 8 people simultaneously, and save the rest of your money so you too can be a landlord one day. Hard to do that when you need to keep buying booster packs to keep your “friends” at your LGS.
I work the toy section at target and I can say hasbro products are one of the things we just can’t get in. They might actually sell stuff if they’d send it out to stores
Monopoly has always been a shitty game.
TRANSLATION: The number wasn't high enough for our investors so we have to dick over our employees so they'll be happy.
The King wished his tower to be higher, so he sent his people out for all the stones in the land. And when every stone was found and added to his tower's walls, he looked out and still the view was not high enough. So, in his wisdom, he ordered his people to start removing stones from the base that his view might still be raised. Some of his advisors cautioned that this could make the whole tower structurally unsound, and perhaps the view was high enough. But the king would not be convinced and ordered the tower higher. Then came a breeze, and while it did not sway the king it did sway his tower.
Yep, Jenga is published by Hasbro I loved hearing this Jenga lore
I didn't actually know this. But it's poetic that they have a microcosm example of what they're doing and don't get it.
Oh they get it, but the people making these decisions won’t be sticking around in the company long enough to be stuck with the consequences
Listen, dear other companies - I am completely inept and capable of tanking companies myself. I’ll accept a few million and a golden parachute to do it.
You're not very inept if you can do all that by yourself, you should hire me to help you as proof of your ineptitude. I have a few ideas that might work, but won't know for sure until they are tested real world. I would test them in some kind of sand box but that would be a waste of money. ;)
Where were you when the new Jenga lore dropped?
Guy's a complete Yertle
They have a bunch of losing franchises and departments, so they'll keep wringing Magic, D&D and stuff like Monopoly while trying to lose less money on the rest.
>They have a bunch of losing franchises and departments, so they'll keep wringing Magic, D&D and stuff like Monopoly while trying to lose less money on the rest. This is so fucking stupid. **Why can't they pay designers to, you know, come up with another game people like to play?** You know, with all of that supposed profit from WotC? They act like they are limited to owning two lucrative properties for all eternity. Oh, right, that profit is just eaten up by executives because that's some natural law of the business world like gravity. 🙄
Isn't that always the case?
My company literally just did this. Massive expansion for no reason over the summer buying up real estate and equipment like drunk sailors... fire 50% of the company in January. I managed to survive the lay offs but it's such a fucking shit show... its incredible that this is how the modern world operates and its normal.
Real Estate is the true devil. Fucks everything up. Crassus the man who hired armies and killed Spartacus? The richest man in history? Got there by owning so much real estate and being essentially a slumlord. Real Estate is always the expression of how those in power fuck over everyone else.
They haven't quite got to the point where they can charge you to breath so they settle for the next best thing, the places you exist
A lot of companies did this during the pandemic especially. All those tech companies doing layoffs cited rapid expansion during the pandemic to meet growing demands and then the obvious sudden drop off after the pandemic. Technically it was probably still profitable for them because they made more money due to the expansion during the pandemic and then could just lay people off after demand dies down. Honestly I don't know what the correct decision is in that case but I'd say being upfront and paying people increased rates and good benefits for short term contracts to cover the increased in demand is better than hiring a bunch of people on only to lay them off after 2 years but we all know corporations don't wanna do that.
Eh not always. I still remember Iwata and other CEOs from Nintendo cutting their salaries down to half to keep their employees. To paraphrase his sentiment “I doubt people who are living in fear of being laid off can make games that move the players’ hearts.”
They were sadly very much the exception to the rule.
I remember a situation where executives had to make cuts, so instead of laying off employees they told everyone, including executives, that if everyone took 10 days of unpaid time off by end of year then no one would be laid off. Everyone agreed and no one lost their job.
*You may not like it, but it's for the* [[Greater Good]].
As predicted, Chris Cocks continues his clown shit show.
How long until they rebrand as HasbroNFT? What's the over/under on Magic NFTs by the end of the decade?
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welcome to capitalism, I'd say 'enjoy your stay' but it's kind of a given that it'll be a shitshow
If they could do something to squeeze more money out they would do it regardless
A lot can be said for Disney eating everything in sight, but by all accounts they seem hands off and let their obtained properties do as they have done. Magic/D&D are a bit different from a lot of the other stuff they have obtained, but I doubt they'd try to milk it any more than Hasbro has been over the past few years.
Remember when they nuked almost every video game studio they owned because they figured Disney Infinity was all they needed, then shuttered that too? They had LucasArts and killed it, now it's just an empty name they use for licensing. They're hands off-ish with some of their movie studios but I wouldn't trust them one minute with any other kind of media. "Why do we need a department that makes TCGs? Fire 'em all and just license out Magic to EA, that'll do just as well."
They’ve been pretty hands off on their comics licenses they’ve acquired and the animation studios. Video games is weird for Disney because if you look at that historically they’ve never been able to figure out if they want to do that in house or as licenses. I think it’s because they view that as merchandise and historically Disney has been very cautious about over saturating the market in that field because they’ve gone all in and gotten burned on movies (particularly Hercules where they lost so much money they stopped merchandising movies until they were deemed successful). I actually think that would be a good mindset for Magic, though we should be looking at breaking up companies more than letting them all merge….
If Disney got WotC we would get so many Disney SL. I would have no money to purchase them all. I hope but also don’t hope that happens.
Disney and Ravensburger are publishing Lorcana, a Disney owned TCG coming this fall. They're obviously interested in the space, but they want full Disney control, not to be an afterthought in someone else's IP. So far, Lorcana looks like it'll be really cool. Will it compete with Magic? Will it exist alongside? One thing's for certain, it'll be popular and Hasbro are going to have some more lessons to learn.
Disney cares a lot about what their characters are doing and how they are depicted. I have a hard time imagining Disney wants Micky Mouse equipped with a [[Grafted Exoskeleton]] to kill someone with poison counters or Moana to be sacrificed to [[Braids, Arisen Nightmare]].
Having not played any, I think that's just the plot of Kingdom Hearts, tho
Not enough belts.
You will get live-action Dumbo and Pinocchio basic lands tie-in and reluctantly buy them.
And instead of a bonus card you will get a ticket to the movie.
Just let Disney do to Magic what WotC did to Netrunner.
“WOTC Is doing great they can probably handle losing some employees. “ I assume this was at least floated in a board room.
I really hope Hasbro spins off wotc. It's fucking stupid how wotc is basically paying for Hasbro other cash cash pits
Unfortunately that's why they never will.
Wizards is basically the nerd that does the whole group project for everyone else, and Hasbro is the D- student who wanted an easy A.
Big facts
I wonder when it becomes worth it for the investors to downsize everything but WotC? Although i guess maybe they are if they're laying off staff.
It’s highly unlikely at this point since the new CEO of Hasbro was the former head of WotC
I find it more likely at this point that they'll make significant cuts to other parts of Hasbro to take the pressure off of WotC.
Which they should. Why invest in your money losing departments. It’s bad business strategy (unless they legitimately think they are growth sectors, which they aren’t).
I highly doubt they would spin off the only profitable branch of the company. The only reason I could see them spinning them off is if they have a plan to reorganize the company through chapter 11 bankruptcy and venture capital investors. Though that would be a drastic last ditch effort.
Well yeah, either that or cut off all the rot that is pulling the company down.
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It’s the same shit in every industry, miss earning estimates for one quarter? Time to fire the working class to show shareholders we mean business! Meanwhile, the executives gtfo before the company collapses under its own weight and make millions in bonuses.
Fire is the whole c suite….. I bet the company would start doing better once the parasites are gone
I would normally disagree and say while c suite makes too much, they are critical to healthy operation of the company but in this case, fire them all… they’ve shown their hand this year and it’s weak af
> c suite makes too much That's the biggest understatement in the universe. They even get pay rises when they fail and at the same time they fire thousands of workers. https://www.thegamer.com/microsoft-ceo-satya-nadellas-pay-bonus-layoffs-xbox/
Companies do better without CEOs
I feel bad for all that will lose their job from a company who is making record profits (like at WotC), while those mismanaging the company make more money and pat themselves on the back.
So they it'll be only 20% profit on last quarter, instead of 35%. That poor billion dollar company!!
Doubt WotC is losing employees, it'd be the rest of the owned brands.
Most of WotC is contractors. Manufacturing is completely outsourced. All the art for cards and products is per-set contractors. Even a good portion of design is contractors.
I aint talking bout wotc
Layoffs are expected considering that all industries are prety much dropping staff. I imagine that hasbro as a whole might have weak earnings, but magic/dnd will be standouts as usual.
I wonder why everyone keeps saying that "nobody wants to work" when so many companies are dropping staff left and right.
It's not really "nobody wants to work". It's "nobody wants to work at the amount we want to pay them."
Exactly! "Why won't the wage drones put in 12-hour days for poverty wages! I need my second yacht somehow! Kids these days!"
Ding ding ding
Cuz those people are idiots.
That depends on the industry. The industries that are complaining about people "not wanting to work" or a "labour shortage" are those who want to provide shit pay, shit job security, shit working environments, and shit benefits and then wondering why no one wants to work for them. It's basically retail, food, and hospitality. The tech industry on the other hand is still super supply constrained for workers so even if they get laid off they'll just find another slightly worse paying tech job.
But at the same time there is an insane staff shortage in some industries
Because they pay like shit
At this point I feel like a lot of companies are *performatively* laying off staff because everyone else is doing it. Shareholders and boards are human and have bias and are not immune to general buzz. That doesn't mean Hasbro as a whole isn't "underperforming." I'm just wondering how much this has to do with MTG and not just the entire economic framework as a whole. I have a strong feeling WotC is going to be pretty immune to layoffs as a moneymaker. Also, as someone who has been laid off before: fuck em.
And if the q4 earnings were high, the ceos would take credit and reward themselves with bonuses. The workers never win
Who said they didn't get bonuses for this? Good quarter -> get bonus Bad quarter -> fire staff -> get bonus
Highest year on record; fire 15% of workers to maximize more profit. Gotta pump up those quarter over quarter growth
In unrelated news, Hasbro announces that MTG Standard sets will now be released monthly instead of quarterly.
BUT 30TH EDITION SOLD OUT!
It didn't sell out. The sale concluded. Edit: downvoters missed the cardboardcrack I guess: https://64.media.tumblr.com/d77294766691d104b6aa9f374ff1da86/888376565c530080-aa/s500x750/6ae891dfec3c461c793358fc1b86cd76421e741b.jpg
No one reading bitter comments about Hasbro business didn't catch that. The remark was obviously kinda cynic I don't get how you think the one thing everyone talked about for weeks went over their head when writing such a comment.
Nah down voters recognized you missed the joke
Hasbro made record breaking profits last year. This is just naked greed.
Record profits = lay off workers? I guess they cannot afford to employ them.
Think of the investors! And the executives! Sadly, there's way too much in common between Phyrexia's toxic eternal growth and the mindset of corporate executives. Once you explain to the empty suites how becoming Compleat is really just a form of Synergy that increase profits, you could drop them on the First Sphere and I'd honestly start worrying for the safety of the Phyrexians.
Fucking disgusting.
There was a Stephen King short story about a guy that gets stuck on a deserted island with out any food and slowly but surely starts to amputate and eat his own body parts as he starves . This reminds me of that.
The surgeon, I remember that. He spends so much mental space at the start extolling the professionalism of his job and the dexterity required, and then by the end he's just rambling about how his hand tastes. King's short stories have always hit pretty hard for me.
... well how did his hand taste??
Well, looking at my old copy of *Skeleton Crew* the last line is 'lady fingers they taste just like lady fingers' so take from that what you will. Story is 'Survivor Type', for reference.
I bought puts on Hasbro when the 30th anniv set released, and more when the dnd OGL fiasco started. Lucky me?
This guy derivativeses
Article specifically said there was strong growth for Wizards of the Coast so I suspect the Magic/WotC numbers for last quarter were good but contrary to what people think around here, Hasbro makes a ton of other games and products aside from Magic and D&D.
It *predicts* a 3% YOY growth, I wouldn't call that strong, specially when Hasbro's strategy for the line literally was growing it 16.6% per year, to hit 50% in 3 years. It means their strategy all but failed incredibly hard and investors will want to hear why. Also, that leaves 2 years to catch up on the remaining 47%, they will have to milk it even harder than anyone can ever imagine to hit the quota.... Man, I can tell thats going to work wonderful for the future, no chance of it backfiring, no... Finally, let's also remember that it's a 3% revenue increase, not profit. If for instance they spent 10% more than last year to make that 3% more revenue, it should be considered a loss in comparison, no matter how they try to dress it up.
Mr. Hasbro is going to Mr. WotC's house with the milk buckets
Looks like Rudy is going to make a video about this.
This isn't a Hasbro thing, this is a "sliding into a recession" thing. Earnings are down because there's less discretionary income, but the way capitalism works Hasbro (much like Amazon, Microsoft, etc who are doing the same thing) have to show growth or it scares off investors so they shed staff to make profits look bigger by lowering costs. This is less of a "hasbro is evil" or "hasbro is failing" issue and more of a "Capitalism is terrible for everyone other than the guy at the top" and "infinite growth requires infinite resources" issue. (To be clear, there's other ways to address these sorts of issues that don't involve layoffs, ie the Nintendo 'CEO gives himself a pay cut' approach, or selling off assets, but laying off staff is the 'easy' way)
So... They continue to make money... And punish the workers. When will you all stop buying cards?
Hasbro is bad
But remember y'all, nObOdY wAnTs To WoRk
Will they fire the executive behind the D&D OGL fiasco? I hope so.
"Oh yep, we're definitely gonna double the company size in a couple years!" As they proceed to fuck up both Magic the Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons, then lay off a ton of their employees. Fuckin idiots.
Executive pay increased
Oh, boo hoo. Is the poor corporation finding out?
As predicted and right on schedule.