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Layoffs at WotC
Abies writes "During last year or so, quite a lot of people were fired from WotC - current owners of the D&D line. A few days ago, _most_ of big names out there had to quit - including Skip Williams and Jeff Grubb. Official WotC press info, Enworld news about that and a Monte Cook thread contain some more detailed info.
Do you think it will spell an end to D&D ? After something which seemed to be a ressurection of old-time RPG, Hasbro seems to kill the biggest RPG company out there. Will OGL and the D20 license be enough to preserve the genre ?"
does this mean my mox cards will be worth more now?
American executives layoff employees to amuse themsleves and for sport; just to show who the boss is. "Planes just the the world trade center! Quick! Layoff 20% of the employees!" Is it any wonder why America is so hated?
Hey! This article wasn't here, last time I checked, about 3 seconds ago.
Remember folks - roleplaying is about together creating characters and a world. The roleplaying system you use can help you to get there, but it is not the important part. In fact, it is very possible to use a very simple system, or even no system at all. As long as your Game Master is fair, and you players play for the fun of it instead of trying to 'win' somehow, the sky is the limit!
RPG's as a genre won't go away, I promise you. There are always MUDs (Multi-user dimension/dungeons) which people can play. Play is free and you make as many characters as you want. Runs on telnet, so you can do it from any OS. My personal favorite is Imperial, at telnet://imperial.modeemi.cs.tut.fi:6969. They also have a web page at that address, minus the port. It is supported by the goodwill of the founders. There are thousands more - www.mudconnector.com. Cheers!
I once shot a man who posted too many, "Imagine a beowulf cluster of these"
They didn't get kicked out of their parent's basements. They would be really screwed then.
WotC has been one of the primary examples of how a company can destroy something via greed. They destroyed magic for christ's sake! The most popular, addicting thing until Everquest hit the shelves, and they killed it over greed. Surely you didn't think they could do much better with D&D, something that isn't nearly as popular or addictive?
The name is too popular to kill off. While if every one leaves the company or gets laid off, this is a bad thing, the name and games will live on. it has a strong fallowing.
I think it just means there wont be new rules and systems as much anymore since the main guys are leaving stage left.
WotC killed itself by trying to force people to keep buying what they already own.
Whether it be for D&D, Magic: The Gather, or one of their other drugs.. er games.
The D&D genre will survive, at the very least because Hackmaster is still out there. Granted, it's extreme power gaming, but it's fun in small doses.
Finding God in a Dog
Jeff Grubb has left WotC to focus more on his writing. His story, "Apocalypse Noun," is being included in the upcoming Thieves' World: Turning Points collection of short stories, due out this November. He is also currently working on the final WARCRAFT novel, The Last Guardian.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Give me a break.. the OGL is not as open as people would think, and the D20 license is worse than an EULA . You know that WOTC has patented "Levelling up" right? They've got freaking patents on character development through levelling.
WotC was the worst movie I've ever seen. Lucas raped my childhood!
WotC has to do what Hasbro tells it, and Hasbro is in its death throes. They're now worth a third of what they once were, and that number isn't going up.
Apparently WotC's art department got gutted like a fish. I don't presume their precious card games are going to recover any faster, at this point.
I am a science fantasy fan
Seeing as I'm sure I'll piss off one person or another with my views, everything typed below is IMHO, so take it with a grain of salt, or bottle of vodka :)
:)
Just from my own prior experience, the most fun I had roleplaying was from 4th-8th grades, where do to admin policy, even if we had had the money to buy a set of RPG books, we could've gotten suspended (or so I heard) for bringing them on-campus.
Furthermore, the worst cheating I've ever run into roleplaying was OL, because regardless of the rules, the GM can do whatever the hell they want anyhow and trying to argue rules with them will just get you kicked off.
So in conclusion, unless you're doing it for bragging rights or something, RPG systems are like windows.. they're pretty, and helpful for newbies/those without imaginations of their own, but they really just waste time and resources better spent on what you're doing
When layoffs are needed, it is always easier to fire some people across the country than the guy down the hall.
-Donut
Apparently the Epic (levels higher than 20) rules D&D are already designed so they have their next cash cow in the bag already. Licensing for D&D and continuing Magic sales will keep them profitable for quite some time, given they don't have any expensive employees anymore.
Its just business. Short-sited myopic business maybe, but not surprising at all. Hasbro is still in business while the much of the competition isnt. The employees can always invent a new game, become hugely popular, and sell out to Hasbro again.
Bitter?
I used to work at a WotC store... and let me tell you... we saw this from the inside out... Sure magic used to be fun but when it changed into having to buy 200 dollars worth of cards every 6 months or less it was less fun and more painful. and the ONLY way to keep up was to buy new cards.. WotC ensured that by removing older cards from the game. atleast with D&D you could buy the basic books and go from there. I have a feeling Hasbro is collectivly crapping them selves right now seeing their 'Wunderkind' failing... I think its that people don't want to spend 200 bucks when ever a new set comes out so they can have the latest uber card so they can win in a tournament.
I see the amount of money people of all ages spend on Magic - the Gathering and other WotC Gaming supplies. I've watched 12 year olds drop 200 bucks buying boxes of the newest sets. The interest in these games seems to grow and grow. I wonder where all losses are that provoke the company to lay off the lifeblood of thier industry, the artists who conceptualize these ideas that millions of people catch onto!
going to go up in a puff of smoke or something?
An RPG is nothing but a set of rules, a framework, around which a campaign is built. The rules have already been published. If people wish to play D&D they will continue to play D&D no matter what the hell happens at or to WotC.
Hey, remember the days when a single human being could carry all the rules to D&D without the aid of a forklift? In his *pocket?* Go get a copy of those rules somewhere, Xerox them if you have to, it'll just make them look more authentic anyway, and then find come creative type with a good *imagination* to run the show. All the players need are some pencils and graph paper.
Does the genre need to be preserved? Only if we've sunk so low in our society that college kids these days can't have fun sitting around the commons and * making cool shit up!*
KFG
DnD's going downhill anyway. It's time for newer, hungrier developers and game companies (like White Wolf) to shine.
"leveling up" appeals to a certain segment of the RPG community. Yet there are others who prefer emphasizing role-playing, and for whom gaining experience and levels isn't that important. Finally, there are also plenty of games whose main selling point is being "level-less"; character advancement is accomplished through other means, usually gaining distributable ability points according to actions during the game.
... or immediately lose your job. On the other hand, if the rumors I've heard in the industry about WotC's downhill slide are true, it's good that a bunch of talented designers are now free to look for positions elsewhere. These are all good folks, and I'm sure they'll land on their feet elsewhere.
"This is your world. These are your people. You can live for yourself today, or help build tomorrow for everyone."
Does anyone have another quarter? Otherwise i have to get funions...
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
If WoTC's plans are to get all these people to come back as freelancers, they're screwed. Microsoft caused a law in Washington to be enacted where dismissed employees cannot freelance for the same department for 1 year. Art department: gutted. RPG R&D: gutted.
I also read last night that WoTC's entire RPG operation may be for sale, with one interested party being Jordan Weisman. See this thread on the RPG.net message boards.
WotC announced its big contest for a new gaming world months ago. This isn't surprising. They fired the original game world owners to make room for new staff and a new setting that they can make pure profit on without coughing up cash to the original setting creators.
I grew up playing Basic D&D (the 1981 Basic & Expert sets, then the 5 boxed sets, then the Rules Cyclopedia), but this new edition feels radically different, and I wouldn't call it D&D. It has too much rules minutia, and the game has left its roots of wonder and fantasy to become bogged down in rules. As far as I'm concerned, D&D died in 1996 when they cancelled the Rules Cyclopedia.
Now that was truly inspired. Well done sir!!!
SHAD0W's Law of determining the outcome of a Magic game:
The winner will be the person with the most disposable income.
I remember back when Wizards announced the D20 system. They had an "interview" or something like that on their site, describing it. And one of the points they made on their site was that D20 could be used to design a system that was completely level-free.
:D) sufficiently advanced in D&D that they know how to adapt D20 to be level-free? Or do you know someone else that already did that?
Is anyone here (well, duh, of course
Oh, you mean will D&D software survive. That has nothing to do WotC. They only control things that are called D&D. Example:
A long time ago a undergrad name Michael Toy used the D&D fighting system and monster stats to create a Curses game called Rogue, the predecessor to NetHack. (Ignore Glenn Wichmann -- he's a legend in his own mind.) TSR didn't care for this, of course, and sicced their lawyers on him. The only result was that all the names got changed to non-D&D things. Which was actually an improvement -- there's no place in the D&D universe for my own favorite player character, the Tourist
Bottom line -- you don't need the media monopolies to play games, any more than you need them to make music. Pity about Farscape though.
The only thing d20 still needs is a good set of software tools for GM's who like to run the game from their laptops, and due to the open nature of d20, I'm sure a lot of amitious hackers are going to fill that void anyway.
As long as WotC offered these guys a nice, fat severence package as a way of saying "thanks" for their efforts, I have no problem with seeing them cut loose.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
now, you're only saying that because you haven't met the Star Wars dorks yet. If you think D&D players are smelly and have no life then you have definitely not had the unfortunately opportunity to gag on the rancid stench of Star Wars fanboys. thier feotid odor is magnified by thier habit of gobbling up whatever pap gets farted out of the ass of GL, because to a rancid fanboy GL's crap is divinely imbued and can lead you to greater understanding of the dumbed-down California Orientalism known as the "force" (much like aum shinrikyu nutballs gobbled up bits of thier guru's bathwater for the same reason)
If you should find yourself in unfortunate situation of "roleplaying" with creepy SW cretins, remember that everyone should feel honoured to line up to suck the cock of the jedi, because jedi are just sooooo cool and every stupid thing is sanctioned because well, they are jedi.
No, your Chainmail rules will not dissapear. I will continue to play D&D with my friends. But if it will stop to be marketed this year, then in few years people will not understand what you are talking about when you will say AC.
;). To really develop you need a fresh look. And I doubt you can expect thousands of teenagers to look into archives for back issues of not-longer-developer games. These thousands are not important, but some of them will turn into really good GMs and players.
Of course, some people don't care. If they can play with their old time friends, it's ok. But from my experience (not much, I do NOT have original chainmail on my shelf - I play RPGs for only 15 years), fresh blood is very refreshing experience (not Vampire pun intended
Now, it is not so grim - there will be other RPGs out there. If somebody would be a good D&D DM, he will also probably make good DM in other games. But certain genre of RPG - high heroic, strict rules for even very powerful characters, etc, is for me tightly tied to D&D. Even if I sometimes prefer 'deeper' sessions, I and my friends really enjoy being able to developer a HERO from 1st level up to ultimate dragon-slaying king. And I'm afraid, that with D&D demise (which is not yet sure of course), this type of RPG would die.
Is that failing as well? It seems to be me they went about it completely the wrong way.
Magic is a fun challenging game... if you can afford to spend at least $300-$600 a year on it or can bargain like a madman. People stop playing because they got tired of the upgrade treadmill and seeing their old cards more or less become useless.
So, for the on-line version, what do they do? They make an even worse version of that flaw! You have to pay full retail for virtual cards. I never paid that much even with the real ones. I would buy by the box at a substantial discount. That's how I stayed in it for so long. This just ensures people burn out sooner.
I think if they had merely charged $10/month for access to all the cards, they would've done insanely well. Over a year, it probably adds up to about the same as the booster approach for many people, but that whole year I would've been able to build any deck I wanted.
As it is, I'm staying the fuck away from it. It's a pity. I really liked the first computer version of Magic the Gathering.
michael, learning to write/edit headlines/blurbs that are more appropriate for Weekly World News?
Ever heard of GURPS? White Dwarf? Hell, I go to the local comic book shop, look at their collection of RPG stuff, and see shelf after shelf after shelf of stuff I've never heard of. And the owner claims she sells at least a little bit of it. So someone is playing it.
The only RPG I've ever played is D&D. But such is not the case for many gamers. D&D is a subset of RPG's, not the other way around.
Newsflash: slashdot fires michael! Will slashdot cease to exist? Is this the end of crappy headline sites?
No. It's a chance to get rid of the trash.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Failed saving throw versus unemployment.
I have a good friend who was commissioned to do a 'magic: the gathering' card for WotC. When he told me about it I thought he'd get some big bucks for it, but he didn't. He got about $4,000. I'm not an artist and I don't buy or sell art. It's just my opinion as an independent contractor that that was pretty cheap.
It took him about 2 months to finish the work. He had to research former art and make sure his phyrexians (sp?) looked right and such. My point here being it took some effort to meet the standards. It's not like he just whipped out some cool fantasy art and they bought it.
I guess the pay is good considering he's an unknown and the original work was only 8"x10"ish; But, this all happened just about at the peak of Magic and I know I spent way more money on cards then I should have. How much can cards cost to print?
Anyway, it must be a great portfolio peace but $4,000 doesn't go real far in Seattle. Where did the money go exactly? To only a very few people I guess.
Following the Disney model of creating "intellectual property jerky," Hasbro could simply coast on the names of WotC's Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering properties for some time.
return;
Well, if DnD needs recruiters to survive, it's in trouble with or without WoTC! When was the last time you saw a recuirter for Monopoly? How about checkers?
And the biggest bonus, if you learn to play nethack, you'll be an expert at navigation in VI (it uses the same keys, but you don't have to).
Whores of the Church? Friggin assholes who assume everybody will know what their lame-ass acronyms are all about need beaten severly with a clue-stick.
All you have to do is come up with a system to buy skill points and attribute points directly with a certain amount of experience instead of buying a level with experience. (Some D20 games like Spycraft already allow trading in experience points for other things, like emergency cash while on a mission.) Probably would take less than half an hour to sit down and work something out.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
RPG is not dieing, its just ascending to it new plane! Computer Games! What made great RPG gaming sessions now makes greater LAN parties! What was once brain rendered, now the latest and greatest GFX's cards make real before our eyes. Its just natural that PnP RPG declines, they will become the poor mans "computer games."
Software RPGs are so powerful that most of what was only possible in the human mind is now being done in games like Neverwinter Nights, War Craft 3, and Ever Quest. While the software versions of RPGs still haven't been made easy enough to run a campaign, its getting easier with each new version of the software. And also the people who play the games are becoming more computer literate. Plus with all the online games it becomes much easier to play when you want to play, and not have to convince all your usual gamming buddies that going out to score with some chicks on a Friday night is stupid as you're running a great AD&D campaign.
It mightn't be long before you see things like GURP RPG PC software where the basic rules system can be tweak for each module, and the importation of graphics can come from 3d software packs like Milkshake and other 3D software. It would be amazing to see a GPL'ed RPG game where all the rules and graphics could be imported and the community builds the game. It's already happened with games like: Half-Life and all versions of Quake. NWN is trying to be the RPG version of Quake, and it might just get there.
But for PnP diehards it is a sad time. Soon the Pens will run dry and the paper recycled, but the computer RPG will keep the flame burning in living memory of all those great times had.
This is going to end badly... the first goatse.cx link just appeared. So did 'a concerned parents' plea with the admins.
I think the reason we're seeing these layoffs is that Hasbro wants a profit margin similar to the one they had when Pokemon and MTG were at their prime, when D&D3 was first released and selling like mad. But Pokemon's popularity is waning, and just about everyone who wants D&D3 has it by now...so they're not making as much money, and something has to go.
Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast ("Hazards of the Coast"?) already sold GenCon to Peter Adkinson, the ousted ex-President of WotC. Perhaps before long they'll sell the RPG stuff to him, too.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Hey that D&D movie was a winner!
Too bad you didnt choose a good story and good actors. You could have been the Spiderman.
WTC you suck! Your like what is happening to baseball. Ignore the fans and eventually you are left with a bunch of overpaid players.
WotC's having a hard time of it, but it's been indicated that they plan to just use more freelancers - they've already done this with some people they laid off, like Monte Cook. Between this and the Open Gaming License, support for D&D will always be available.
That said, the biggest progress in RPG's lately has been from smaller, independent creators. Check out The Forge - tons of people all working on their own creator-owned games.
No one will know to click that link. But what no one knows is that you can embed images in the page. So if someone were to directly link that img... oh my.
...Hasbro faked the accounting irregularities because WotC was meeting their financial projections? It's being suggested there was a contract which said Hasbro couldn't meddle inside the company unless they missed certain numbers.
Hasbro's quarterly reports seem to indicate that Wizards were hitting their numbers, keeping their parent afloat, but not turning in big enough profits (Pokemon or Magic levels) to pull Hasbro out of its disastrous tailspin.
Looks pretty suspicious: Layoffs at the profitable division.
Anyone know the scoop? Surely someone recently laid off can post anonymously.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
it is literally prehistoric.
You want prior art, centuries old?
*King me!*
KFG
I know this might sound harsh. but after roleplaying for nearly 15 years, D&D just doesn't offer anything interesting anymore. I used to play it when I was 10 and thought all that there was to RPGs was hack an' slash, but that was a long time ago.
There are some nice odds and ends that came out of TSR - I personally thought that Ravenloft, Darksun and Planescape were interesting attempts to breath new life into the increasingly stagnant fantasy genre, but look at how bland the rest of the backgrounds are: Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Birthright - footnotes to Tolkien at best., they are nothing more than cashcows. The D&D system just plain sucked, still does, and if you just want to do hack an' slash then there are plenty of multiplayer computer games such as Diablo II, Everquest, and even the biosphere offerings will more than fill your needs and are probably much more fun. Or why not just do wargaming instead - Games Workhop and other cater to this market just fine?
The reason that roleplaying keeps me interested theses days is the background, complex plots, characters and interesting players/GMs - the sort of interactivity that computers games will not yet achieve for some time to come. Look at the two biggest RPG companies aside from WotC: Whitewolf and Steve Jackson Games:
Love or hate it (which I do in equal amounts) WW has done much more to actually build interesting and innovative fictional environments for roleplaying with the World of Darkness and Trinty Universe lines than TSR/WotC has ever managed with various flavours of D&D. They sell not because the system, but because of the content and quality of the background material.
Likewise, GURPS is popular not because of the system, (although it is a much better attempt at a universal system than D&D3 will ever be) but because of the hugh range of excellently written background books -regardless of what system you like to use, even if you hate the system, many of the books are still highly entertaining, and useful.
The opensource game license is an interesting idea, but I believe ultimately flawed. They are working from the premise that getting into RPGs is hard because there are so many systems and they are so different to learn - their solution is that we all use the D&D system and so don't have to learn new systems for different genres of play and then everyone can then write their games for the largest possible market (D&D system). The problem with this is that one system doesn't suit all types of games, all types of genre and all types of groups!
If you are into interesting system mechanics then look at Phage Press' Amber Diceless Roleplaying games (set in Zelazn'y Chronicles of Amber Universe), or Jonathan Tweet's Everway RPG, based on using vision and fate card. Both are truely unique and interesting games because the systems facilitates storytelling. The first time that we played Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu was a milestone for our gaming group: WHAT WE CAN'T JUST KILL THE ENEMY? We had to actually think about innovative ways to defeat the enemy while avoiding combat!
Our group LIKES there to be different flavours of rules for different types of games we play - hell most of the games we play these days barely require any rules: the ROLEplaying of characters is what is important not the ROLLplaying of dice! Do the roleplaying community a big favour and let D&D die!
The only people promoting roleplaying (pens and paper, dice) are the players, been the same since the series began.
:)) never will.
Who ever saw a D&D Tv ad? It is one of the best examples of viral marketing.
So what, they have laid off the fat cats, who's crying?
The thing about WOTC is that anything it sells (as illustrated by the cards) is an upgrade squarely aimed at kids, as some other posters have mentioned, the real roleplaying stuff is free, your are only buying someone elses worlds (you can make your own), like ravenloft e.t.c.
WOTC always seemed to me to be a lot like the WWF, a load of shitty hype, i wouldn't mark their entire demise with more than a fart, hell, if i was a wizard, i would have disintegrated their sorry ass a long time ago.
Off topic:
I used to play dungeons and dragons as a kid, one of the guys brothers was much older than us 13 year old kids and his younger bro used to run the games.
He was (is?) a great artist and used to draw each of our characters onto our sheets for us, its a magical thing for kids, far beyond what disney could ever offer, immersion wise.
The WOTC are selling access to imagination, nothing more, all these cards and shit have diluted the experience IMHO of roleplay, the bubble's burst for these guys, thats what they get for not extending their products and the imaginations of their customers, quick buck, yes please now they are out on their ass, fair enough i say.
If i travel somewhere i always go to the newsstand in the airport or rail station, if i see a copy of Dragon, i buy it. I can then sit and read it, knowing i am expanding my imagination.
These WOTC guys put too heavy a price on it, let them die, your imagination (if you have one
Awesome work guys.... come back for more fun next week. Same place same time, I thinejk.
Please tell us what WOTC stands for. We aren't fucking smelly geek pussies.
As a role-player of some 25 years experience, in one sense I am glad to see WotC going through some troubles. Their products are *INCREDIBLY* expensive these days, for what they are, and the fact that they "Open Sourced" the D20 system has just given other companies the scope to charge ludicrous prices also.
The D20 Call of Cthulhu game is crap! WotC have released it simply to destroy Chaosium's hold on CoC, yet it is an inferior product. (Yes, Microsoft syndrome hits the role-playing world). On, and Chaosium do not get off lightly also because they only garner favour from me from the point of view of quality; they are still rip-off merchants for over-pricing.
Finally WotC also suck for not giving away earlier D&D material but attempting to charge for electronic copies in PDF format. Most software companies (with the exception of Gates' corrupt empire)give away older versions of software freely, on magazine cover-disks, etc.
Good riddance to bad rubbish. The sooner the rip-off merchants like Games Workshop, WotC and Microsoft curl up and die, the better.
Sorry to be nitpicky, but the Online Gaming League is the only OGL that I know of, and I don't see what it could possibly have to do with the Open Gaming Foundation. I mean seriously, the first person shooter geeks shouldn't be confused with the d&d dorks. They at least deserve that much.
They've already cleaned it up. I'm sure they're very pleased with your idea right now.
Corporate marketing people will always concede that the ultimate promotion is word-of-mouth. They do their best to create this, but they'll readily admit that it's mostly beyond their control.
Another parallel with DnD: in both games, players tend to improvise rules not approved by the publishers. In Monopoly, most players make the fine revenue into a prize you get by pulling a card at the right moment. (This change makes the game too random for my taste, but most people seem to like it.) And of course, serious Dungeon Masters use the TSR books as departure point, not a bible. In both cases, game is sustained by a critical mass of enthusiasts, not by corporate marketing.
There is always LARP
One thing I miss from Rogue/Nethack's time-sharing days: it's pretty hard to share data files. Nothing more fun than finding the corpse of one of your friends and getting to plunder all his stuff!
WotC's marketing? Hah! When WotC bought out TSR D&D was already a thriving "product." TSR didn't "market" D&D, they made it available for purchase.
So who did the marketing? The DM's and players, that's who. No, I don't expect teenagers to look into archives for back issues of no longer developed games. I expect to go out and actively recruit them to play a game whose basic framework has already *been* developed and which we as players flesh out for our own enjoyment. The whole point of an RPG is that the *players* do their own development. An RPG is not a "product," it's an imaginative, interactive *game.*
If game playing were left to the "marketing" of some corporation chess and checkers not only would have been dead centuries ago, they never would have existed in the first place!
The rules to D&D really did fit in your pocket once upon a time. In fact they were simple enough that it would be a practical undertaking to memorize them. Publication is a non-issue, just as it is with Chess. Just as with chess the rules are known by one and passed by direct transmision to others.
What will kill the RPG genre? One and only one thing, which I have already alluded to. When college kids will only play games that are "marketed" to them with rules that are "under development" in order to get them to buy the same product over and over and over again. When they can't take a loose framework and develop their own game *themselves*, then the RPG genre will die.
When this happens we'll have far more to worry about than RPGing.
KFG
Morrowind is a prime example of that.
I however like the idea of levels because it helps gauge character development. How do you know you're doing well unless you have some sort of measuring stick.
Anyway... good point
Annoying is an understatement. Ever read/see "Misery"? Where John (the writter) points out how having different paper would make the typing job eaiser, and Anne (the woman nurse) goes off?
Anne is like the Gods of Merentha. If you are not kissing their asses, they go off.
What is the patent number so we can review this "patent" ?
Good Luck to all the folks who were laid off and are going to receive "career transistion services and support."
:-/
I was one of Wotc's laid off employees and they never provided any career transition services and support even though I received a letter from the company stating I would. Unfortunately, it was a big lie.
My two cents,
Rondi Patterson
Former Regional Representative
Wizards of the Coast
From this page. It's sad too see this stuff...
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
WotC damaged intelligent gaming beyond repair. I feel no pitty what so ever for the company being bought by Hasbro after buying or chrushing nearly *every* RPG and Game Publisher in the buisness and then getting into shallow water.
Magic and the following Wave of Trading Card games - that what made WotC turn from a 3 Person company into a 300+ company - drained an entire generation from a then solid culture of Pen and Paper RPGs with a substancial diversity. I'm feel sorry that those times had to pass so quickly.
Damn WotC and their Magic, Pokemon and all that crap...
(just the 2 cents of an old school gamer)
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Reports of the great mage Elminster applying at a Local Seattle McDonalds are coming in. Many witnesses say they saw him standing in line for a job application practicing his lines, 'Would you like fries with that?'
More as the story breaks.
-THIS SPACE FOR RENT!
Look at all the things that happened once WOTC was sold to Hasbro. There have been constant layoffs ever since the buyout. The Origins convention management went back to a previous company, Gen Con is leaving Milwaukee for Indianapolis next year. Recently, Gen Con was sold off to Peter Adkinson, the former head of WOTC. There were rumors of all sorts of doom and gloom at the last Gen Con I went to (speaking of which really lacks in the organization department, its always chaos as far as registration, etc.) I think I got out of M:tG and D&D just in time; bummer is that I'm stuck with 14K of cards and a couple D&D manuals that I will have to sell off on ebay for a pittance compared to what I could have gotten two years ago.
Checked around on some of the business sites and the general idea is that Hasbro is run by bean counters. They are very good at hording the money they make from their hits, when the hit runs dry they cut staff and anything else to save money and wait for the next hit. Then they ramp up and take it for all it's worth and then start over again. It ain't pretty, but it works for GM and Ford.
I've played Kill Dr. Lucky, The Big Idea, and Brawl, and liked them all, and heard good things about a lot of the rest.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Reasons why there is less corruption on the patent side of the pitch than on the copyright side:
1. Copyright power is concentrated in about a half-dozen enourmous rich greedy bstrds; patent is spread across thousands of large rich greedy bstrds.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
Hasbro bought in for Pokemon.
With Pokemon decline, they looked for ways to make money from their purchase. Thus...
1) Sell off computer game rights.
2) Pare down business to the core games. (SW, Pokemon, D&D, Magic, and....oops.)
3) Remove high-end costs - long-term WotC employees usually, that are more likely to command higher salaries.
4) Trim down often.
Hasbro isn't interested in learning the gaming industry habits. Their purchase model is "Buy once, play a couple times or many, just buy." Their goal is not long-term success for a company they bought - they're faithful to the bottom line. (They're brutually honest about it - they are dipping into Wizards, which "very likely" *cough* out-performed its other companies/departments - not profitable enough.)
WotC shareholders sold to Hasbro - probably knowing at least some of this would happen. I wouldn't want to saddle Peter & Co, for the rest of their years, maintaining a monolith...selling it off has to be okay. The purchase of TSR, saved TSR from an earlier death. Who knows? Maybe Hasbro would have bought it, killing it immediately. (And it's not like OGL is something they would grok.)
I remember that in the years I played D&D, AD&D, Star Frontiers, and a handful of other RPGs, I wasted the most money on AD&D books because they are chocked full of crap nobody ever really uses in game play. What I mean is, it's about weapons and combat and who can honestly say they didn't end up making up their own bastardization of the rules just to keep the roleplay flowing? Who really runs the whole tedious AD&D combat sequence?
The genre isn't dead. I have friends developing a streamlined game system that keeps all the stuff you want in a fantasy RPG, but leaves out all the complicated unwieldly combat rules (which I vaugely remember evolved out of a naval combat boardgame) that turn roleplaying into arguments about how to roll dice in a particular situation.
I'll cheer if the D&D books go out of print, and the copyrights go undefended. That's because they trademark stupid things like "halfling" because the Tolkien pricks trademarked "Hobbit". It's stupid. Besides, all my old tattered and rotting books may eventually be worth something then...
All I know is that if D&D books go out of print because WoTC goes out of business before anyone (who cares) buys up the rights, it won't stop the old fogeys. Nobody *REALLY* needs any new D&D rules (D20) anyways. Everyone always ends up making things up as they go along, and that's fine with or without WoTC.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
Campaign worlds appeal only to those who use those worlds (obviously :) or those wanting a complete collection. Splatbooks (the crunchy class/clan-specific handbooks) are only useful to players using that class. Sales get smaller and smaller, while the cost of production doesn't drop (and may increase due to smaller print runs!)
The only ways to really keep making money are:
Releasing more splatbooks and campaign-specific minutia
Using "meta-plots" to make every book critical to the entire gaming line
Selling consumables like dice, miniatures, paint, character sheets and other forms
Having a MMORPG that extorts^H^H^H^H^H^H^H charges a monthly fee for each character
I wouldn't be surprised to see a D&D-based MMORPG in the next couple of years. Given the huge amounts of money that other companies are making (and the steady revenue stream), I would say that it's almost inevitable.
D&D is too valuable to disappear from the market entirely. It may change hands several times, but between name recognition and player base it's worthwhile for someone to save. I think sales are reflecting the economy right now, and when things get better (read: geeks get back into high-paying positions) RPG sales will improve.
Jeesh, I get so annoyed when people harp about how this or that corporation is killing their favorite hobby. Sure, HAS may be a big bean counter corporation, but they still have managed to keep SOMETHING of TSR's legacy alive. Not to mention actual GOOD GAMES like Risk 2210, Axis & Allies (in three versions), etc...
But ultimately, if it doesn't make money NOBODY is going to publish it and we all lose.
I just came from Gencon - the Open Gaming License has hugely envigorated D&D from where it was just 4 or 5 years ago. Hundreds, and hundreds of compatible products are out there.
Wake up.
you'll get my DMs guide when you pry it from my cold dead Gauntlets of Ogre Power.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Things come and go...
Sure, I remember having fun playing D&D as a teenager. But that doesn't mean that I should be sad that its a market that isn't doing so well anymore. Ultimately, its a business. THEIR business. Things get replaced. Things go out of style. Oh well.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
You should ammend that with "Between two players of equal caliber, the winner will generally be the person with the most disposable income."
Magic is one third skill, one third deckbuilding and one third luck.
Thanks to the Internet, getting a good deck design isn't that difficult; it's simply getting the cards themselves that's difficult. That's where *money* comes in.
Don't kid yourselves that this isn't true, everyone. Even years ago, when I still played MtG, people were complaining about "TheDojo symdrome"; where people would check theDojo for killer decks and then build/buy them. I don't know how true this is for Magic now, but at the time, Magic was being dominated by combo decks that required very little skill or luck to pull off two or three turn kills.
Money is a *huge* factor and in the right tournament environment, it can be the only factor.
As for the people who say "Just play Draft or Sealed", I'm sorry, but not everyone can afford to drop $20+ to play a single tournament. Even if it doesn't affect the actual gameplay, money is a barrier to actually *playing*.
My entire group got tired of the upgrade treadmill and seeing their cards be relegated to infrequent extended tourneys. And this was at the University of Washington, just *blocks* from WotC's (now defunct) game center!
What did we play instead of Magic? Pinochle and Great Dalmuti. Don't laugh. With the right group of people, Pinochle can be an exciting, fast paced, fun-to-watch card game.
I picked up the original Cyberpunk rpg at a game con 10+ years ago. Their combat system Friday Night Fire Fight was an exhaustive statistical work culled from numerous reports on inner city gun usage- most "fire fights" were in dark alleys, a few quick shots exchanged at close range and they weren't very "successful."
So they had an incredibly indepth system that was a bitch to use.
When Cyberpunk 2020 came out they revised the combat. It was like pure heaven. It was easy! You pointed and shot, you said bang, your gun said "bang", damaged got doled out and you were done. They also completely vamped up their net-running section. And we had hours of fun.
If you want realism, walk outside. Otherwise give me streamlined, bastardized, home brewed specifically for our current campaign.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
> Do you think it will spell an end to D&D ?
D&D died years ago. In Jr. High we used to play D&D, then we moved on to AD&D with its cool hard bound books and pages and pages of charts. At first we tried to follow the rules, actually use encumberance, spell and weapon timing, treasure tables, etc. But we found that they started to get in the way of the fun of the game. We started dropping them and replacing them with our own ideas until eventually we were playing our own game and just telling others it was AD&D to keep them from getting confused. (They were anyway, but that is a different story). After the second edition rules came out we dropped the pretext of even playing AD&D.
These days I play with a group of friends who are starting to publish their own Role Playing Game, igsgames. Their rules don't get in the way of the important part of game, Role Playing. No pages of charts to remember, etc.
Now where was I going with all that... oh yeah. D&D may be dead, but the RPG industry live and prosper, gaining new blood as an aging rules system dies (d20). And that is a Good Thing [tm].
RPGs will always survive the stupidity of their creators and CFOs. WOTC/TSR has been declared dead more times than I can remember. Steve Jackson Games is unfortunately brought back from the brink every year (bad management + evil owner = financial trouble). Seems they (most game company managers) have poor decision-making skills. It's too bad that talented people will have to find jobs in the noncreative sector for a while, but I'm not going to stop playing and I'll bet WOTC and Bioware will keep hooking me up.
All I can say is, D&D survived without Gygax, and it will keep going without Jeff Grubb and company. WOTC and Hasbro can both go out of business for that matter, and it won't stop anybody from playing.
It's well written and right on the matter:
http://montecook.com/anrant.html
who could seriously care about this shit? would rather piss on a spark plug.
YMMV, as usual. They simplified certain things (rules) but increased the complexity of the overall game. The "dumbing down" is superficial, IMHO. e.g. Go as a board game thas "simpler" (dumber?) rules than Chess, but could be a lot more complicated than it. Besides, I believe the simplication is WotC's MtG Division's decision, not Hasbro.
They've been announcing the imminent demise of Magic as long and as often as the collapse of the Internet. AFAIK, it is one of the one line of WotC products that have huge repeat sales as compared with just-buy-the-rulebooks-and-play D&D. How many times you've bought stuff for D&D as compared with the stereotypical Magic player?
Oh yeah, if it wasn't clear, I'm still spending $ on Magic, and I think it's better than ever. For the past year or so, any way.
The genre isn't dead. I have friends developing a streamlined game system [igsgames.com] that keeps all the stuff you want in a fantasy RPG,
Try Earthdawn. It has a slick (IMO) dice system and a great world setting. Living Room Games resurrected it after FASA killed it off; not long before FASA went belly-up themselves.
MMORPG's are a genre all to themselves. While I will willing attest to their addictiveness, they are nonetheless NOT in any respect RPG's.
I will use EverQuest as my example since I was an early beta tester for it and still grudgingly play it to this day.
They start out a great game. Everyone exploring, fighting things, trembling in fear of the "red con" out there on the horizon... people are friendly and everyone is more interested in the game than leveling.
Not so today. Once EQ went live to the public the quality dropped a hundred fold. All that is important is leveling to 60, joining the uber guild and keeping everyone else out of this dungeon or that plane. The game is like that because of the masses of people with no interest in RPG's whatsoever who play it to "win".
It will be only after I draw my last breath that MMORPG's dethrone a select group of friends, a bag of cheetos and a twelve pack of Mountain Dew. RPG's are superiour to online static games such as EQ and DAoC. Asheron's Call 2 may be different, but I guarantee you, even the dynamic world of AC and AC2 cannot compare to a GM's immagination and on the fly decision making.
It would be nice, if the people writing it could actually code. Instead, you get weekly bug fixes that are actually bug releases.
Clear, Dark Skies
"Elbereth Habeas Corpus!", cried the Armani-clad knight as he swung his +3 Firebrand (tm, registered, patent pending, copyright) down upon the arms of the bespectacled Mage, which at that moment were holding an open Holy Tome over one of the Demonic alters - a shaft of light and a macabre hum emanating from it's heart. A single word, "Xerox", emblazoned on the front...
There's a lot of insinuation about WoTC executive greed/money-grubbing going on - which may be the case, but it is also a very hard time for any business to stay afloat. Still, with the relative success of the d20 system, I expected WoTC to be in the black for some time (although I've heard it said that they only make money on the sales of Player's Handbooks - don't quite follow why.)
Monte Cook's rant has some fine points, but no specific names or facts about WoTC. It does seem that somebody has decided to squeeze the venerable D&D turnip, or perhaps killing the goose is a better analogy - ok, they're doing something they shouldn't be with farmyard items - let's leave it at that. Over the past 20 years (where are them wooden teeth, dad-gum-it!) I've had the pleasure of playing the following gaming systems:
- AD&D 1st and 2nd Edition (missed out on Chainmail!)
- Gamma World
- Traveler
- Top Secret
- Paranoia
- Gangsters
- Chill
- Arms Law/Claw Law/Spell Law
- Empire of the Petal Throne
- GURPS
- AD&D 3rd Edition
- Some others, but my Alzheimer's is acting up again...
Some of these games/rule systems were remarkably complete (sometime to a fault) - others were extremely simple. Still, the success of a given game never depended on just the rule system - it required a creative, fair, and well-paced DM (or what have you) to make it all work.So, what's my point? (Hey, this is /., do I need one?) Forget the gaming system. Get a good group of creative people together, crank out your own house-brew, and battle on.
If you see an Orc in the road, kill it.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo. -- James Klass
Seriously. I believe that they are just ousting the top paid people at WoTC to save some bucks.
Which might not be a bad thing, since I believe at this point they can keep D&D alive since they've probably got their "core rules" out. Now they only really need people to make modules and other supplemental material that doesn't require very much work compared to coming up with the d20 system.
D&D will more than likely survive for several years in the "3rd. Edition" format. It won't surprise me if Hasbro will be forced to sell WoTC or D&D off after a few years, however. This could lead to "4th. Edition..." but who knows when this will happen.
Even if they went out of business tomorrow, it wouldn't stop me from playing Dungeons and Dragons, since I have rules for both 2nd. and 3rd. Editions lying around. (Even though this seems to be blasphemy to some, I prefer 3rd. over 2nd... but that is a different discussion altogether).
The books are out there. There are still plenty of people who play 2nd. Edition and even 1st. Edition! People aren't going to stop playing D&D or other Pen and Paper RPGs because of stuff like this.
The thing is that I've heard the Epic Level Handbook was selling like mad. Maybe the figures I've heard are wrong. Or maybe Hasbro is playing B.S. corporate politics. Who knows?
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
I like it. :)
For that matter I predate Chainmail by a bit of a margin. I've got a copy of H.G. Wells "Little Wars" around here somewhere.
Yeah, they're starting to call me "The Grey Ponytail" these days, but at least I don't wear striped suspenders.
KFG
Well, if WoTC DO "kill" D&D (wich I find improbable and laughable), another game company -perhaps Parker Brothers or Milton Brothers- will simply buy the rights! Though let's hope that doens't happen.
Just about every *D&D book ever published has been scanned into PDF file. You can find them all over the place... So even if they go out of print, people will still be able to play.
Sorry to be redundant, but I think this argument benefits from restating the obvious:
I still play D&D with the same books I recieved as birthday presents TWENTY YEARS AGO. The only thing I've purchased repeatedly are new dragon dice! (How many of you salivate when you hear the term "dragon dice"?).
I haven't purchased a new D&D book since Dieties and Demigods!
I just wish I hadn't written my name all over my books with a big red crayon...
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
An RPG is nothing but a set of rules, a framework, around which a campaign is built. The rules have already been published. If people wish to play D&D they will continue to play D&D no matter what the hell happens at or to WotC.
I agree, but what about Magic: The Gathering? I'm much more fond of not buying a new set of cards every 3 months, but some people are. The rules for magic are set out, but they keep adapting them and adding things to them, at the same time adding new concept cards and series.
Is magic affected? I assume it's their cash cow, but...
~Will
sig?
But if you want to play a wizard with the greatest magic system available to date, check Ars Magica (This link wasn't working at the time of writing. Hence the strange domain.)
A few great sites in the Open Directory Project
"The Internet, of course, is more than just a place to find pictures of people having sex with dogs." - Time Magazine
MUDs are great, but they are different from Pen & Paper roleplaying games. Of course there are some MUDs (or MOOs, or M**s) that do focus on role-playing,
While MUDs do then to be very roll play type games (And typing kill rabbit gets boring very quickly, but maybe I was just never any good.) If your looking for Roleplay games, then MUSHes, and MUX are what your looking for, since the server side of things has no inbuilt combat system as is the case with MUDs, your left with rooms and people and what ever the game runners ad via the internal code language.
Take a look at http://lost.strange.com/mush/mushlist.shtml to see the kinds of games out there (And there are lots)
I saw the light at the end of the tunnel... But it was just someone with a flashlight bringing more work.
Personally I played D&D and AD&D for a couple of years but didn't like it. So I moved to Role Master from Iron Crown. And fell in love with it so much I'd never go back to AD&D, specially since WotC owns it. Any how RM might be a bit more complicated, or have a high learning curve but it is worth it.
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
The WoTC guys were lucky they had jobs "for awhile". When Hasbro took over Avalon Hill, ALL of the talent was let go with no notice!
Concerns about the future of D&D under Hasbro are one of the main reasons why we at the Free Gaming Association have taken the d20 rules and are releasing them under the Open Gaming License with the missing bits being put back in by volunteer contributors. We are looking to flesh out the barebones rules that WotC released under the OGL back into a real and full system. Sort of acting as an OpenOffice to WotC/Hasbro's StarOffice, if you get the analogy.
;)
Besides, who can't like a project that brings D&D, CVS, and free principles together?
-Tom
I've never heard of WotC, I have no idea what it stands for, and I suspect if you tell me what it stands for...I still wouldn't have heard of it.
This strikes me way too geeky that you put this together as news.
It appears you need some adult supervision.
Magic will be a force in the gaming community for a VERY long time. The strength of its support and sheer popularity will make it viable on the tournament scene, and the nature of magic itself will make it popular outside of tournaments for even longer.
The difference to me lies in the number of creative and fun ways there are to play. I like to play a format called backdraft. Instead of drafting the best deck possible, you draft the worst, and then exchange that deck with your parner. Another format that was recently written up by the wizards staff was the Big Draft Box. This simply was a collection of one copy of every magic card ever. While out of reach for most players, the principle remains sound, stuff one copy of a ton of different cards into a big box and draft 'em.
What makes magic different seems to be the ways the cards interact with each other. Drafting in other games just isn't as easy because of the necessity of an initial game state. Magic has no initial game state except for cards in hand and a library.
As for player support alone, if it came to that, I think Magic would still survive. There are enough people who love to play the gmae no for prizes or cash or cards, but just because it's fun. Other CCGs, such as Middle Earth: The Wizards(a once-popular CCG produced by the now defunct Iron Crown Enterprises) survives today on it's fan base alone. As the web editor for the North American council pages, I can say we're still very active.
In the end, games that people love to play will always survive.
You can only be young once, but you can be immature forever.
I've worked for 2 companies that experienced what WoTC is going through. My two previous companies operated at a very good profit (mostly due to good R&D and good QA). Both companies had more than $10million cash in the bank.
Enter the "parent" company and a buy-out offer that fattens board members and some executives. 9 months later the $10 million is gone and the lay-offs begin.
Both companies cash reserves were used to "prop" up the parent company's own operation.
Nothing really new here. Kinda sucks for those still at WoTC; especially considering how hard they have worked in the past 4 years.
Sometimes I just want to get together with some friends, relax, chat some, and play a role-playing game. Something simple, something that every gamer knows inside and out, something that gamemaster can easily whip something up for, something with some of the guilty viseral pleasure of beating up bad guys and taking their stuff. Something simple, both in rules and roles.
When I began playing RPGs, I played D&D because it was the default. When I matured, I played more serious, innovative games like Vampire: The Masquerade, GURPs, and other games. I derided D&D as a waste. Now that I'm older, busy with work and other things, I appreciate D&D again. My life is complex and full or hard choices. The D&D game I play in is a simple pleasure, low stress for everyone.
Also, you cannot ignore that 3e D&D has really helped revitalize the RPG industry. Things were slowing down and growth minimal. D&D brought the simple excitement back, brough back people who hadn't played in years, and brought in new players. Potential new players generally aren't going to try a more experimental system. They're looking for something simple that they can appreciate instantly. That game is D&D. And those new players will be looking for new games in a few years. That's your opportunity to introduce them to more mature games. Everyone wins!
There is a place for every sort of game, be they mature or not. I still run Deadlands, Psychosis, Call of Cthulhu, and other more "mature" games, and I love them. Don't insult D&D, it still has a place in my life and the lives of millions of other gamers. If it isn't your cup of tea, just leave it be.
..is a good idea. Or a bad idea, in terms of my schedule...
I would guess that WotC is going to move to a contract-based model with regards to their writers - pay-per-work as opposed to paying them salary. In the end the writers and WotC are more flexible in terms of their output. :^)
I tend to agree with the above comments about the d20 system. While they improved some aspects (Feats, Skills), it's basically the same old recycled crap (Armor Class, Level-based Hit Points, Classes) from the previous editions. The system is heavily biased towards cinematic/high-fantasy games (i.e. characters with god-like abilities), and needs serious work to do anything else. I do think it's better than either 1st Ed. or 2nd Ed., though. To quote James Wallis, "I have enormous respect for what it's achieved in terms of dragging D&D's rules into the late 1980s [...]" Of course, the d20 rules were released only a couple years ago...
The Future: Some assembly required; batteries not included.
That's an outstanding quote... although has there really been that much improvement in RPG systems since the late 19080's? After that, the trading card games started stealing mindshare, and the entire RPG world kind of stagnated, to the point that people started thinking of computer games as "computer RPG's" for no other reason than the fantasy settings.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Drop me a line, let's see what we can do to create a group!
ub3rg33k.MONTY@PYTHON.hotmail.com(No.Movie)
Look, I know that all us *nix anti-M$ types like the open source model, but the facts in this case are that D&D was a fine game for it's time, which was over like 10 years ago. There's bigger, better, simpler, less patched, and more well designed games out there now. It's the accursed marketing machine that has kept D&D/d20 going despite it's flaws (sound familiar???)
I mean, seriously, if all open source code had to be in COBOL, while commercial coders all wrote in C, java, and perl, would we be anywhere?
In this case, I'm rooting against d20, open system or not. There are better ways to skin that cat, and if the free market really works, we won't be hearing anything about d20 games in 5 years, IMO.
Games like TFT (a contemporary of D&D), GURPS, the IGS system, Shadowrun, and even TWERPS are all better. I hope they don't get buried by the tidal wave of d20 offal that's out there now.
Never generalize
Heh. I'm replying to you here, but I doubt that anyone other than us two would care. Perhaps I'm wrong, so here I am.
I like 3rd Edition, it seems like a simplified version of 1st/2nd edition. That's not a bad thing at all. The things that you speak as being BAD things, can be argued to be good things. (Monte Cook had a good article on why classes, levels, and such are good. He had his pet peeves, wanting to remove AC. I don't like level based HP, but he likes it. D&D 3ed is a compromise, though, between 3 veteran game designers. The lead of which wrote a game without classes, armor class, level based hitpoints, etc, that being Mr. Tweet. And he being one the designers of Ars Magica, which launched White Wolf and thus Vampire.)
I'm not saying that they are always good, or that they're perfectly executed. It's just that it's a comfortable medium between "just like the old days" and "new ideas and good stuff" to keep the strengths of D&D and incorporate some good ideas that should have been there from the beginning. You can't alienate your old players (listen to all the grognards saying that 1st edition is better than 2nd edition, so why did we need a third edition). Also listen to all the people who say, "It's just like GURPS."
3rd Edition is neither, honestly. GURPS has far more versatile character generation, but the combat resolution system is not for a newbie. (I'm sure that if I were to have witnessed it in action, I might have learned it easier.) However, with the d20 system and a battlemap, I've mastered how to handle combat resolution without needing a demonstration. (I was the first person to DM a group in our area.)
(Oh, and for those that complain about Track being a feat -- that's because if it were a skill, then one of the main benefits of being a Ranger would be lost. Arguably, it could have been an exclusive skill, but making it a feat is a way of saying that despite having a high wisdom, you still will fail that wilderness lore.)
Finally, about contract-based-model, they are moving forward to use more freelance workers. As a programmer, I would prefer to work for a company so that I know I get paid, even if my project gets cancelled. Projects get cancelled. WotC is not going to make money maknig modules. They produced 9 small modules and the higher ups complained about having to do that all the ways. The whole point of the SRD/d20 license is so that small companies can handle that sort of thing. It's not profitable for a big company. But, going from 750 employees to 250 is frightening, especially given who they laid off.
blah blah, WotC is evil and sucks and Hasbro is evil above all and wants nothing but money...
Magic is Dying, D&D is dying....
WHATEVER
Magic has apparently been dying since they released the Beta edition. I rnu an online MtG league using the FREE software called Apprentice and channel population in our IRC channels are as high as they have ever been.
I couldn't give a whit about D&D, because its never interested me, but guess what - people will always play it. I'm sure Monopoly purists threw hissy fits when they started releasing all the various editions (Sports, New York, Europe, etc), but guess what - people still play the damn board game as much as they play any borad game nowadays.
As for the popularity of Magic, you can argue that all they want to do is suck money frmo the players, but if people love it so much, and are willing to pay, then whats the problem? People buy CD's at $18 apiece when it costs less than a dollar apiece to make. People payed hundreds of dollars for items on Diablo II and other asinine games ONLINE - much less cards you could physically do something with.
To attest to the popularity of Magic, let me give a few figures from recent tournaments. An event last weekend in Cleveland drew 605 competitors. New Jersey back in June drew 603. Tampa Bay drew 409 people back in February. 683 people played in London earlier this month. Sapporo, Japan raked in 467 three weeks ago. Barcelona had 699 last spring. 614 showed up in Antwerp, Belgium. Kobe, Japan had 1,350 in August 2001.
Oh no, Magic isn't exactly the same game it was 8 years ago back when the card quality was so average that Juzam Djinn became a hundred dollar card.
Change HAPPENS. In everything in life, change will occur. Today was the one year anniversary of the Twin Tower attacks. Life CHANGED (for better or for worse) for nearly every American 365 days ago. Rather than bemoan how the "good old days were", why not look to the future and try to have fun with whats available to you?