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A History of Wizards of the Coast
HerderOfCats writes "Shannon Appelcline has written up an excellent independent history of Wizards of the Coast, the company that brought us Magic: The Gathering, eventually acquired TSR and D&D, transformed the paper RPG game industry with d20 and the Open Game License, and eventually was acquired by game giant Hasbro." From the RPGNet article: "Overall, Hasbro was looking to make Wizards meaner and leaner, and thus a better profit making machine. In 2001 and 2002 Habro also divested themselves of their conventions. Origins went to GAMA and GenCon to Peter Adkison. Around the same time they also outsourced their magazines by licensing Dungeon, Dragon, Polyhedron, and Amazing Stories to Paizo Publishing, who continues to publish the RPG magazines today. Two years later another pruning would come. Wizards had also been running 85 'Game Keeper' and 'Wizards of the Coast' retail stores, but in early 2004, Hasbro shut them all down. Together with selling the conventions, this relieved any concerns that Wizards might be developing a vertical monopoly, like that controlled by Games Workshop in the UK--and really such a monopoly wouldn't have made sense given the d20 strategy. "
I must say, Wizards did an incredible job improving D&D with the changes they made going from advanced to 3.0 and then eventually 3.5. I began to play advanced d&d only about a year before the 3.0 launch and got to witness the new life that was injected into the industry. A much more streamlined ruleset and (fairly) well playtested books made me into the RPG addict I am today.
Anail Nathrock Uthvass Bethudd Dochiel Dienve
In case anyone in interested in spring of 1997 I visited TSR on a business trip. This was just after the Wizard's of the Coast buyout. For the curious here's my writeup on visiting TSR during the final days in which you can hear my perception of the mood (poor, but improving since the buyout) and learn useless things (Peter Adkison really likes ketchup. And why 50th level Dwarven Paladins, an illegal combination in 2nd ed, was a major test case.).
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I've been saying this for a while now, and think that the writing has been on the wall for at least ten years, if not fifteen. The absolute biggest problem with the gaming industry is treating it like an industry. No matter how many editions and point releases (point releases, for Chrissakes!) of a system there are, or how many different Revised Guides to the Jakes of Waterdeep are printed, games do not suffer from planned obsolescence. This is a major problem for publishers, because there is a distinctly finite market for their wares. Even if they do come up with entire new settings and flavour texts (see the proliferation-- nay, metastasis of Everquest and Warcraft D20 and their ilk) instead of repackaging the Compleat Guide to Elfs again, the publisher is still spreading itself and its profits thinner: not everyone will purchase setting-specific source material, or official setting material in the first place.
Presentation and packaging is the absolute worst element of the industry now, by far, though. In my younger years, I used to collect RPG material, especially GURPS supplements and obscure titles. $20 CDN for a 128 page perfectbound book? Hey, that was good value to me. When prices crept up to more than $25 for the same material, my purchases slowed dramatically. Now, the few GURPS books that come out each year, priced at roughly $50 a pop, don't even get a second glance. They're filled with the ugly, glossy art and oversized print that D&D paved the way for with 3rd Edition, and Evil Stevie is wondering why his profits have been dropping. Oh, but hey! They're offering PDFs of the books now, that's got to be good, right? Well, aside from the fact that 1:1 scans of 8-1/2"x11" books are an incredible pain in the butt to read on a screen... and that they're selling those for $25 a shot, too.
Palladium is screwed for the same reason that it's always been flirting with disaster: Its owner is an asshole with delusions of adequacy. This is the man that green-lit a tie-in game for the N-Gage of all platforms. The most popular books in his stable were written by people that have long since run to saner pastures, leaving him to erase their contributions through sheer mudflation.
Wizards of the Coast... well, they're probably going to be the only outfit that survives the crash of this so-called industry, because they have diversified like nobody's business-- and they have done it in directions that do not suffer the pitfalls of an industry based on the end user's imagination. Just take a peek at the front page of their website: Pokemon, Magic, Neopets... all titles and games that have officiality and collectability stamped all over them. When was the last time that someone seriously tried trotting out a homebrew pokecritter or magic card? Sure, they're still grinding out D&D material and plastering it up on that turgid mess of a website, but I can guarantee that they're making much more money out of the games that you can get into for ten bucks, and keep yourself hooked on for the price of a pack of smokes whenever you go up to the cash at the comic shop or variety store.
Wow, you're an idiot. What Ryan Dancey "pulled" was irrevokably Open Sourcing the most popular RPG ever. His stance was that people are going to create derivative works based on D&D no matter what, so why not make a simple and clearly legal way for them to do so. D&D (d20) is better now that it's ever been. There's more quality and more variety than there ever has been because companies can concentrate on what they do best. Sure there's no shortage of crap (Mongoose I'm looking at you), but that's the price you pay for choice.
I hope your face isn't too pissed about that missing nose. You focused on an inaccurate and irrelevant side statement to make a religious stance that's entirely off base. Not to mention you're missing out on the best thing to happen to the gaming industry since TSR.
SJG has massively scaled production and distribution back over the last three years. The warehousing they owned outside of Austin is gone. Their home-grown Ogre Miniatures and Macrotures line is dead, until such a time as someone can magically make it profitable. Their core lineup, the GURPS RPG system and its supplements, has dwindled from a steady flow of two or three books a month to two or three per year.FASA is long dead and its successors are doing sweet nothing with the book licenses they bought-- Wizkids' Shadowrun miniatures game flew like a lead balloon. White Wolf's house magazine has been out of print for years, and they annihilated their signature World of Darkness setting in an orgy of apocalyptic worldbooks. The WoD replacement books lack the same spark of popularity, making their world a rather dismal one indeed. Wizards, as noted, is concentrating mainly on CCGs and CRPG tie-ins (more hit than miss, when one compares the Temple of Elemental Evil and D&D Online to say, Baldur's Gate), with a trickle of generic fluff interspersed with the occasional bit of Eberron or Forgotten Realms material. The rest of the so-called industry is made up of boutique publishers clinging desperately to the open gaming license, or praying to become the next big core system.
Even though I knew they were WOTC... Even though I knew Hasbro ate them... And knowing, deep in my soul, that all of them are really Beatrice (or Brenda if you are of the MOAV). But! I have been a DM and player on and off since the ancient days of graph paper, "The Judge's Guild," and your class being "Elf." The game has relentlessly improved and then fallen into decadence over and over, like the gaming Empire that it is. The quixotic and brilliant First Empire, with its luminaries and obvious literary influences. The expansive, coherent, and sometimes boggling multiverse of the longer Second Dynasty, strewn with unusual cosmoses (or is that cosmi?). The violent takeover and rise of the foreign Third Age brought welcome changes, with the sacrifice of some continuity came near-infinite flexibility... and the shadow of the entity known only as Munchkin. Ah, history. And imaginary history! "Dang those Suels and their Rain of Colorless Fire..." It's still a shame that the Witch of Shadowdale got killed by that dragon..." and "GUARDS, don't let those gnomes land here or we'll have another mutant hamster infestation, like that last time that we're STILL REBUILDING FROM." I know that there are dozens of you grinning and adding your own. I have my grievances with 3.5 (those RANDOM packs of miniatures still have me muttering curses -- a DM wants to buy 24 kobolds without involving the Net -- making them collectible SUCKED)... but on the whole, great things have happened in this Third and a Half Age. Oblivion is a letdown compared to the interpersonal chemistry you get in a Really Good D&D Game. You crack open books and plan insane strategies between games. The beauty of a game where anything can happen -- but still rules apply! I guess this is really a toast to all the folks, geniuses, writers, dreamers, players, dungeon masters, wargamers, actors, comedians, sages, and fools that make gaming a thing that will never die! A TOAST!! Criceratops ...reminiscing about that one time with the barrel of holy water...
crappy triceratops