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. "

Comments

Vast improvement

[urubos]

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.

A snapshot of TSR's final days

[ChaosDiscord]

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.).

Re:Without a Future?

[Bieeanda]

Sadly the published RPG is dying an agonizing death. Nobody wants to pay $30-$40 for a hardcover rulebook when they can pay that for a full-function CRPG (computer or console, take your pick). Add to this the unending supply of "optional" supplimental books and the industry just cannot survive the same glut that TSR produced in the 2nd Edition AD&D days. The promise of OpenGaming and d20 can't save an industry that relies on an ever-shrinking market of buyers and an ever-increasing price of entry. Further pressure is being exerted by decreasing literacy among teens, lower interest among young adults, and thus an aging tabletop gaming populace hemmoraging to real-life issues and other problems.

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.