I’m not particularly clued into the industry but I’m not shocked. From what I’ve seen, Cynthia Williams believed the most profitable direction for D&D was to monetise game game at a very granular level like microtransactions, as we saw in the OGL debacle, plus her focus on the VTT was likely going to manifest in a similar way.
I’d say the explosive success of Baldur’s Gate and the surge in WotC talking to practically all games companies possible, it’s clear they’ve set their sights on a hopeful path to continued revenue growth that does not offend any fans.
My assumption is that Cynthia simply centered her leadership on a path that is no longer the direction the company has deviated from.
I’m guessing she got the job because Hasbro approved of those plans for profitability, though. It all seemed standard corporate affair. Hopefully they learned from their mistake, but I think this means they’ll just find a CEO to squeeze money out of pumping bad video games or some shit. Companies always learn the wrong lessons from their success.
In fact, they already learned the OGL lesson before, so it’s dumb they had to learn it again. They’ll probably have to repeat another one of these lessons in 10 years or so. Hopefully until then, the company is slightly better, but we’ll see who steps up.
2-3 years of pumping shit video games is 2-3 years that they aren’t fucking with the core product, which is the only part I don’t want ruined. The can make bad games, bad merch, bad brand tie-ins or anything else for all I care as long as they don’t harm the game.
Now, history has taught me that whoever they bring in next will be worse in a myriad of new and depressing ways, but a kernel of irrational hope remains that the pendulum may swing in another direction and they’ll see if, instead of viewing their playerbase as untapped piggybacks, they focus on delivering good products at reasonable rates and see where that takes them. A pipe dream, I know.
“AI, what’s the good picture for news about corproate CEO stepping down?” “Sexy knight dommy mommy that will step on my bad robot programming.” “I’m deeply concerned about you, AI”
Over the years, I’ve had many friends work for WotC in various tiers, including exec level, and all of them have stories that run in a similar vein: the corp leadership would have very little against being the white tower that sells the whole of its warded domain to the highest bidder, if the price is right. Hell, even the execs in the 00s joked about calling the main hub “The White Tower”.
Fuck WotC into the mud and leave it to drown in the puddle.
“Williams held the position for over two years and was involved in some of the company’s biggest highs and lows, with her tenure seeing the release of the D&D film Honor Among Thieves and the blockbuster video game Baldur’s Gate 3, as well as ushering in a wave of fan backlash following the OGL scandal.”
They had little to nothing to do with BG3. The development process of a movie, including approving of a screenplay, takes longer than two years, leaving her responsible for…
Oh. Yeah.
The reason I abandoned the company. Or at least one of the avalanche of reasons.
Was thinking exactly this. Both films and video games - especially one the size of BG3 - take far longer than a couple of years to come to fruition which means the only thing she had a hand in was the OGL and every other small-to-medium controvery I’ve only really heard about through One Shot Questers’ round up videos. Burn the witch.
She had more of a hand in Magic the Gathering’s recent push to make as most product as possible, as well as the incredibly awful Magic 25th anniversary celebration idea of $1000 packs of proxies.
Welp. Since Hasbro overall seems intent on running its properties into the ground, I have little doubt the next one will continue the cycle of enshittification. I’d love to be wrong, but I doubt it.
While the set is decent are you happy with 4 separate set symbols in one release? How do you feel about play boxes being worse than set boxes but more expensive?
And those powers keep on creepin. They are finally scaling it back a bit, but there’s a reason the only cards that aren’t on the reserve list (or three kingdoms) above $30 were released in the past two years.
How do you feel about play boxes being worse than set boxes but more expensive?
I didn’t know that. Seems like a bizarre choice, but I don’t know that it affects my enjoyment of the game. I understand why people would be pissed about that.
And those powers keep on creepin.
That’s been a problem for decades and yes, it’s bad game design (and not the only bad game design going on with MTG by a long shot).
I’m running an outlaw deck in Arena right now and I haven’t had this much fun playing MTG since I built a mech deck after the Kamigawa release and insisted on putting on the Pacific Rim theme when I first played it.
If these are going to be the new minifig blind boxes, what’s been the best way to buy a full set? This will likely be the first and only time I want to do that lol.
There are online sellers who specialize in minifigures and offer the full set for a bit of a mark-up. I don’t use these, so I can’t recommend one.
Bricklink is a third party marketplace for Lego, which was bought up by Lego a couple years back. You can order individual parts, minifigures, sets from third parties. For example, I buy missing collectables there and in return sell my duplicates.
Last, there is the possibility that this new series also will have individual scannable QR codes on the packaging, like the current one does. Apps such as Bricksearch can scan the code and tell you which minifigure is inside.
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