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Lamuella
Jun 26, 2003

It's like goldy or bronzy, but made of iron.


sure, and I think they're on strong standing with the ORC. I'm just saying there's a difference between "this doesn't need to be licensed so we're stopping" and "this isn't licensed". PF2e could be entirely legally distinct from WOTC quite easily, but as it stands it currently isn't.

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Dexo
Aug 15, 2009

A city that was to live by night after the wilderness had passed. A city that was to forge out of steel and blood-red neon its own peculiar wilderness.
Yes, and that's why they are planning to separate from the OGL by publishing a new one, without the OGL language.

Lamuella
Jun 26, 2003

It's like goldy or bronzy, but made of iron.


OK, I think we've reached the point of agreeing with each other confrontationally so I'll lower my weapon and step out of initiative order.

Dexo
Aug 15, 2009

A city that was to live by night after the wilderness had passed. A city that was to forge out of steel and blood-red neon its own peculiar wilderness.
I am legitimately not being confrontational here, sorry if it comes off as such.

Cycloneman
Feb 1, 2009
ASK ME ABOUT
SISTER FUCKING

kingcom posted:

We've got big industry names coming up with revolutionary ideas such as 'hmm instead of strength, lets call it stronkth'. I expect all of this to disappear and either a new generation of 3PP pumping out nothing but dnd content or many of them to roll back when they find out how much damage they personally have done to the indie space. The one exception I think is that Pathfinder 2e will pick up a gathering of 3rd party devs.
The fact that the nega-grogs native to SA feel the products being produced aren't "innovative" enough doesn't matter, what matters is: is the product sufficiently popular to cover its costs? Some of the products will not be. This was also true of third party supplements. However, we've already seen people aren't willing to throw themselves on the mercy of Wizards of the Coast back in the 4e era, when almost nobody was willing to sign onto the GSL which included in its terms a "you have to pulp all your stuff if we say so" clause. They will not sign onto OGL 1.2, which includes a clause that lets them kill your work if they decide it's "hateful content," with no ability to contest or argue bad faith readings. This after they got done with a bad faith reading of OGL 1.0a that let them kill it despite that going against intent, contemporaneous statements, assurances, etc. (And also has been maliciously applying contracts without good faith elsewhere.)

The reason everything got funneled into OGL in the first place is that most RPGs were simply using the same sorts of core mechanics as D&D: hit points, binary pass-fail, stats + skills, etc, they just had to use slightly different numbers and dice to avoid TSR's lawyers. This is because those core mechanics are very popular (and also have been iterated on for almost 50 years so the basic design has been increasingly optimized - by contrast, PbtA is still iterating). The minor tweak of Traveller having Education instead of Wisdom but otherwise pretty much using the exact same 6 stats did not stop that game's success.

Once OGL came into play, if you wanted to make a "HP, binary pass-fail, stats + skills, social is an arbitrary roll, etc" game, you could just use d20, which was only marginally worse than alternatives and had huge network advantages. OGL 1.2 burns that to the ground so when you want to make an "HP, binary pass-fail, stats + skills, social is an arbitrary roll, etc," system, you will go and make "D&D, but it's Stronkth instead of Strength" because you don't enjoy going out of business because a malicious megacorp that just got done torching 22 years of a creative commons decides to arbitrarily gently caress you.

The Bee
Nov 25, 2012

Making his way to the ring . . .
from Deep in the Jungle . . .

The Big Monkey!

Cycloneman posted:

Once OGL came into play, if you wanted to make a "HP, binary pass-fail, stats + skills, social is an arbitrary roll, etc" game, you could just use d20, which was only marginally worse than alternatives and had huge network advantages. OGL 1.2 burns that to the ground so when you want to make an "HP, binary pass-fail, stats + skills, social is an arbitrary roll, etc," system, you will go and make "D&D, but it's Stronkth instead of Strength" because you don't enjoy going out of business because a malicious megacorp that just got done torching 22 years of a creative commons decides to arbitrarily gently caress you.

Luckily, that part is going to be Creative Commons as of 1.2, so unless WotC goes against pursuing that half of the deal anyone is free to use thst core and it'll be out of their hands. Any of the meat you need to use it is still OGL-locked, but that's a problem for more direct DnD derivatives, not for unrelated systems built on the d20 framework.

Cabbages and VHS
Aug 25, 2004

Listen, I've been around a bit, you know, and I thought I'd seen some creepy things go on in the movie business, but I really have to say this is the most disgusting thing that's ever happened to me.
Shower thought I had, based mostly on observations of WoTC behavior towards MTG whales combined with the fact that MTG has global reach and the D&D MTG set sold very poorly outside the US:

What if all the backlash was well predicted in actuarial tables, and cancelled subs etc were a calculated loss to WoTC who are trying to build an "extended universe" and have realized that if they start selling asspensive, exclusive D&D product to MTG whales, they can lose 80% of the DND playerbase to Pathfinder and still make more money?

D&D is only ~20% of WoTC revenue, so it's not like they are playing The Most Dangerous Game. I predict they will be punished on twitter but rewarded by their stock price over an 18 month period.

Just my .02 as a known nothin'

YggdrasilTM
Nov 7, 2011

Nah.

Lamuella
Jun 26, 2003

It's like goldy or bronzy, but made of iron.


I don't think there are whales in d&d in quite the same way. Yes, there are people who spend a shitload of money on their RPG hobby (I've seen some absolutely insane setups people get) but they're typically not throwing that money at WotC.

Like, after a certain point, what precisely are you selling them?

The Bee
Nov 25, 2012

Making his way to the ring . . .
from Deep in the Jungle . . .

The Big Monkey!

Lamuella posted:

I don't think there are whales in d&d in quite the same way. Yes, there are people who spend a shitload of money on their RPG hobby (I've seen some absolutely insane setups people get) but they're typically not throwing that money at WotC.

Like, after a certain point, what precisely are you selling them?

Dice and minis, which for a toy company Hasbro is remarkably behind on.

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



Cabbages and Kings posted:

Shower thought I had, based mostly on observations of WoTC behavior towards MTG whales combined with the fact that MTG has global reach and the D&D MTG set sold very poorly outside the US:

What if all the backlash was well predicted in actuarial tables, and cancelled subs etc were a calculated loss to WoTC who are trying to build an "extended universe" and have realized that if they start selling asspensive, exclusive D&D product to MTG whales, they can lose 80% of the DND playerbase to Pathfinder and still make more money?

D&D is only ~20% of WoTC revenue, so it's not like they are playing The Most Dangerous Game. I predict they will be punished on twitter but rewarded by their stock price over an 18 month period.

Just my .02 as a known nothin'
Models of this granularity would have many other uses and I don't see much sign that they've been implemented generally. If they had been developed in house by Hasbro I do not think they would need D&D profits.

In your scenario, D&D loses a lot more than 80% of its 'value' because it would become an order of magnitude harder to find an actual game. One might then hypothesize 'oh, but the GPT-4 AI GMs would make up for it' but I think at that point you're just writing depressing fanfiction about your inevitable defeat by the corps.

hyphz
Aug 5, 2003

Number 1 Nerd Tear Farmer 2022.

Keep it up, champ.

Also you're a skeleton warrior now. Kree.
Unlockable Ben

Sage Genesis posted:

So... can I publish a nearly blank page as a PDF, or one filled with some generic D20 wank, with the 1.0a OGL attached today, and then "errata" it years later with a full product into it? I mean, I published my "product" in time, right? So I can also publish a couple of hundred of them, issue errata when I need to, and then crank up the price from $0,01 to a real market-conforming price. All the while avoiding using the new license.

Ok ok. So the above is obviously just petty trolling. But, is there any consequence for errata? Can someone update an older product and still fall under the old provisions?

You say this is trolling, but it's exactly what Activision did with Tony Hawk 5. Their license agreement with Hawk was running out, so they stuck a disc in shops on the very last day of that license which included only a mostly-broken tutorial and added the whole game as a patch. There's no suggestion they were sued for it, although that may be because the game was terrible.

Lamuella
Jun 26, 2003

It's like goldy or bronzy, but made of iron.


The Bee posted:

Dice and minis, which for a toy company Hasbro is remarkably behind on.

Sure, but I can get nicer dice and minis elsewhere.

Admiral Joeslop
Jul 8, 2010




hyphz posted:

You say this is trolling, but it's exactly what Activision did with Tony Hawk 5. Their license agreement with Hawk was running out, so they stuck a disc in shops on the very last day of that license which included only a mostly-broken tutorial and added the whole game as a patch. There's no suggestion they were sued for it, although that may be because the game was terrible.

This is how I found out that Tony Hawk's son is named Hudson Riley Hawk.

Sage Genesis
Aug 14, 2014
OG Murderhobo

hyphz posted:

You say this is trolling, but it's exactly what Activision did with Tony Hawk 5. Their license agreement with Hawk was running out, so they stuck a disc in shops on the very last day of that license which included only a mostly-broken tutorial and added the whole game as a patch. There's no suggestion they were sued for it, although that may be because the game was terrible.

Now I don't know whether to be proud of myself, or worried for myself. :confused:

Thanks for the info!

Finster Dexter
Oct 20, 2014

Beyond is Finster's mad vision of Earth transformed.
https://twitter.com/mattcolville/status/1616219497534484485/photo/1

I strongly dislike that MCDM chaos die. Granted, we don't really know what's going on there, but looking at that gobbo sheet, actions are triggered based off what comes up on that chaos roll. I much prefer FFG SW where there are destiny points, or Modiphius 2d20 with its momentum. In other words, a mechanic that involves player and GM choice on when to trigger the Cool Thing, as opposed to waiting for a fancy die result to come up.

switching gears...

The Bee posted:

Dice and minis, which for a toy company Hasbro is remarkably behind on.

Yeah, this is pure insanity. They kind of let the D&D Minis game die on the vine, and why aren't there multiple lines of designer dice sets like oh here's the Red Wizards of Thay set, or the Raistlin Black Robes set. Leverage influencers or whatnot to release special runs, like oh here's GinnyD's green hair dice, etc.

poo poo, I would buy the hell out of sets of well-designed draconian themed dice, Aurek, Sivak, Baaz, etc. And I already have way more dice than I'll ever need.

Siivola
Dec 23, 2012

At some point they did have a very expensive dice set for every book release.

Lumbermouth
Mar 6, 2008

GREG IS BIG NOW


Finster Dexter posted:

Yeah, this is pure insanity. They kind of let the D&D Minis game die on the vine, and why aren't there multiple lines of designer dice sets like oh here's the Red Wizards of Thay set, or the Raistlin Black Robes set. Leverage influencers or whatnot to release special runs, like oh here's GinnyD's green hair dice, etc.

poo poo, I would buy the hell out of sets of well-designed draconian themed dice, Aurek, Sivak, Baaz, etc. And I already have way more dice than I'll ever need.

It must be profitable to keep selling random boosters of minis, otherwise they wouldn't keep doing it. But it still blows my mind that you can't just buy, like, a box of pre-painted goblins at a $3-4 per miniature price point from the biggest RPG company in the world.

Even their Pathfinder Pawns equivalent is woefully inadequate and way too expensive for what you get.

Lamuella
Jun 26, 2003

It's like goldy or bronzy, but made of iron.


Finster Dexter posted:

Yeah, this is pure insanity. They kind of let the D&D Minis game die on the vine, and why aren't there multiple lines of designer dice sets like oh here's the Red Wizards of Thay set, or the Raistlin Black Robes set. Leverage influencers or whatnot to release special runs, like oh here's GinnyD's green hair dice, etc.

poo poo, I would buy the hell out of sets of well-designed draconian themed dice, Aurek, Sivak, Baaz, etc. And I already have way more dice than I'll ever need.

Same with minis. D&D have a game in which you can play as a really wide range of different character types and then have omparatively few minis that match their characters.

I do a thing where because I like painting, if I'm in a long running game with people I like painting a mini for each of their characters. I'm ten weeks into a game with some friends and of the five of us I think I can find an existing WotC mini that matches one of us. That's money left on the table there.

Lamuella
Jun 26, 2003

It's like goldy or bronzy, but made of iron.


Lumbermouth posted:

It must be profitable to keep selling random boosters of minis, otherwise they wouldn't keep doing it. But it still blows my mind that you can't just buy, like, a box of pre-painted goblins at a $3-4 per miniature price point from the biggest RPG company in the world.

Encounters in a box. Steamforged will sell me the encounter, maps, stat blocks and minis for less than £30 and the sculpts are pretty cool. Why aren't WotC doing the same?

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Epic-Encounters-Labyrinth-Goblin-SFEE-010/dp/B097DQBT22

CitizenKeen
Nov 13, 2003

easygoing pedant

Megazver posted:

I wouldn't mind a version of Genesys with fewer special snowflake dice, tbh.

I'd rather Genesys go the route of Fate Accelerate / 2d20. Keep all the special snowflake dice, keep the core mechanic, but change the stats, change the mechanics around the core mechanic. Never going to happen because FFG got hit by PE, but a goon can dream.

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



Lamuella posted:

Encounters in a box. Steamforged will sell me the encounter, maps, stat blocks and minis for less than £30 and the sculpts are pretty cool. Why aren't WotC doing the same?

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Epic-Encounters-Labyrinth-Goblin-SFEE-010/dp/B097DQBT22
Wouldn't Steamforged likely be one of the people they want to give them a piece of the action?

Anonymous Zebra
Oct 21, 2005
Blending in like it ain't no thang
I was discussing VTTs with my wife this morning because she wondered what I was up to when she saw me searching for DungeonDraft custom asset packs. I was explaining to her that I can run games on Foundry, and that I can subscribe to people's Patreons who then allow me to download their custom maps as tiles and modules in Foundry since you can link your Patreon account into Foundry. That led to me explaining that you can link your Patreon to Discord and Discord to Foundry, and that you can pay people directly through cartographyassets.com, or indirectly through their Patreons to get assets for DungeonDraft, which itself is a program you can buy for $19.99. At some point in discussing this, I pointed out that absolute none of this money changing hands actually makes it into WotC's pockets, and kind of laughed. They really missed the boat on making money off online-play TTRPGs, and an entire fan-made ecosystem has not only formed, but fully integrated into itself completely outside of WotC's own systems. It's actually kind of amazing.

Anonymous Zebra fucked around with this message at 18:41 on Jan 20, 2023

MockingQuantum
Jan 20, 2012



The Bee posted:

Dice and minis, which for a toy company Hasbro is remarkably behind on.

They make quite a bit of both, there have been branded minis and blind boxes for 5E since the start. Same with dice. The issue is theirs aren't particularly good or interesting, they seem to be geared towards being almost entirely functional and boring to look at, and the blind box minis were structured in a way that was clearly intended to be a cash grab similar to MtG boosters or old mini set collecting. I don't think they understood that people care a lot more about getting a bunch of minis they'll never use that take up a ton of space, compared to getting some cards they're unlikely to use in their current decks. Plus the weights were predictable so it was pretty easy to find the minis you wanted with a little help from an FLGS or online retailer who was willing to go to the trouble, which probably destroyed a lot of the margin on them.

I know they've made dice over the years but it's sort of a similar problem--they're boring and fine, and there are very few options available. I think the dice market (or Chessex, at least) has probably survived over the years purely on the conceit that every player can probably find a unique-ish set of dice that really grabs them. There's a wide gulf between putting out some minis and a couple of dice sets, and being able to produce a ton of both with a wide variety. Minis especially are just a hugely time consuming process if you want decent sculpts, so it's a lot of process and overhead to gamble on when there's already a lot of companies producing really good stuff out there.

MockingQuantum
Jan 20, 2012



CitizenKeen posted:

I'd rather Genesys go the route of Fate Accelerate / 2d20. Keep all the special snowflake dice, keep the core mechanic, but change the stats, change the mechanics around the core mechanic. Never going to happen because FFG got hit by PE, but a goon can dream.

Honestly at this point I think it's less to do with the PE and more to do with very little appetite to do anything new/different with Genesys, my understanding is that outside of Star Wars it's never performed well and hasn't seen much adoption, and it's already kind of entrenched in Star Wars/Terrinoth/Rokugan stuff. I'm not sure what the situation is now that the FFG RPG arm got spun off as Edge, I know a lot of the people that developed Star Wars and Genesys are gone, though.

Weirdly the impression I get is that Embracer is actually a lot more supportive of new game development and branching out to new properties and ideas. At least, significantly moreso than the past few VC firms that owned Asmodee were.

The Bee
Nov 25, 2012

Making his way to the ring . . .
from Deep in the Jungle . . .

The Big Monkey!

Anonymous Zebra posted:

I was discussing VTTs with my wife this morning because she wondered what I was up to when she saw me searching for DungeonDraft custom asset packs. I was explaining to her that I can run games on Foundry, and that I can subscribe to people's Patreons who then allow me to download their custom maps as tiles and modules in Foundry since you can link your Patreon account into Foundry. That led to me explaining that you can link your Patreon to Discord and Discord to Foundry, and that you can pay people directly through cartographyassets.com, or indirectly through their Patreons to get assets for DungeonDraft, which itself is a program you can buy for $19.99. At some point in discussing this, I pointed out that absolute none of this money changing hands actually makes it into WotC's pockets, and kind of laughed. They really missed the boat on making money off online-play TTRPGs, and an entire fan-made ecosystem has not only formed, but fully integrated into itself completely outside of WotC's own systems. It's actually kind of amazing.

Yeah. Much like Blizzard, they missed the boat and are scrambling to try and pull it into their harbor. And I think we all know how Blizzard literally trying to make the WC3 lightning strike twice went.

FishFood
Apr 1, 2012

Now with brine shrimp!
The whole situation with FFG and Genesys is a tragedy, another unfortunate example of capitalism killing a bunch of cool games and interesting ideas. FFG Star Wars is one of my favorite RPGs and Asmodee moving all of FFG's RPGs to Edge has absolutely killed it. That happened years ago, and they're only just reprinting stuff now with no news about anything new being produced for the system. I don't think Edge has really produced anything for any of their lines in the last 3 years, maybe some Rokugan stuff?

FFG is a shell of what they once were, with their various miniatures games being given to Atomic Mass who didn't really know what to do with them, and their LCGs being winnowed down to just Arkham and LotR. Their output has slowed to a trickle, and while Arkham is still going relatively strong, I loved FFG's competitive LCGs and those are just never coming back.

Kalman
Jan 17, 2010

hyphz posted:

You say this is trolling, but it's exactly what Activision did with Tony Hawk 5. Their license agreement with Hawk was running out, so they stuck a disc in shops on the very last day of that license which included only a mostly-broken tutorial and added the whole game as a patch. There's no suggestion they were sued for it, although that may be because the game was terrible.

There could well have been patching permission included in the license; without having seen the license text it’s hard to say exactly what happened there, but it’s not safe to assume that the same approach would be permissible under OGL1.0a.

Suzera
Oct 6, 2021

This spell rocks. It'll pop you right out of that funk.

Lamuella posted:

The core rulebooks of Pathfinder 2e are licensed under the OGL.


Yes. What I'm saying is this is largely irrelevant as WotC is not the content contributor in this case. It's Paizo. WotC can claim no ownership of PF2 property itself through the OGL here, other than over the printed OGL license text itself which is the ONLY WotC content license by Paizo. They just have to not include the OGL text and there is no Wizards-claimable content in PF2 books. PF2 does not use Wizard's SRD (the thing Wizards licenses via OGL), art, copyrightable wording (aside from the text of the OGL itself), trademarks or patents (probably).

MIT doesn't control all open source software licensed under the terms of the MIT license just because they created the license wording and hold copyright over the license text itself. The license itself confers no ownership to MIT of software content published under the terms of the MIT license, just like OGL does not confer ownership to WotC for non-WotC content published under OGL 1.0a.

The MIT license is this one:

quote:

Copyright <YEAR> <COPYRIGHT HOLDER>

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

MockingQuantum posted:

They make quite a bit of both, there have been branded minis and blind boxes for 5E since the start.

On top of this, and perhaps somewhat ironically, there could be licensing issues involved here. I am seriously speculating here, it's just a thought, but I know that some companies in the past have had their hands tied for years, even decades, by exclusive license agreements they signed in past years without an ability to easily yank them back if the licensee wasn't willing or able to provide what the company wanted. Licensees can have a lot of autonomy, or just a little, or basically none.

https://dnd.wizards.com/miniatures

Here's the currently advertised licensees to make D&D minis and merch. I don't know what the license terms for WizKids are right now (wizkids has some generic press releases on their site but unsurprisingly I can't find the actual terms or text of their license), but if they're partially or completely exclusive, Hasbro may not have the ability to dramatically expand or alter its range, in particular to do anything beyond what WizKids has the capacity to do.

Beadle & Grimm does the "premium" merch and they seem like a small outfit and may not have the capacity to do a huge expansion.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

Cabbages and Kings posted:

Shower thought I had, based mostly on observations of WoTC behavior towards MTG whales combined with the fact that MTG has global reach and the D&D MTG set sold very poorly outside the US:

What if all the backlash was well predicted in actuarial tables, and cancelled subs etc were a calculated loss to WoTC who are trying to build an "extended universe" and have realized that if they start selling asspensive, exclusive D&D product to MTG whales, they can lose 80% of the DND playerbase to Pathfinder and still make more money?

D&D is only ~20% of WoTC revenue, so it's not like they are playing The Most Dangerous Game. I predict they will be punished on twitter but rewarded by their stock price over an 18 month period.

Just my .02 as a known nothin'

In general I think people are way too quick to ascribe this sort of 4D chess planning to companies. Corporations will absolutely do scummy poo poo and devious poo poo but usually the stuff they try to do is stuff that has much more predictable returns, like "we'll ignore implementing this safety feature/doing this recall because we've crunched the numbers and the fines for being caught out are less than the cost it would take to implement this stuff." I am hugely, hugely skeptical that the plan at WotC central is to drag their name through the mud, shed 80% of their players (if that happened it would be a disaster of such magnitude that it would make all of TSR's bad business decisions pale in comparison), and then ??????? followed by profit based on the speculative gamble that D&D will somehow develop whales the same way a game like Magic has.

Also, I'm not really sure whales are what makes Magic such a juggernaut anyway. Casual formats and things like Commander are, to my understanding, by far much more popular than formats where someone wants to try to gatcha-roll their way to four of whatever the most broken card is (and in fact a lot of that sort of "whaling" happens on secondary markets which WotC receives precisely zero dollars from anyway), so I think the premise is flawed from the get-go.

I fully expect a bunch of people to re-up their D&D subs after a while once the heat has died down, but that has less to do with some master plan and more to do with general consumer behavior.

Vire
Nov 4, 2005

Like a Bosh

Kai Tave posted:

In general I think people are way too quick to ascribe this sort of 4D chess planning to companies. Corporations will absolutely do scummy poo poo and devious poo poo but usually the stuff they try to do is stuff that has much more predictable returns, like "we'll ignore implementing this safety feature/doing this recall because we've crunched the numbers and the fines for being caught out are less than the cost it would take to implement this stuff." I am hugely, hugely skeptical that the plan at WotC central is to drag their name through the mud, shed 80% of their players (if that happened it would be a disaster of such magnitude that it would make all of TSR's bad business decisions pale in comparison), and then ??????? followed by profit based on the speculative gamble that D&D will somehow develop whales the same way a game like Magic has.

Also, I'm not really sure whales are what makes Magic such a juggernaut anyway. Casual formats and things like Commander are, to my understanding, by far much more popular than formats where someone wants to try to gatcha-roll their way to four of whatever the most broken card is (and in fact a lot of that sort of "whaling" happens on secondary markets which WotC receives precisely zero dollars from anyway), so I think the premise is flawed from the get-go.

I fully expect a bunch of people to re-up their D&D subs after a while once the heat has died down, but that has less to do with some master plan and more to do with general consumer behavior.

I think a lot of the money they make isn't even just booster sets or rare powerful cards anymore its the collector boosters and compleat edition booster for foils and extended art cards or the secret lair drops. Like the MTG 30 cards that cost like $1000 bucks where not even legal for play in standard.

aw frig aw dang it
Jun 1, 2018


Kai Tave posted:

In general I think people are way too quick to ascribe this sort of 4D chess planning to companies. Corporations will absolutely do scummy poo poo and devious poo poo but usually the stuff they try to do is stuff that has much more predictable returns, like "we'll ignore implementing this safety feature/doing this recall because we've crunched the numbers and the fines for being caught out are less than the cost it would take to implement this stuff." I am hugely, hugely skeptical that the plan at WotC central is to drag their name through the mud, shed 80% of their players (if that happened it would be a disaster of such magnitude that it would make all of TSR's bad business decisions pale in comparison), and then ??????? followed by profit based on the speculative gamble that D&D will somehow develop whales the same way a game like Magic has.


I agree with this, yeah. Companies are generally quite willing to push negative consequences out to the long-term if they can get some short-term benefits from it, but not often willing to take the inverse. Especially publically-traded companies like Hasbro, where they'll have shareholders screaming at them every time they lose money in the short-term. Even if the plan presented was a solid one, a hypothetical future where they're frolicking in piles of D&D whale money doesn't weigh much balanced against the damage that tanking their playerbase would do to their numbers in the next year or two, for the people who are running the show.

Vire
Nov 4, 2005

Like a Bosh
Anecdotally almost every executive I have worked with is not capable of the long term non Euclidean chess playing to do that either most of them are legit morons. The few that haven't happened to be some of the most evil people I have ever worked with though (Blackstone.) I don't think WOTC is on that level haha so I agree with the sentiment.

moths
Aug 25, 2004

I would also still appreciate some danger.



Selling a box of goblins would mean that you're cannibalizing sales from the random box that might contain goblins.

The loot box is better from that perspective because the guy who wants a dozen goblins might end up buying thirty boxes to get them (instead of one box containing the product he wants.)

In reality, he's going to get them from another source, which is a huge blind spot for a lot of business. It's the same mindset that sees every instance of piracy as a lost sale. From this viewpoint, selling a goblin pack would mean they lost thirty sales.

MockingQuantum
Jan 20, 2012



FishFood posted:

The whole situation with FFG and Genesys is a tragedy, another unfortunate example of capitalism killing a bunch of cool games and interesting ideas. FFG Star Wars is one of my favorite RPGs and Asmodee moving all of FFG's RPGs to Edge has absolutely killed it. That happened years ago, and they're only just reprinting stuff now with no news about anything new being produced for the system. I don't think Edge has really produced anything for any of their lines in the last 3 years, maybe some Rokugan stuff?

FFG is a shell of what they once were, with their various miniatures games being given to Atomic Mass who didn't really know what to do with them, and their LCGs being winnowed down to just Arkham and LotR. Their output has slowed to a trickle, and while Arkham is still going relatively strong, I loved FFG's competitive LCGs and those are just never coming back.

FWIW there is some genuine effort being put into reviving FFG since Embracer bought Asmodee, from what I can tell. They've hired new designers and are developing new games, which is a change from a couple of years ago when they just sort of let everything wither on the vine because whichever VC firm owned them or whoever was calling the shots at ANA was happy to ignore any studio that wasn't currently their most successful one. I know right after Embracer took over, they did an analysis to see how their employees' pay was compared to industry standards and an employee at FFG got something like a $20k annual raise because of that process, lol, so there is some investment being made into FFG again.

Leperflesh
May 17, 2007

moths posted:

Selling a box of goblins would mean that you're cannibalizing sales from the random box that might contain goblins.

The loot box is better from that perspective because the guy who wants a dozen goblins might end up buying thirty boxes to get them (instead of one box containing the product he wants.)

In reality, he's going to get them from another source, which is a huge blind spot for a lot of business. It's the same mindset that sees every instance of piracy as a lost sale. From this viewpoint, selling a goblin pack would mean they lost thirty sales.

Wizards is intimately familiar with the secondary market for randomized product packs. If you want WizKids Official D&D goblins, you wait for the stores and whales to open 100 boxes, and buy goblins from those sellers. Contrary to what Kai Tave just said, Wizards' does benefit from high prices for cards in the secondary market, because it's those high prices that drive sales of the randomized packs to speculators. The sustained, long-term increase in value for cards going back 30 years is a major incentive to people to buy and crack packs. Despite loads of evidence that cracking packs is almost always net negative expected value, people still do it. A key component of this strategy, though, is the "reserved list" - a promise by Wizards not to reprint playable copies of a bunch of the most valuable cards. The much-maligned 30y anniversary giveaway, which included sales for about an hour in order to set an Official Price of One Thousand Dollars for these cards - flirted with that promise by reprinting certain high-value cards on the reserve list, but critically they were not identical (different backs I think) and aren't legal for use in any format. Even aside from the reserve list, cards that could get reprinted can still go for dozens or even hundreds of dollars, because players want several of them to build certain competitive decks and they haven't been reprinted yet, or only the print from a specific set is allowed in their format.

D&D minis don't really fit that model, though. Part of what makes reserve-list cards valuable is that they're extremely good cards in the "allows super old cards" formats, so a key driver of their value is utility, not just rarity. But minis are tokens - you don't need to have the special mind flayer wearing a leather jacket in order to put "Eyy, the Fonz Beholder" onto the tabletop and have your PCs fight it. At best, rarity and cool factor drive the prices of out of print minis. Those factors are unpredictable and probably the generally low quality of pre-painted WizKids plastic D&D minis restricts their ability to attain high collectibility value. Without the dream of striking it rich with an amazing find in a random pack, you don't have that huge secondary market pull to convince people to crack boxes of random minis.

I think Wizards probably understands this. At least some of the people there do. The loot box, jolt of excitement from opening a random pack of anything is still there, it can be somewhat addictive, but in the end, minis just aren't magic cards and never can be. Selling a goblin pack would still detract from that, and probably they'll sell fewer goblins by just offering goblin packs than they will by shoving goblins into millions of random packs of minis... but using WizKids official D&D licensed minis would probably be a lot more popular if they just sold what people wanted, because there's so many unlicensed equivalents out there that there's zero reason to buy packs to try and get goblins when you can just buy goblins from ten other companies.

Critically, you can print and use proxies for expensive Magic cards, but they're not legal in tournaments, or even at many Friday Night Magic events. Whereas there is no competitive, you-must-use-official-minis scene for tabletop D&D. HeroClix was different, you needed (ostensibly, at least with a higher barrier to proxying) an actual HeroClix model to play. But for D&D? There's no moat.

so tl;dr, I agree with you that trying to convince people to buy random packs of D&D minis is stupid and giving up market share.

Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 21:09 on Jan 20, 2023

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



moths posted:

Selling a box of goblins would mean that you're cannibalizing sales from the random box that might contain goblins.

The loot box is better from that perspective because the guy who wants a dozen goblins might end up buying thirty boxes to get them (instead of one box containing the product he wants.)

In reality, he's going to get them from another source, which is a huge blind spot for a lot of business. It's the same mindset that sees every instance of piracy as a lost sale. From this viewpoint, selling a goblin pack would mean they lost thirty sales.
The wise monkey would have a lovely system and lovely sculpted goblins, perhaps even with some randomization in each pack. And the wise monkey would also make it so one pack of goblins contains one fewer goblins than a recommended encounter for a party of four or five.

Dexo
Aug 15, 2009

A city that was to live by night after the wilderness had passed. A city that was to forge out of steel and blood-red neon its own peculiar wilderness.
They won't use loot boxes.

No need to, even console games have realized other more effective ways to make money.

Only really Gatcha games do it now.

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Zurai
Feb 13, 2012


Wait -- I haven't even voted in this game yet!

Leperflesh posted:

Part of what makes reserve-list cards valuable is that they're extremely good cards in the "allows super old cards" formats, so a key driver of their value is utility, not just rarity.

FWIW, this is absolutely not true. The vast, vast majority of the reserved list cards are junk and always have been. Like, yes, you have the original dual lands, Black Lotus, Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale, and so on, but you've also got 27 cards from Fallen Empires of all sets (and not the, like, 2 good cards from it). Despite being average to bad, many of them are still valuable. It's absolutely their rarity that drives the price.

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