WotC: "seven or eight" D&D video games are coming over the next few years

[Norfleet]

And they seem intent on trying to destroy the franchise that had this appeal on top, yes.

 

[laclongquan]

The ideal (and risk-free) opportunity for WoTC to establish a foothold in video games was in 2012, when people were throwing millions at Kickstarters to revive 'old-school' RPGs. Instead, they did nothing for almost a decade and then greenlit shovelware like that new Dark Alliance game.

It's hard to imagine the level of incompetence required to handle a franchise with universal appeal this poorly.

It's not what you think. When you open up Kickstarter campaign, you are opening up to fans' questions and criticisms. All your weakness will get poked, by all the fans that have ax to grind with WotC, all the time and until the games get published. Note: abandoning games and refund KS would not be a solution because we will poke at them until the game get done and published.

WotC is NOT an IP holder to run KS campaigns. Their decisions that get made over years illustrate their personality quite clearly and it's not one to run the risk of KS. With good reason too~

 

[InD_ImaginE]

The ideal (and risk-free) opportunity for WoTC to establish a foothold in video games was in 2012, when people were throwing millions at Kickstarters to revive 'old-school' RPGs. Instead, they did nothing for almost a decade and then greenlit shovelware like that new Dark Alliance game.

It's hard to imagine the level of incompetence required to handle a franchise with universal appeal this poorly.

Eh DnD wasn't that big in 2012. It exploded in popularity in the mainstream only after 5e and still a bit more after that. Maybe 5 - 6 years ago? Before that it was niche hobby still.

 

[Sacibengala]

Oh, No! Otherside don't deserves this, they are so good if they get the chance show. *Troll Face*

 

[copebot]

So let me get this straight. In an environment where people don't have jobs and have nothing better to do with their time, they can't manage to turn out time-wasters that people are willing to go without pizza for?

No, they've just done the cost-analysis and determined that it's cheaper to make cheap plastic shit "actkshun figyurrs" for 25 cents a piece while selling them at $30 a pop to idiot manchildren than it is to make decent cRPGs for ~$10-20 mill and selling 750k copies at an average price of $20.

Unfortunately, their math is probably sound.

For WoTC, though, their margins on licensing are even better than selling plastic or books. You just sign a contract with some guys who will pay you for the privilege of using the D&D name and access to real licensed Beholders™. The guys paying for the license front all the money and take all the risk involved in making a video game. I think D&D's bigger problem is that their IP mostly sucks and is getting worse. They also have the general problem of woke capture in which the companies are increasingly run for the benefit of do-nothing employees rather than customers or shareholders. Employees get paid for remaking things that don't need to be remade. It's kind of weird to have a company sitting on decades of IP that also declares a large portion of its intangible assets to be fundamentally immoral and not suitable for sale to anyone.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

They fucked up a co op hack n slash brawler featuring some of the most beloved FR characters of all time. They're hopeless.

 

[J1M]

The ideal (and risk-free) opportunity for WoTC to establish a foothold in video games was in 2012, when people were throwing millions at Kickstarters to revive 'old-school' RPGs. Instead, they did nothing for almost a decade and then greenlit shovelware like that new Dark Alliance game.

It's hard to imagine the level of incompetence required to handle a franchise with universal appeal this poorly.

Well, you don't have to imagine. You can watch the investor apology call they did a few weeks ago for the Magic 30 fuckup.

 

[anvi]

They are evil shitlords like Hasbro. And MTG is shit now.

 

[Galdred]

Honestly instead of funding game themselves they just should've done what GW did with licensing and all. Larian is probably also on licensing model?

Revenue will be lower of course, but it is risk-free for WotC.

Indeed, I am not 100% certain of the model behind GW licensing, but it seems to involve paying up-front, then a percentage of the earnings, and GW reserves the right to not renew the licence if they feel like it, which allows them to cull games that don't sell over time (Storm of Vengeance, Space Hulk Ascension, Adeptus Titanicus...) .

 

[Abu Antar]

WotC botched a lot of things, but Hasbro's plastic figures are also selling poorly. I don't know if you guys read the article.

The growth at Wizards of the Coast has come alongside financial difficulties at Hasbro, whose shares fell 40% last year as higher prices led to lower toy sales.

Not that I am defending WotC. They released too much shit in the past decade. Baldur's Gate III seems generally well received. Ride that momentum and make an Icewind Dale 3. Hack n' slash games are doing fairly well, right now. Capitalize on that and make Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance III. Roguelikes are in. Let people do their thing with your ruleset. But no, instead with got things like:

-Dark Alliance - Bad game, and dirty loot box shit. Player count dropped super quick.
-Sword Coast Legends - Had a swift death.
-Tales from Candlekeep: Tomb of Annihilation - Dead.
-Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms - Idle game that is doing better than all the above games.
-Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale - Piss poor hack n' slash game.
-Enhanced ports of older games, and Siege of Dragonspear.

They fumbled the ball to hell and back. Sure, the Warhammer IP has a lot of bad games attached to it, but they at least have a few good games that came out of the licensing.

So in my eyes, both Hasbro, and WotC have fucked up, something that should be successful by default. Going the way of wokeism won't help them, either.

 

[Dadd]

How could anything WotC makes be successful by default when they don't have a single sentient employee

 

[zapotec]

You forgot Solasta, not a bad game

 

[Abu Antar]

You forgot Solasta, not a bad game

Solasta is not an officially licensed product. OGL stuff have generally been better than any official thing since 2011.

 

[copebot]

You forgot Solasta, not a bad game

Solasta is not an officially licensed product. OGL stuff have generally been better than any official thing since 2011.

No disrespect intended to Solasta's devs, but that is the kind of game that WoTC could be mass licensing repeatedly. Just extending the license can make it a lot easier for a developer to secure financing, or the prospect of getting the license can facilitate that. Having a prebaked system also simplifies development for all kinds of reasons. But WoTC is stupid and badly-run. Irrespective of whether or not it's a good thing, the D&D brand's revival has had very little to do with WoTC and everything to do with things like Critical Roll and incidental cultural boosts from things like Netflix. If all that they are doing is collecting copyright rents, the company will rapidly learn the limitations of copyright if your company is not actually creating anything that people want to buy.

 

[Dodo1610]

Washington-based Hidden Path Entertainment, both of which were working on games for Wizards of the Coast.

At least one detail of this report is wrong since Hidden Paths DND game is still in development

 

[Risewild]

The only thing I want from WoTC is a sequel to MTG: Shandalar, with all cards from the older sets (maybe up to the Kamigawa block and that's stretching it bit), more game modes (Commander, Two-Headed Giant, etc.), more and different main quests, and good modding support. They could make it so we could play MTG against a buddy (like the Shandalar Manalink addon did) but it being a single-player game would be enough for me.

 

[Dadd]

The only thing I want from WoTC is a sequel to MTG: Shandalar, with all cards from the older sets (maybe up to the Kamigawa block and that's stretching it bit), more game modes (Commander, Two-Headed Giant, etc.), more and different main quests, and good modding support. They could make it so we could play MTG against a buddy (like the Shandalar Manalink addon did) but it being a single-player game would be enough for me.

Sounds good but I get a strong impression from WotC's actions that they would rather we forget about old sets and focus only on the latest few sets.

Posters on MTG's reddit page, which is heavily controlled, usually denigrate cards from older sets as "bad" or "janky" or call them "mistakes," and say new cards don't have those mistakes and are better. WotC employees frequently refer to old cards as "mistakes" even though the awful new cards they've been designing often suffer from complexity problems Garfield explicitly warned about.

Last time I checked Arena still doesn't have older sets. You'd think with MTG's history they would strive to promote older sets and iconic old cards in digital formats, but that's exactly the thing they're not doing.

 

[Tuco Benedicto Pacifico]

Infinitron No news in home page about Hasbro/WOTC suddenly deciding to trash a half dozen D&D videogames that were allegedly in development?

 

[Kruno]

Infinitron No news in home page about Hasbro/WOTC suddenly deciding to trash a half dozen D&D videogames that were allegedly in development?

What? Is there a deeper discussion about this somewhere? More info? Could those game simply have been in development hell?

 

[Tuco Benedicto Pacifico]

Infinitron No news in home page about Hasbro/WOTC suddenly deciding to trash a half dozen D&D videogames that were allegedly in development?

What? Is there a deeper discussion about this somewhere? More info? Could those game simply have been in development hell?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...ards-of-the-coast-cancels-video-game-projects

There's also a bit of an awkward situation going on, with the reporter insisting on twitter that his sources are labeling the Hidden Path unannounced D&D game as axed, while the studio insists (once again on twitter) they are still working on it.
Hard to say if it's the former that got some bad info or the latter that didn't get the bad memo or it's trying to play it down to not alarm some other investors.

 

[copebot]

The thing with the OGL is that it is much more of a branding exercise than a copyright licensing exercise. Game rules are not copyrightable. Game mechanics can be covered under utility patents, but that's misleading since just because you CAN patent something does not mean that the patent is enforceable in court. No entity owns an enforceable IP right on the concept of the critical hit or THAC0. No one has even trademarked THAC0.

In the 2000 version of the OGL, 9. says:

"9. Updating the License: Wizards or its designated Agents may publish updated versions of this License. You may use any authorized version of this License to copy, modify and distribute any Open Game Content originally distributed under any version of this License."

That seems pretty unambiguous as written. Unless you accept the new version of the OGL, you can accept and perform under the old version of the OGL. And frankly, all the license gives you the "right" to do is to associate your publication with the OGL. Most of the claims that could be brought would be frivolous anyway. You already have the right to do virtually everything that is in that agreement.

Game rules are generally not subject to copyright. What it does protect is specific expressions. Copying the exact paragraphs and tables describing attack bonuses can be infringement, but copying the content of those tables generally will not be infringement. That's why Pathfinder can exist without being sued into nonexistence.

More sophisticated companies weave in trademark protections on characters and concepts to improve their protections. Wizards owns a bunch of Drizzt trademarks, for example. If you try to knock him off too closely, but not exactly enough to constitute copyright infringement, they may still have colorable claims for trademark infringement to at least drag you into court. Design patents have also been significantly narrowed in the US under Egyptian Goddess to only really protect designs that are "substantially the same" as others. So, even if Wizards gets a design patent on a miniature of an orc, even a fairly slight modification in the design of that object will make it not infringe on that design patent.

So, an attempt to make the licensing more restrictive won't really work because they do not really have any stick to beat people with. They have some carrots, but in part because they are such a weird and erratic business partner, they are goofy carrots that will turn you trans if you eat them.

 

[scytheavatar]

Infinitron No news in home page about Hasbro/WOTC suddenly deciding to trash a half dozen D&D videogames that were allegedly in development?

What? Is there a deeper discussion about this somewhere? More info? Could those game simply have been in development hell?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...ards-of-the-coast-cancels-video-game-projects

There's also a bit of an awkward situation going on, with the reporter insisting on twitter that his sources are labeling the Hidden Path unannounced D&D game as axed, while the studio insists (once again on twitter) they are still working on it.
Hard to say if it's the former that got some bad info or the latter that didn't get the bad memo or it's trying to play it down to not alarm some other investors.

Wizards of the Coast spokesperson is more or less official confirmation, anyone who is denying that the game is cancelled is just smoking copium.

 

[JarlFrank]

It's hard to imagine the level of incompetence required to handle a franchise with universal appeal this poorly.

WotC are incompetent SJW cucks who only care about removing racism from D&D and don't actually know how game design works.