Enworld reports that Renton role playing game manufacturer Wizards of the Coast laid off employees last Thursday. Enworld confirmed three people who were definitely laid off, and they suggest that layoffs come every year at WOTC around this time. I have a call out to WOTC, and I’ll update this post if they respond.
Last year, Gamegrene.com reported similar layoffs at WOTC, and announced that they are “unfortunately becoming an annual holiday event.” This year, Gamegrene calls the annual layoff ritual “clockwork.”
Thanks to Slog Tipper Rich for the tip.
If only they’d had enough green mana to cast “Fountain of Money.” Or enough black mana to summon “Horde of Collectors.” Alas, they’re tapped out.
WotC made the decision years ago to abandon the adult gamer market and purely chase the teen/pre-teen markets with their core products. The MBA’s apparently missed the course regarding the fickleness of children.
I still miss the WotC arcade on the Ave.
Hardly surprising. I don’t know anyone playing 4th ed.
They’ve got some shitty practices. I frequented a board with D&D players all over, one of the guys is in Greece, he can’t buy PDFs since he’s not in America, but it’s hard for him to get game books over there. So that’s a customer lost right there. You’d be surprised at how much of an international market there is for D&D, that WotC has generally been ignoring.
Everyone’s playing French RPGs here at the UW … I think they lost their market.
4th Edition is/was a financial disaster for them. No surprise about any of this.
I didn’t even like 3rd edition. Never bothered with 4th. D&D was much better with TSR. Not perfect by any stretch, but better.
I honestly liked 3.5’s flexibility (and does anyone actually miss THAC0?).
4 rubbed me the wrong way, it was dumbing down, it wasn’t even ‘making it more accessible to newbies’ simplification. I personally feel like the character classes aren’t nearly as interesting or variable as 3.5 could’ve made it. Edition wars have always been brutal among fans, but this has to be the most virulent one yet.
Not to mention the changes in setting (If you’re going to time-jump Forgotten Realms, kill some gods, make some new ones, could you please kill the ones that people actually hate, like the Big E?)
Merry Christmas and Happy Capitalism bitches!
wow, a whole 3 people?
wake me when you’re huring like the A/E industry.
Wow… Who cares? Has WotC been relevant since Hasbro bought ’em nearly ten years ago? NO! They are laying off THREE people and this gets noted in SLOG? WTF?
WotC has been bleeding employees for years. If you look at who gets the boot you might start to notice it is always older company/gamer-nerd loyalists who have been working there for ages (some came over from TSR, some from before Hasbro). People that work for a company for a long time have higher salaries, so why not find a way to jettison those workers for young cheap debt enslaved college grads? WotCWTFPWNZU.
what you non-nerds need to know about this:
Wizards of the coast recently released the 4th edition (actually more like 6th, it’s complicated) of Dungeons and Dragons.
It really, REALLY sucks. they basically tried to make D&D more like World of Warcraft. But they forgot that World of Warcraft isn’t actually fun.
So, while lots of nerds, like me, bought the first book or three (its convenient for each player to have their own copy of one of the books, the DM basically has to have 3) we soon found out we didn’t want to play anymore. so people aren’t buying the books after the first 3. Obviously, this is not good for their business.
I don’t miss the arcade on the Ave so much as the giant plaster minotaur’s head looming over the foyer. It typified the excess of the late 90s….