WotC? Gaming?

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;814478How does anyone even run those businesses if everyone gets canned after two years.

Its the equivalent of the edition treadmil. Games Workshop ran and probably still runs on it. Lure them in, work them like animals and then throw them into the gutter. Easily replaced and no one is likely to believe the former employees.

Its worse though in places where you cannot just quit and go elsewhere.

Quote from: One Horse Town;814485WotC? Gaming?

From what I've been told by former employees and from watching things unfold. WOTC is notorious for botching advertising and marketing of any sideline games that arent top priority.

Also that Hasbro learned to keep WOTC on a tight budgetary leash for a reason. This is a company that threw product into landfills and incinerators rather than try to sell it because it was secondary product. Mismanagement plagued them early on.

Hasbro isnt much of a better place to try and work for. Ive talked to a few folk who worked for them before and some of the reports were all rosy. But some were pretty bad. Up to and including having their games stolen and never seeing a dime. Never heard of that on the WOTC end. But I have heard and seen that working with them, things like collaborations can be a study in frustration and failure.

Very YMMV from all accounts.

Quote from: Omega;814494From what I've been told by former employees and from watching things unfold. WOTC is notorious for botching advertising and marketing of any sideline games that arent top priority.

They don't seem to do great when it comes to marketing their priorities (D&D and Magic) either. I get the impression these properties coast by on the backs of long-established fan bases.

Quote from: The Butcher;814503They don't seem to do great when it comes to marketing their priorities (D&D and Magic) either. I get the impression these properties coast by on the backs of long-established fan bases.

That's not my perception of Magic. It may not be the pinnacle of modern marketing presentation, but it seems about right, and I see curious newcomers getting drawn in regularly.

That definitely is my perception of D&D though. It has gotten better, but it's still limping. I have to be proactive about recruiting, and a very common reaction is "Whoa, that still exists?"

Quote from: The Butcher;814503They don't seem to do great when it comes to marketing their priorities (D&D and Magic) either. I get the impression these properties coast by on the backs of long-established fan bases.

In D&Ds case they literally cant. Solomon and SweetPea are apparently still blockading any movies, TV shows, etc. Possibly with Warner in on the gag too now. But they did maintain a presence via word of mouth through the playtest, and the comics.

They actually did much the same with Magic. A comic book presence but little that I ever saw in actual TV ads.

Whereas Kaijudo got a cartoon series.

D&D needs an update of the cartoon series.

But really what I think Hasbro should do, long term, is put together a boxed set, minimal rules (but no "level cap 1-5 introductory" crippleware BS, a whole game, in the 80s plenty of games manage to do this in 40 pages or less), dice, all you need to play, family-friendly art and extremely clear game-manual-like explanations,and get that boxed set out on the same shelves as Monopoly and the Game of Life. Just have it be a standard game anyone can pick up at a Toys R Us or Kmart.

As for WoTC's treatement of their employees...its a corporation. I wouldn't expect anything better than being an employee t McDonald's or Walmart. Doesn't mean they don't have an endless stream of geeks willing to submit themselves to it. ust goes back to my opinion that the roleplaying hobby doesn't need the roleplaying industry. Even if I didnt create my own games at this point, I could easily game for the rest of my life just on the material produced by independent other gamers, most of which they're perfectly happy to put online for free jut out of love for the hobby. D&D is a gateway drug, sure, but it doesn't match up with actual gamers introducing other people to gaming. The hobby could do just fine without it.

Quote from: Lynn;814472Those processes worked brilliantly in Japan because Japanese culture is all about harmony and perpetuation of the group. What's funny is that many of those processes originated outside of Japan and were then successfully adapted to Japanese culture. Business culture is still culture; it sits on top of the societal culture.

A Japanese manufacturer (of that era) would not have allowed known defective parts in the door; Japanese suppliers wouldn't have knowingly provided them either. The sword of humiliation always falls on the neck of the CEO in the end.

...and so it did.

The entire plant was closed within two months after Steve Jobs returned to Apple. I heard some of the manufacturing people were offered jobs in Santa Clara and with Apple overseas in the (I want to say) ...Taiwan or the Philippines, but the vast majority were simply let go. I had already been gone for six months. Shown the door after one too many confrontations with my Engineering superiors.

That was the last Fortune 500 tech company I ever worked for. After that, I have chosen to work for tech start-ups and small to mid-sized technology companies where stupid and incompetent engineers have a much harder time gaining any positions of lasting authority.

Apple looked like this in 1997:
It’s difficult to remember how far Apple had fallen. Just a few months away from bankruptcy, the company had a dwindling 4 percent share of the PC market and annual losses exceeding $1 billion. Three CEOs had come and gone in a decade including the one that had opened the plant where I worked, Gil Amelio; board members had tried to sell the company but found no takers. Two months after Apple’s deal with Microsoft, Michael Dell told a tech industry symposium that if he ran Apple, he’d “shut it down and give the money back to shareholders.”

Would that Apple had not made it. They have, and continue to do... tremendous damage to the American technology Industries as a whole promoting closed technology and DRM where they were once the champions of innovation and creativity. If they had faced the same commercial market barriers they routinely throw up for other tech companies now, they would be long dead.

To get back on topic, There was a time I would have been honored to work for TSR or WOTC making RPGs, however the last time I seriously considered that was 2003. Once WOTC was sold to Hasbro, I no longer considered creating RPGs and games a viable career. Hasbro has had a hate-on for TSR since TSR experienced tremendous commercial success in the late 70's and early 80's taking considerable portion of a whole generation of youngsters with them like. At first everyone ignored TSR. Then they tried to kill it. When they failed with both those strategies, they bought it. They still can't kill it without incurring some considerable backlash from gamers, so they keep WOTC employees on a supertight leash and starve out any true hope of growth and innovation by regularly trimming the talent employed there.

This has had an interesting side effect in that newly released talent kicks off the shackles of corporate servitude and almost routinely spins off and starts up a very small, but great gaming companies. It's been an enlightening renaissance.

Look, dip-shit, no-one gives a fuck about apple.

Yes, i too can edit my posts to make it look like i was on-topic. Look WotC!

Quote from: One Horse Town;814524Look, dip-shit, no-one gives a fuck about apple.

The same can be said for Apple about the American people. Just yesterday, I had the misfortune of having to help a young lady who wanted to download a song she had bought from the Apple iTunes store to a PC. She couldn't download it it, because the DRM was making it extremely difficult to  download her song to her 2nd pc (she already had it on her first pc).

I ended up getting her song from somewhere else and putting it on her pc for her, but the whole thing took almost thirty minutes. That's my thirty minutes, that I'll never ever get back.

Oh my fucking god take the fucking hint


the -rpg- site

Quote from: Will;814527Oh my fucking god take the fucking hint

I had already changed the subject back to Wotc, he wanted me to talk about Apple some more.

Bugger off.

...Actually, no wait. You think it's a good idea for any company to add DRM to it's offering and include severe restrictions on content as part of that sale? Inquiring minds are keen to know.

On the topic of gaming companies ... doing freelance is a big ball of suck, too.

You have to work your ass off to get jobs, to get PAID, and then half the time decide whether it's worth sending someone to small claims court.

There's the famous case of Chaosium, which printed folks' stuff and didn't pay them for a decade or two.

I worked for one company where the contract specifically said 'we pay you X amount once we decide your stuff is good, and if we have a problem, each of us has a chance to fix it or cancel the deal.'

I submitted it, then it took 4 months to get paid (because, as it turns out, they were using the wrong address, which I could never get a line with them to work out... just emails I'd send in, answered a month later).
And then the pay was $100 short. WTH?

Yeah. They said 'oh, we only used X amount of your stuff, so paid you based on that.'
Ex-fucking-cuse me? That's not what the contract stipulates.
'It's standard practice in the industry.'
Like fuck it is. And, again, NOT WHAT THE CONTRACT SAID.

But I wasn't about to sue folks cross-country over $100, just... never worked with them again.

Fuckers.


Oh, and the capper on all of this is that RPG writing pays SHIT. Granted, fiction/short writing generally pays shit.

Here's the 'drive RPG writers to drink' factoid:
Generally you can expect 2-5 cents a word (assuming you get paid).

In the 1920s, unadjusted for anything, Amazing Stories and similar writers could get only 2-5 cents a word.

...

...

Yeah. Which is why you can't make a living on writing nowadays unless you get a magazine gig or are fantastically lucky.

Yep, professional rpg writing looks like a terrible career from the outside looking in.  Presumably, WotC at least offers health insurance, paid time off, and a 401K option.  Is there any other player in the industry who can afford that for their employees?  Maybe Paizo?

Quote from: GameDaddy;814520Would that Apple had not made it. They have, and continue to do... tremendous damage to the American technology Industries as a whole promoting closed technology and DRM where they were once the champions of innovation and creativity. If they had faced the same commercial market barriers they routinely throw up for other tech companies now, they would be long dead.

I was very involved in the Mac market at that time (still am in several ways) too. Apple is not a computer company now, but a consumer electronics company that also makes computer devices - the "digital hub" strategy.

But bringing this back...TSR > WotC > Hasbro. The new parent companies had different mandates for the subsumed business than the previous one (though Apple Computer > Apple, Inc does come to mind as similar).

It was obvious that Hasbro's situation would be completely different than WotC - compartmentalized but also extremely vertical.