Wizards of the Coast
| Wizards of the Coast | ||
|---|---|---|
 |
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| Alignment | Batshit Insane Chaotic Evil | |
| Divine Rank | AAA | |
| Pantheon | Tabletop, TCG | |
| Portfolio | Magic: The Gathering, Dungeons and Dragons | |
| Domains | Deepest Pits of TCG Hell | |
| Home Plane | Washington, United States | |
| Worshippers | Fucking Pinkertons (We are NOT making this shit up) | |
| Favoured Weapon | Assraping Fans, Corporate Greed, Sending fucking Hitmen after Fans | |
Wizards of the Coast (Abbr: WotC) (http://www.wizards.com}}), like so many luminous icons of the tabletop industry, was founded in a dingy basement in the rainy city of Seattle in 1990. Originally, they developed Magic the Gathering, and, after using their patents on various cardgame staples like "tapping" and "counters" to strangle literally every other competitor but Legend of the Five Rings out of business, they made so much goddamn money on the sucker's market that is the CCG scene that they were able to fulfill every nerd's dream of buying the dying Dungeons and Dragons property out from under Lorraine Williams, then revitalizing it with its most popular edition. Since then, they've been themselves bought out by the cold, emotionless, alien beings taking the form of corporate suits at Hasbro, but in recent times the corporation has adopted a more "hand-off" approach to Wizards, to mutual benefit. LOL NOT ANY MORE. Reception of their leaked 1.1 update to the OGL document had been a stinking dumpster fire.
They are a source of civilized and respectful debate on /tg/, but while the old guard will probably never forgive them for changing literally anything about the game from the Chainmail days, general consensus is that, as evil megacorporations in the tabletop business go, they really could be much worse. Besides, they got a bit better, so that's good I guess. Unfortunately nothing good ever lasts with people screaming murder over OGL update 1.1. And said dumpster fire evolving into a Australian-grade Bushfire during the April 2023 incident (More can be read below).
Early History: Oh~ Oh~ Oh~, It's Magic!
Wizards started out as a small-time game publisher, releasing new editions of defunct old niche games and small dribbles of their own material. They'd probably have gone the route of Iron Crown Enterprises or be languishing in obscurity today, if not for a stroke of good luck. Some math major with an eye towards game design walked into their office and pitched a board game to them. They liked it, but they didn't have the cash to produce it, so they asked him to come up with something cheaper to produce, something portable and quick to play. Well, to make a long story short, he went home, ran some numbers, and the rest is history.
Magic: The Gathering was (and, if you're into the Skinner Box of CCGs, still is) a damn fine collectible card game, the first commercially successful one of its kind in the world... which isn't actually that impressive, considering the only other CCG at that point was a baseball card game from the early 1900s. Still, it started an industry, won shitloads of game-design awards, and led to Wizards using its patents on various basic card game mechanics ("tapping," counters, etc.) to ruthlessly crush all competitors. Sometimes, they were justified in protecting their IP against hacks and shovelware imitators. Sometimes, they just went after people they didn't like. Let's just say there's a reason L5R used to make you lose points if you accidentally said "tap" instead of "bow."
It also made them more money than can easily be imagined, not least because the 90s was the age of know-nothing idiots speculating on "nerd shit," a trend started in the comic-book industry. (Humorously, the cards from this time have sometimes ended up being more valuable than the pointless comics bubble ever would be.) Rather than blowing it all on hookers and blow, in the tradition of the 80's, they funneled it back into their RPG business, buying up various old games and refurbishing them, including Ars Magica from fellow swaggering new kid on the block White Wolf. Most of them had enjoyed only moderate success at best, not least because the market then was smaller than it had ever been following the fundamentalist-o-caust of the 80's purge and the company was putting its fingers into too many pies and failing to support all its games, but eventually, they managed to land the biggest fish of all.
And so, my lord became a king by his own hand...
As a cash-strapped and internal-politics-crippled TSR was folding and dying, Wizards bought them and all their stuff, including the famous and venerable Dungeons and Dragons property, for a paltry $25 million. They gave all the old TSR guys jobs, called off the lawyers and openly allowed fans to release stuff for poorly-selling but much-beloved campaign settings, and put various designers from TSR to work building the most popular and successful edition of D&D ever. Then paid to do it again when it needed a shitload of patching, leading to the silliest D&D edition name of all time (3.5). They also held a contest to design a setting that was weird and new for the new edition, ultimately settling on Keith Baker's Eberron.
Along with that edition, they put out the Open Gaming License, offering free reign for other companies to use their rules and produce supplements. While this had the unfortunate side effect of sometimes putting their tacit approval on complete fail, it is generally held to be one of their smartest and most fan-friendly moves ever, generating huge amounts of content for their game without paying a dime for it. Whether you want uber-minimalism, hard sci-fi, or erotically-charged sexventures, you can generally find it somewhere in the library of OGL content, in varying degrees of quality.
As the decade wound down, they also got the license to make a CCG for Pokémon, and while we scoff now, it was a pretty good game that wasn't a complete Magic rip-off, and it probably made them about as much money as Magic for a while there. The Pokémon craze was at its height, and children everywhere begged money off their parents, worked menial lemonade-stand jobs, and, in some truly fail-tastic cases, murdered each other in cold blood for the next sweet, sweet hit of booster pack fever.
New Management, or the Road to the Great Mistake
At the turn of the millenium, terrible, alien intelligences examined our realm of existence. With minds too different from ours to comprehend their motives, and the cold, unfeeling calculations of inhuman thoughts, they reached out their slick black tentacles into our plane and acquired Wizards of the Coast. They also paid nearly ten times as much for the privilege as Wizards spent for TSR, so suck it fanboys!
What happened next is hard to conclusively prove, since nobody involved wants to stop working in the business forever by getting a rep as a fuckin' snitch, but over the course of a decade, most of Wizards' upper management was quietly replaced. Various minor aspects of the property, like GenCon and the Dragon and Dungeon magazines were portioned off and outsourced to other producers (notably, Paizo). Keeping a low overhead meant firing all the veterans to hire newbs with lower asking salaries, draining the company's talent pool. Whether these cutbacks were the fault of Wizards, a company run by enthusiasts for enthusiasts with a history of mediocre business sense, or Hasbro, a corporate giant with a history of undermining their acquired brands with needless executive interference and anti-consumer bullshit, is probably never going to be openly known. Either way, eventually, the decision was made to build an entirely new edition of Dungeons & Dragons.
In theory, this wasn't necessarily a bad thing. Third Edition and 3.5 had always had their flaws (Monte Cook's traditional caster-dominance, weak martial classes, incoherent high-level play that turned into a maze of magic item abuse and extra turn stacking, a cesspool of bad character options left over from the ill-thought-out "ivory tower" game design, etc.) and the latter was starting to show its age. Furthermore, they decided that this edition wouldn't just be a revamp of the old, but a complete rebuilding of the entire D&D system from the ground up, intending to fix long-running problems and set a bold new direction for the future. No more would martials announce "I make a weapon attack" and throw a d20 round after round: they would have access to cool techniques and a varied playstyle just like the casters. No more would casters break the game over their knee and don their robe and wizard hat to fuck its corpse: their power would be drastically scaled back, with magic now divided into limited-application combat components and longer-and-more-involved ritual spells.
Unfortunately, this well-intentioned and high-profile project was destined to go horribly wrong...
Schism and Competition
Despite what the butthurt fanboys will tell you, Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition was (and still sort-of is as they sell off the backlog) a financial success. And the hatred for it was never uniform. Even people that hate 4e will admit that it's not a terrible game, but even its fans have to admit that, in many ways, it is utterly unrecognizable from the game that preceded it. The sad truth is that 4e was worse than a bad game: it was a flawed-but-good game which just happened to have a lot of stupid drama to deal with.
To make a long story very short:
The people who love 4e love it for its tightly-defined rule set, tactical depth compared to 3.5 (no more martials flanking and power attacking every turn while the casters fly out of reach or teleport out of sight and spam save-or-die rays from their familiar), strong support for the DM via online materials, ease of play compared to the frequent RULESRULESRULES problems of earlier editions, giving every class, even former low-tier sad-sacks like the monk a fair shot at being as awesome as the previously-dominant full-casters, and for introducing some genuinely good new ideas to the lore. (Ex. The Raven Queen replacing the evil death gods as an iconic neutral death goddess, some great new books and campaign ideas for Eberron, adding lots of off-beat, niche races like githzerai and goliaths to the core rulebooks, and a new, wonderfully revamped version of Dark Sun for the first time in two-and-a-half editions that not only brought back all the best parts of that gameline but sanded off all the worst ideas, like the biomechanical halfling empire and the DM taking over a character during the Dragon transformation.)
The people who hate 4e hate it for sharply segregating the game into combat and story sections, focusing heavily on the use of miniatures and battle mat combat rather than the "theater of the imagination," being hard to run without "power cards," sold separately, to keep all the abilities straight, nickle and diming consumers to try to force them to buy World of Warcraft-style subscriptions for access to character generators or other online materials, shoehorning all classes into the same sets of mechanics (Leaders heal and buff their allies, Strikers hurt things, Defenders tank, Controllers debuff and throw out area attacks), making a lot of gratuitous changes to D&D lore, from slaughtering the cosmology of Planescape to dropping a Spellplague on the Forgotten Realms, and releasing a castrated new version of the Open Gaming License for the game system.
Worse, it seems many of these problems were corporate mandated from above by Hasbro, seeking to create a more tightly-controlled IP and cut the Open Gaming License off at the roots. While 4e remained a modest financial success, many fans began leaving the oldest roleplaying game of all behind to go looking for other ways to scratch the itch. And many of the Hasbro-based marketeers, being, like most marketeers, dumb blood-sucking vampires who only vaguely remember what it is to be human, made the whole situation worse by emphasizing 3.5's flaws as much as they praised 4e's features in a vindictive way that hurt feelings and created a lot of bad blood.
Paizo, the former magazine publishers, took advantage of this to start fully promoting their own D20-based RPG game, Pathfinder, a sort of "D&D 3.75" that attempted to fix the problems without transforming so drastically from the 3.5 model. How successful they were is... debatable (read that page for details), but it drew in the fans like mad. Because it ran on the OGL, it soon had rafts of refugees publishing quality third-party material for its game. Riding that surge of popularity, Paizo began to become a true challenger to WoTC's former dominance over the gaming market, even outselling them at times.
This act, creating one's own worse competitor, was humiliating for Wizards and disquieting to Hasbro. The slimy, icy tendrils of the conglomerate began to withdraw. So long as Wizards did not become a financial liability, the interns through which Hasbro communicated sang (they burn out, bleeding from every orifice, after channeling a single communication and have to be replaced), it would now be free to pursue whatever direction it wished for yet another edition. But it must have another edition. The insatiable hunger of the otherworldly suits would not be satisfied with second place, no matter how profitable it proved.
Yet, in many ways, as Wizards scrambled to clean up the floors under the intern and move on, this whole experience was good for Wizards. Now that they had actual competitors, product quality could be an actual defense against the bizarre demands of their alien masters, since now they stood to lose customers if they fucked up. And they could dissect what Paizo did leading up to Pathfinder and take notes.
The Life and Death of 5th Edition
After seeing how much success Paizo had with its open playtests for Pathfinder, Wizards did something similar with the new edition of D&D, which got years and years of hard, careful work and testing put into it. Wizards promised to keep the best aspects of every previous edition, distilling a better product at the end. Despite a frequently-skeptical response, it helped rebuild community confidence, and the eventual result, many years in the making, was D&D Next, or, as it would inevitably eventually be known, 5e.
So far, 5e has been a roaring critical and commercial success. The game is fun, simple yet deep, streamlined without being dumbed down, and has combined the playability of the early editions with the mechanics of the d20 system and the best ideas from 4e. With the monthly community surveys and Unearthed Arcana articles providing anyone with an Internet connection with quality, officially-sanctioned homebrew content and a genuine system of feedback, Wizards has begun to reclaim the reputation they nearly lost after the ill-advised attempt by their corporate masters to chase the MMO dollar. Even Paizo had to step up its game to compete, as the best parts of 5e brought into contrast the worst parts of 3.5 in Pathfinder.
The company had also been centralizing a LOT of their publication. Up until about 2015 or so, Wizards subcontracted a lot of their writing and art duties to others, like some freelancers and authors who would work for them. However, after a rocky reception to the quality of the first five D&D 5e books, the company hired a bunch of new graphical designers, artists, editors, and even some of the players on the official D&D podcasts (including Kate Welch and Amy Falcone) to join their main crew in Seattle. After that, all but one of the 5e books has been radically better-received, even if the release rate of splatbooks is still far lower than what most fans like.
After that step, Wizards began branching out significantly, hiring Fandom, Inc and DriveThruRPG to create officially-licensed and branded websites to augment their own online offerings for D&D and Magic: The Gathering. With the full acquisition of D&D Beyond, players were able to create characters, sell adventures, track combat, design custom monsters, and otherwise homebrew material to their hearts' content, and even buy official expansions to the hardback D&D books that are legal at the table for Adventurers' League. The services also actually work, amazingly enough, although there is widespread fan discontent over how the hardback books cost fifty US dollars but don't unlock their online content on D&D Beyond without spending another 25 bucks.
With the streamlining of their services, WotC has since been looking toward creating a unifying edition of D&D called "One D&D". Intended to be backwards compatible, One D&D is intended to feature a much grander implementation of online features into the core experience. This is intended to even include a fully virtual TTRPG with D&D Beyond integration for use with online campaigns.
Then 2023 happened
Evidently Hasbro/WotC decided 2023 was the year to make an absolute ass of themselves.
The first major incident happened just before the turn of the year, November 2022. Magic the Gathering's illustrious 30th anniversary was released and it achieved an unprecedented level of hatred across damn near the entire Magic the Gathering community (which is no small feat, mind you). In a decision that truly displays how out of touch the suits at Hasbro/WotC are, the 30th anniversary cards were only available in a box of four booster packs that retailed for $999, which had to be ordered directly from them. These cards were functionally reprints from MtG's first editions of the game, which included many cards on Wizard's reserved list (for those not in the know, the reserved list is a long list of cards that WotC has basically vowed to never reprint). Cards like the notorious Black Lotus, the other Power Nine cards and the like. However, these cards were all printed with a special 30th anniversary back which rendered them all illegal for officially sanctioned play. While this certainly helped avoid potential lawsuits that could've been incurred from violating their reserved list agreements and helped avoid utterly destroying the market value of the original cards, it still rubbed many people the wrong way that they would skirt that line in the first place. Of course, that was if anyone even got them from the box. As mentioned, these cards were only available in booster sets, which of course means all the cards included in the $999 box were totally randomized. That's right, players had to pay a thousand bucks for the chance to get the equivalent of a proxy of a Black Lotus or similar card that was not legal for play. Pretty much anyone who actually enjoyed the hobby was less than pleased at the best of times, considering the obvious greed on display. Suffice to say, this was a major misfire for the company and though WotC claims the stock sold out in around 30 minutes of the product's launch, there is much doubt as to the veracity of these claims.
Not only did the utterly disastrous 30th anniversary celebration for MTG that's seen the brand become a financial liability happen, but in preparation for their upcoming One D&D ventures, WotC created OGL 1.1. By exploiting the very literal phrasing of the OGL 1.0a, which dictates that 3rd parties or content creators operating under it are at perfect liberty to utilize any authorized versions of the OGL for their works, WotC Lawyers figured that as there's explicitly a lack of wording to make OGL 1.0a "irrevocable"; they could simply de-authorize OGL 1.0a and force all licensees to adhere to the new OGL 1.1, lest they get bullied out of the game by Hasbro's fleet of lawsuit-wielding lawyers. This is despite the intentions of 1.0a and the FAQ clarifications stating that the intent was for 1.0a to remain as a fully authorized license agreement "in perpetuity". The new OGL, of course, is far more restrictive on how D&D's SRD is utilized and demands that any individual, group or organization that makes $750k or more annually on content that falls under OGL 1.1 must report all earnings to WotC and pay a 25% royalty fee (or a "paltry" 20% if using Kickstarter as the medium, WotC's "preferred" platform for crowdfunding) for all such content. To make matters worse, this OGL was to be thrown at most relevant parties in such a manner as to give them as little as one week to sign on the included contract. Way to piss off an entire online fanbase by unleashing a grip tight enough to make Games Workshop jealous. The only reason this particular plan didn't play out exactly as described is due to the honorable, well-intentioned efforts of several WotC employees who leaked OGL 1.1 ahead of schedule.
Then again, they were still making a mint off the cardboard crack through all of this, so in hindsight we should have seen this coming. It also goes to show that WotC can't seem to genuinely learn from their mistakes, as this is playing out even more poorly than their attempt to alter the OGL during their disastrous 4th edition ventures. At the very least, thanks to an insider leak, we know they only see customers as an obstacle to their money.
Due to the near universal backlash OGL 1.1 faced due to the leaks, WotC attempted to backpedal, claiming 1.1 was merely a draft of the final product (despite having sent it to various 3rd parties with a contract included). Their apology was filled to the brim with fairly typical corporate condescension, gaslighting and handwaving; the new OGL "2.0" will be rephrased in a way that doesn't "scare" the community while protecting WotC's assets and interests from being preyed upon by larger corporations seeking to exploit their IP. It takes a special kind of small-dick energy to be intimidated by companies that don't even make 1/100th of their annual revenue, but then again, this is Hasbro we're talking about.
This open revolt led to more allegations coming out from current and former employees, including insanity like AI DMs for their proprietary VTT and intentions of ramping up the subscription prices while cutting back on perks for any tiers below the absolute top (which includes banning homebrew of all fucking things). Most damning of all is the intent for selling fucking lootboxes because Hasbro's CEO was under the delusion that the game "was undermonetized". All of this came out in the wake of a massive wave of folks cancelling their D&D Beyond subscriptions, an upset so massive that WotC tried to pull a fast one and hide the unsubscribe button, and the news merely poured a healthy dousing of gas to an already raging fire. For the record, WotC has denied everything about this except for carving apart all the books to make microtransactions, because they're banking on all those sheep still buying all the parts from their favorite books.
Another response was made about a week later that was written by the Executive Producer of D&D, one that wasn't nearly as condescending to the community as a result of the above rioting. This post promised to forward a review copy of the new OGL, one that the public can scrutinize, criticize, and ridicule as part of their desperate ploy to stop the massive bleeding wound that they inflicted on themselves. This took the form of a newer OGL 1.2, which eases certain restrictions, waived royalties and stated that it would be irrevocable (until they revoked it, by once again leaving just enough legal wiggle-room for them to update/de-authorize this OGL at a later date), but ultimately still proved far from desirable by the community.
Ironically, WotC's intention to revoke/replace the original OGL 1.0a has spurred a significant number of its former contributors and competitors to unite under Paizo's banner to create the "Linux" of RPG Licenses referred to as the Open RPG Creative License (simply, and perhaps appropriately, referred to as the ORC). The ORC, being drafted by several of the original authors behind the OGL 1.0a, is intended to be explicitly and unmistakably irrevocable, perpetual, and once established, owned by a non-profit 3rd party so that it cannot be altered or managed by an individual/group whom might be tempted to modify the terms for personal profits. Paizo also expressed a willingness to defend OGL 1.0a's status in court, though such efforts would prove unnecessary.
In the end, Wizards of the Coast cancelled the update from 1.0a and made the announcement that it was here to stay for good, after weeks upon weeks of losing every shred of goodwill trying to push the change. In a slightly surprising move, they also committed the entire 5.1 SRD to the Creative Commons License before the announcement itself, ensuring that all info contained within was indeed irrevocably free for third party use going forward. Thanks to the headwind from people abandoning the system, their biggest rival Paizo experienced record growth, all the while the community talks about boycotting the upcoming movie. Whether people will forget about this come D&D Beyond or not, who knows? What we do know however is the effect that the community has on a fanbase, and how one Wardian move can cause so much harm.
Despite this, one can surmise that these changes will be restricted/exclusive to 5e. There is absolutely no way that WotC/Hazbro executives aren't fuming in impotent rage that the D&D community managed to stymie their plans to further monetize one of their biggest cash cows. Though OGL 1.0a and 5e are safe for the foreseeable future, they are under no compunction to release their upcoming OneD&D or VTT projects under OGL 1.0a and with how much money they've invested in those ventures, they'll almost assuredly attempt to create a new OGL more in line with their goals to secure their future products. Though with the substantial popularity boost their competitors received, the massive loss of D&D Beyond subscriptions and having thoroughly gotten on their community's bad side over the past few months, WotC will likely be keeping a low profile for a little bit before poking that hornet nest again.
... or maybe not as they proceeded to ram said hornet nest straight through.
The April 2023 Incident AKA How to Turn a Children's Card Game into the fucking Italian Mafia
 | This article contains something which makes absolutely no logical sense, such as Nazi Zombie Mercenaries, Fucking Space Orangutans, anything written by a certain Irish leper or Robin Crud-ace, or Wizards of the Coast hiring the fucking Pinkertons over a children’s card game. If you proceed, consider yourself warned. |
 Expect huge amounts of derp and rage, punctuated by /tg/ extracting humor from it. |
Remember the April 2023 incident mentioned earlier? Yeah. So what happened was that these bundles of chucklefucks sent in the fucking Pinkertons (Currently a subsidiary of Securitas AB, a Swedish security corporation) to some neckbeard's home who had accidentally purchased an unreleased set of MTG cards. Yes. These insane nutjobs sent in a motherfucking PMC notorious for its history of shooting striking workers (resulting in literal legislation against them called Anti-Pinkerton Laws, look them up) over a bunch of children's trading cards. Hey, if you're going to behave like a 19th century robber baron, why not go the whole hog and use the same thugs for hire favored by Carnegie and his ilk?
This sheer levels of unprecedented, over-excessive and unnecessary overreaction shocked the wider tabletop community because it was just that batshit insane. The poor guy's wife was so traumatised she broke down crying when these armed hired goons terrorized and intimidated the entire neighborhood, let alone the guy's family themselves. I mean fuck. Not even the scumfuckery of Games Workshop is that mean spirited. You must be fucked royally hard to make GeeDubs of all companies look reasonable. Seriously, the entire tabletop community (not only the MTG and D&D fans) were up in justified outrage. This led to a shit ton of former fans cancelling their subscriptions to WOTC and declaring that they will never buy a product from them again. The PR was such a fucking raging inferno that WOTC quickly apologized but by this point it was too little too late as many view that their actions is a class-action lawsuit in the making. Especially after it turned out that this wasn't even the first time they had done so.
Like seriously, you couldn't have just emailed the guy over a genuine shipping mistake?! You bunch of sociopathic, megalomaniacal fuckwits?
WotC is clearly speedrunning "worst company of 2023" so keep your popcorn ready for the next fuck up sure to be coming soon.
External Links
- Drive to Work, episode 40 (the Wizards of the Coast episode) ,[1].