A History of Wizards of the Coast 58
HerderOfCats writes "Shannon Appelcline has written up an excellent independent history of Wizards of the Coast, the company that brought us Magic: The Gathering, eventually acquired TSR and D&D, transformed the paper RPG game industry with d20 and the Open Game License, and eventually was acquired by game giant Hasbro." From the RPGNet article: "Overall, Hasbro was looking to make Wizards meaner and leaner, and thus a better profit making machine. In 2001 and 2002 Habro also divested themselves of their conventions. Origins went to GAMA and GenCon to Peter Adkison. Around the same time they also outsourced their magazines by licensing Dungeon, Dragon, Polyhedron, and Amazing Stories to Paizo Publishing, who continues to publish the RPG magazines today. Two years later another pruning would come. Wizards had also been running 85 'Game Keeper' and 'Wizards of the Coast' retail stores, but in early 2004, Hasbro shut them all down. Together with selling the conventions, this relieved any concerns that Wizards might be developing a vertical monopoly, like that controlled by Games Workshop in the UK--and really such a monopoly wouldn't have made sense given the d20 strategy. "
D&D South Park... :P (Score:3, Funny)
Re:D&D South Park... :P (Score:2)
Re:D&D South Park... :P (Score:1)
Vast improvement (Score:5, Interesting)
3.x = Bah! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:3.x = Bah! (Score:2)
Unfortunately, my main processor is too old model to be able to play that :(. I lack the memory protection features - the DID [wikipedia.org] unit - needed to keep several personalities separate and from accessing each other's memory.
A snapshot of TSR's final days (Score:5, Interesting)
No, no, no. (Score:5, Funny)
Kevin Siembieda is a jackass (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe it was also around this time that I read about how Palladium had sent off some cease & desist letters to game magazines, asking them not to publish certain types of content for their games. (I don't even know of any independent RPG magazines these days -- not that I've been paying attention. Back in the day, it was normal for these magazines to publish adventures, characters, and other materials for various RPGs.) I recall one magazine editor wrote an editorial saying that since Palladium seemed to be so heavy-handed, they wouldn't be covering anything about Palladium games from then on.
Reading Kevin's history of Palladium on their website is a bit disturbing. It's clear that this guy is very full of himself. And for what? He re-made D&D with renamed alignments, two types of hit points, and a larger number of classes.
Re:Kevin Siembieda is a jackass (Score:3, Informative)
On the generic front, Chaosium's BRP was out and supported by three very different systems (RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu, Stormbringer) around the time that Palladium was publishing its first book.
His claims to being the first cyberpunk game because he had cyborgs and robots are laughable. If you want to go via that (ridiculous) definition of cyberpunk, Champions was out in 1981, three year's
Re:Kevin Siembieda is a jackass (Score:2)
But,
Re:Kevin Siembieda is a jackass (Score:2)
Whatever it is you're smoking, can I get a hit? The Palladium system is unadulterated crap. On the other hand, the game worlds Palladium comes up with are second to none. I love the Rifts world, and occasioanlly am willing to muddle through the shit system and even worse editing to play in it, but that is getting to be less frequent. I would love to see Rifts d20 (Mind you, I'm not sure how good d20 would really be for Rifts, but it
Re:Kevin Siembieda is a jackass (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Kevin Siembieda is a jackass (Score:3, Funny)
Without a Future? (Score:4, Insightful)
Finally, Wizards has ensured the demise of their original cashcow, Magic: The Gathering, through an unending stream of expansions and rules changes & negations. This is further eroded by the fact that it attempts to be a game and a collectible object: you force consumers to pay repeated costs for the same game, both through randomized packs of cards, and by a continual "revision" of the game. Gamers must continuously pay money to Wizards and retailers in order to remain "tournament legal". Why pay $20-$30 per month to Wizards for a card game, when a kid can pay $15 a month to Blizzard Entertainment and still hang out and be cool with his friends?
Electronic gaming in its various guises isn't just eating its grandfather's lunch, it's putting gramps in the home to die. The sad part about all of this is that companies like Wizards are willingly going.
Pax Electronica.
Re:Without a Future? (Score:2)
Re:Without a Future? (Score:1)
Yeah, people have been saying that every year for the past 12 years. But for some reason the product seems to just keep getting more and more popular every year. I don't understand it either, clearly someone is doing something wrong. Surely this is the year when the naysayers will get it right.
-elf
Re:Without a Future? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Without a Future? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Without a Future? (Score:2)
Re:Without a Future? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Without a Future? (Score:1)
Onlin
Re:Without a Future? (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been saying this for a while now, and think that the writing has been on the wall for at least ten years, if not fifteen. The absolute biggest problem with the gaming industry is treating it like an industry. No matter how many editions and point releases (point releases, for Chrissakes!) of a system there are, or how many different Revised Guides to the Jakes of Waterdeep are printed, games do not suffer from planned obsolescence. This is a major problem for publishers, because there is a distinctly finite market for their wares. Even if they do come up with entire new settings and flavour texts (see the proliferation-- nay, metastasis of Everquest and Warcraft D20 and their ilk) instead of repackaging the Compleat Guide to Elfs again, the publisher is still spreading itself and its profits thinner: not everyone will purchase setting-specific source material, or official setting material in the first place.
Presentation and packaging is the absolute worst element of the industry now, by far, though. In my younger years, I used to collect RPG material, especially GURPS supplements and obscure titles. $20 CDN for a 128 page perfectbound book? Hey, that was good value to me. When prices crept up to more than $25 for the same material, my purchases slowed dramatically. Now, the few GURPS books that come out each year, priced at roughly $50 a pop, don't even get a second glance. They're filled with the ugly, glossy art and oversized print that D&D paved the way for with 3rd Edition, and Evil Stevie is wondering why his profits have been dropping. Oh, but hey! They're offering PDFs of the books now, that's got to be good, right? Well, aside from the fact that 1:1 scans of 8-1/2"x11" books are an incredible pain in the butt to read on a screen... and that they're selling those for $25 a shot, too.
Palladium is screwed for the same reason that it's always been flirting with disaster: Its owner is an asshole with delusions of adequacy. This is the man that green-lit a tie-in game for the N-Gage of all platforms. The most popular books in his stable were written by people that have long since run to saner pastures, leaving him to erase their contributions through sheer mudflation.
Wizards of the Coast... well, they're probably going to be the only outfit that survives the crash of this so-called industry, because they have diversified like nobody's business-- and they have done it in directions that do not suffer the pitfalls of an industry based on the end user's imagination. Just take a peek at the front page of their website: Pokemon, Magic, Neopets... all titles and games that have officiality and collectability stamped all over them. When was the last time that someone seriously tried trotting out a homebrew pokecritter or magic card? Sure, they're still grinding out D&D material and plastering it up on that turgid mess of a website, but I can guarantee that they're making much more money out of the games that you can get into for ten bucks, and keep yourself hooked on for the price of a pack of smokes whenever you go up to the cash at the comic shop or variety store.
Re:Without a Future? (Score:2)
Seriously, Palladium is "screwed"? They've been in business for 15 years at least! In a tiny little industry like paper and pencil games! How in the world does that equal "screwed" given any possibly definition
Re:Without a Future? (Score:3, Interesting)
SJG has massively scaled production and distribution back over the last three years. The warehousing they owned outside of Austin is gone. Their home-grown Ogre Miniatures and Macrotures line is dead, until such a time as someone can magically make it profitable. Their core lineup, the GURPS RPG system and its supplements, has dwindled from a steady flow of two or three books a month to two or three per year.FASA is long dead and its succes
Re:Without a Future? (Score:1)
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But they *do* get new generations of customers. There's only a finite market if people stop having kids, or (more likely, sadly) those kids stop getting into roleplaying.
Grab.
Re:Without a Future? (Score:2)
I believe it is time to update your copy/paste rant. WOTC lost the Pokemon license several years ago.
Re:Without a Future? (Score:1)
Instead, I've been enjoying plain ol' D&D, blogging [brew-masters.com] about it, writing [slashdot.org] stories [slashdot.org] about my characters, and even writing my own utility [citygen.org] software [slashdot.org].
Maybe that makes me an
Re:Without a Future? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's nonsense. The fact that they keep coming out with expansion is *precisely* what keeps the game alive. They come out with new cards, change up the tournament formats, and all of a sudden, the players have to actually design, build, and test new decks rather than using the same old Psychatog deck that they ran in Extended 4 years ago. This applies even in formats like Type 1 where you can use any card ever printed. Fundamentally, the fun of the game isn't in the game itself, it's in the metagame. Keeping up with the meta, finding ways to exploit and overcome the decks you expect to see at the tournaments, these are the things that keep people coming back to the game.
Falling sky! Falling sky! (Score:2)
Re:Without a Future? (Score:1)
Electronic gaming and rpg gaming have one thing in common - sticker shock. As a former game store employee, I'd see mom and dad take their kid on a shopping trip, the kid would get cranky, so mom and dad would say "If you behave, we'll stop by that store you like." And the kid would shut up - because unlike rpgs and computer programs, that retail for 25 to 50 bucks a pop, booster packs are well within most parent's buying threshold. You gotta figure the logic is something like: "I can read a paperback bo
Re:Without a Future? (Score:2)
Ironically, this reminds me of Prince of Lies, a Forgotten Realms book: "The world was doomed, but it kept going anyway".
A little bit of irony (Score:5, Informative)
By most peoples' reading of laws, game companies can protect the actual text of the games via copyright, and they can protect the use of their system names for marketing via trademark. However, they can't actually protect the game systems themselves unless they file patents for them as inventions
Back in 2000, Ryan Dancey, the D&D Brand Manager for Hasbro, and to a lesser extent, Peter Adkinson himself, were involved in a rather large [google.com] multithread [google.com] debate [google.com] on rec.games.frp.dnd (there are a lot more threads), the TSR/WotC website, etc where Dancey pretty much explicitly stated that any creative work players produced in their AD&D games were derivative works of TSR/WotC and thus wholly owned by TSR, automatically invalidating any copyright that the actual creator had on the work and granting full copyright on their material to TSR/WotC even if the majority of the work was generic and made little reference to AD&D.
At the time, I immediately pulled all of the material about the campaign world I created off the net. It basically only used the AD&D rules and involved new character classes, monsters, maps, new worlds, etc. Dancey went so far as to claim even using the rules (which weren't patented and even if they had been patented, would have already expired) made the work of campaigns like mine derivative of AD&D and thus the sole property of TSR/WotC.
Needless to say, I never moved on to 3E and flat out refused to participate in anything like D20/OGL due to Dancey, because I refused to legitimize any of his stance. I have an entire three foot shelf of TSR books but I haven't bought anything in the last 6 years mostly because of what they tried to pull then. I find it rather ironic that when WotC was the small guy startup, they nearly died from the bigger fish suing them over the idea derivative works and less than a decade later, when WotC was the big fish in the sea, the same people took the exact opposite stance that got them off the ground.
Re:A little bit of irony (Score:1)
Re:A little bit of irony (Score:1, Interesting)
Wow, you're an idiot. What Ryan Dancey "pulled" was irrevokably Open Sourcing the most popular RPG ever. His stance was that people are going to create derivative works based on D&D no matter w
Re:A little bit of irony (Score:5, Informative)
Re:A little bit of irony (Score:1)
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I Still Occasionally Call Them TSR (Score:2, Interesting)
the fallout of Hasbro's shutdown of Game Keeper (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:the fallout of Hasbro's shutdown of Game Keeper (Score:2)
What about the drug-fueled free love? (Score:1)
See this article for more details:
http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/03/23/
Re:What about the drug-fueled free love? (Score:1)
So let me get this strait (I'm a mild Magic geek on the side) the company that strays away from overly erotic art and has a firm policy of aiming for teens, and little kids with pokemon was a hippie free love commune?
No wonder "strip magic" tended to catch on on the side. For the unfamiliar, strip magic was a sub format of magic that required stripping as you lost, I dont remember still if it was life point related or not. Sadly, the form
Why can't WotC just shut up (Score:2)
Is Hasbro slowly killing Origins? (Score:1)
Wizards duelling on the Coast? (Score:1)
In particular:
* Vague references to an interpersonal conflict that resulted in the masterfece that was Homelands being released in place of Coldsnap, which didn't get developed and released until 10 years later.
* The decision to quit paying artist royalties, which resulted in the loss of many of Magic's best artists, and the abysmal state the card art was