For what it's worth, there was a Bamf podcast with two of the game design folks caught in the layoffs, Dan Dillon game designer and Eytan Bernstein lead editor. Both had nothing but good things to say about the game and the company, and the people they were working with. Both said, they’re not going to try and tell people what to do, but don’t boycott on their behalf. If you do, it will hurt the WotC employees that are still there more than the corporate folks that actually made the decisions. And if you want to do something, it’s better to look for ways to support those who were laid off than to try and punish the company.
They didn’t think it was, as layoffs go, anything was unusually mean. And as far as it happening in mid-December, there’s really no good time to be laid off. And they are getting a severance package, though they can’t talk about it.
Unrelated to the layoffs, both seem pretty excited about the 2024 books. The community playtest feedback is actually something they pay attention to. And they do actually read every comment, so please don’t be a jerk.
They talk a bit about their time there and themselves. The whole thing runs a little over an hour, but it’s really pretty interesting.
I have nothing against AI art inherently. I do personally believe (albeit with little evidence) that most current AI art platforms were trained on art they didn't have permission to use, and that that training data should be disclosed and the relevant artists compensated in some way. But if WotC trained an AI using the piles upon piles of art that they do own across all their IP (the amount of art they own from Magic alone is staggering to contemplate) and then used that AI to make more art in a similar style, that would be within their rights as an IP-holder. But they probably shouldn't do that until AI regulations are more concrete.
I use Ai art for my groups but, if i were going to publish the stuff i write i would have to look in the public domain or go with no art. I can't draw to save my life unless i am making a map. I am not fan ripping off artists for personal gain. Also yes getting laid off around christmas time sucks been there done it. However there are slightly less worse times to be laid off memorial day or labor day where a person might not be as worried about heating their home severance only goes so far
Probably cheaper to pay executives more and lay more people off than to pay executives less and lay less people off.
If you lay off 3,000 workers who makes $50,000 per year each while still maintaining similar levels of revenue, that is saving $150,000,000 per year. Throwing five executives an extra $10,000,000 each in bonus will still save you $100,000,000 per year.
Except increasing or decreasing CEO salary doesn't change your productivity at all. You can still make product at the same rate. Laying off 20% of your workforce probably results in more than a 20% drop in productivity.
Probably cheaper to pay executives more and lay more people off than to pay executives less and lay less people off.
If you lay off 3,000 workers who makes $50,000 per year each while still maintaining similar levels of revenue, that is saving $150,000,000 per year. Throwing five executives an extra $10,000,000 each in bonus will still save you $100,000,000 per year.
Except increasing or decreasing CEO salary doesn't change your productivity at all. You can still make product at the same rate. Laying off 20% of your workforce probably results in more than a 20% drop in productivity.
i wonder what's the ROI for increasing CEO pay? not that we could trust the answer since it would be coming from a CEO with interest in remaining relevant. like listening to a coyote standing in the hen house doorway explaining why fewer daily eggs is likely a factor of market conditions and nothing to do with the coyote's management style nor rumors of recently vacated positions and really chickens in general just don't want to work anymore.
Probably cheaper to pay executives more and lay more people off than to pay executives less and lay less people off.
If you lay off 3,000 workers who makes $50,000 per year each while still maintaining similar levels of revenue, that is saving $150,000,000 per year. Throwing five executives an extra $10,000,000 each in bonus will still save you $100,000,000 per year.
Except increasing or decreasing CEO salary doesn't change your productivity at all. You can still make product at the same rate. Laying off 20% of your workforce probably results in more than a 20% drop in productivity.
Not necessarily. Sometimes you’re over staffed. I’ve been places where we laid people off with no appreciable loss in quality of our work. The business climate changed and we had people sitting around not doing too much. I’d guess many of the layoffs fit in that pattern. Hasbro has been selling fewer toys, stands to reason they don’t need as many people making them. WotC is a different case, where its sales are up and they still had to cut a few people. I’m not trying to say anything bad about those people or the quality of their work. But even with MtG and D&D’s growth, it’s possible they were also over staffed.
Probably cheaper to pay executives more and lay more people off than to pay executives less and lay less people off.
If you lay off 3,000 workers who makes $50,000 per year each while still maintaining similar levels of revenue, that is saving $150,000,000 per year. Throwing five executives an extra $10,000,000 each in bonus will still save you $100,000,000 per year.
Except increasing or decreasing CEO salary doesn't change your productivity at all. You can still make product at the same rate. Laying off 20% of your workforce probably results in more than a 20% drop in productivity.
i wonder what's the ROI for increasing CEO pay? not that we could trust the answer since it would be coming from a CEO with interest in remaining relevant. like listening to a coyote standing in the hen house doorway explaining why fewer daily eggs is likely a factor of market conditions and nothing to do with the coyote's management style nor rumors of recently vacated positions and really chickens in general just don't want to work anymore.
Funny you should say that, lol.
THe standard ROI measure that is used to determine "adequate compensation" typically involves a series of factors that can be narrowly brken down into three broad categories:
Increase in Market Price/total Market Value. (stocks)
Increase in Net Profit.
Debt Reduction.
Strictly speaking, Boards look to those metrics to identify the ROI, but there is one final factor that tends to overwhelm them and that is not a statistical measure, but a purely subjective one:
Reputational value
This one is blown out of context, and is essentially the Ego factor. But it has existed as long as the concept of Corporations (that's roughly 500 CE/AD, for you D&D people), and no one casually tosses away 1500 years of tradition, especially these days when the CEO is one of the shareholders or possibly a founder.
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Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
Great podcast featuring two of the more prominent recent laid-off creators, Dan Dillon and Eytan Bernstein, as well as Owen KC Stephens who was laid off from WotC some years prior to provide his more historical perspective on this sort of thing. It's a bit of a long watch but they share just about as direct an eyewitness account of things as we've seen:
To briefly summarize some of the key points for those interested:
1) Obviously they can't talk about the content of the severance packages they received, other than to confirm that they did in fact receive packages.
2) While sad about being laid off from what they saw as a dream job, they are still very optimistic about the quality of the upcoming 2024 books, and plan to continue playing and supporting D&D themselves, as well as supporting their still-employed colleagues and creatives still on the inside. They also want to remind all of us that surviving layoffs is no fun either, survivor's guilt is a real thing, and those who remain deserve our empathy too.
3) They would obviously rather there have been no layoffs at all, but they didn't see anything particularly out of the ordinary with these events or their timing. In particular, they saw the upside e.g. from a tax and benefits perspective for the layoffs to happen late this year as opposed to early next year.
4) Nothing but good to say about Crawford and Perkins and their dedication to improving the game, and requests that no hate is directed at them or any other creative still on the inside. They also both reiterated that yes, every single playtest comment is being read.
5) The most helpful thing we can do is to focus on positivity and support those laid off directly - send them nice words if you can, signal boost any posts they make seeking employment, support them if they have a patreon or any other crowdfunding avenue. Hate, vitriol and death threats do not help, and in fact tend to hurt those still on the inside.
Upward and onward, I hope they have something where they won't pursue antagonizing competition. The community is split enough, don't need them furthering a divide in that.
Probably cheaper to pay executives more and lay more people off than to pay executives less and lay less people off.
If you lay off 3,000 workers who makes $50,000 per year each while still maintaining similar levels of revenue, that is saving $150,000,000 per year. Throwing five executives an extra $10,000,000 each in bonus will still save you $100,000,000 per year.
Except increasing or decreasing CEO salary doesn't change your productivity at all. You can still make product at the same rate. Laying off 20% of your workforce probably results in more than a 20% drop in productivity.
i wonder what's the ROI for increasing CEO pay?
In general, all the publicly-available data indicates that it has a statistically negligible impact on company performance.
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Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
they complain that very little work has been done recently.
Aside from the VTTs you mean? Both of them?
Many will get little to no use from those tools for various reasons, but many would benefit from patches to bug reports as old as the site, regardless of who currenyly owns the site. Who wants to buy in to a system that is more focused on marketing to new customers than providing fixes to complaints that are years old and hundreds of forum pages deep?
In the software business, fixing bugs for existing code is never as sexy as working on the Next Thing. ;)
Yes but getting people to continue to purchase/subscribe without finishing past projects makes it hard to pay for working on the Next Thing.
Agreed. But that doesn't stop 'them' from trying! But as long as the software provides enough usability that users can get by, users will stick with it. Sure, they'll gripe and leave comments on message boards, :-) but the users will still pay the company and plod on.
Hasbro's stock has been downgraded to Neutral (not Buy anymore), and target price lowered from 60 dollars to 53. Analyst that wrote the article below doesnt predict they have enough cash flow to pay their $400million dividends to shareholders this year (for the 2nd year running apparently), so they wont meet their 2.5x EBITDA goal (a financial ratio of company value compared to costs,
Explains why they were slashing costs in order to pay shareholders at this point. Their massive staff cutting was focussed more on the plastic toys side of their company, with not many taken from WotC, but it does leave D&D and MtG seemingly as their only potential saviours.
My table and I expect this'll lead to heavy advertising and monetization of products this year, as they need to make a lot of money fast.
Hasbro's stock has been downgraded to Neutral (not Buy anymore), and target price lowered from 60 dollars to 53. Analyst that wrote the article below doesnt predict they have enough cash flow to pay their $400million dividends to shareholders this year (for the 2nd year running apparently), so they wont meet their 2.5x EBITDA goal (a financial ratio of company value compared to costs,
Explains why they were slashing costs in order to pay shareholders at this point. Their massive staff cutting was focussed more on the plastic toys side of their company, with not many taken from WotC, but it does leave D&D and MtG seemingly as their only potential saviours.
My table and I expect this'll lead to heavy advertising and monetization of products this year, as they need to make a lot of money fast.
That is an interesting reflection on the difference between US and UK trade styles. Do you have an average of other analysts, or are you waiting to see what the consensus is?
NASDAQ's current average for this week still has it as a Buy, based on am average target of $60.4 (high of 78, low of 52), and includes the DA Davidson analyst as part of the set -- the full list being:
B OF A GLBL RES
CITIGROUP
DAVIDSON D A
GOLDMAN SACHS
JP MORGAN SECUR
MORGAN STANLEY
ROTH CAPITAL PA
STIFEL NICOLAUS
UBS
ZACKS RESEARCH
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Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
Waiting to see the consensus. DA Davidson is an outlier at the moment to be sure. But if they cant meet EBITDA then I'd imagine that the average target is going to slip lower. In a week or so we may be able to pick up a trend analysis.
Worth clarifying though I'm just a statistics nerd, not a trader :p
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Well i don't know... i mean they we're expecting to get a big amount of money out of this
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For what it's worth, there was a Bamf podcast with two of the game design folks caught in the layoffs, Dan Dillon game designer and Eytan Bernstein lead editor. Both had nothing but good things to say about the game and the company, and the people they were working with. Both said, they’re not going to try and tell people what to do, but don’t boycott on their behalf. If you do, it will hurt the WotC employees that are still there more than the corporate folks that actually made the decisions. And if you want to do something, it’s better to look for ways to support those who were laid off than to try and punish the company.
They didn’t think it was, as layoffs go, anything was unusually mean. And as far as it happening in mid-December, there’s really no good time to be laid off. And they are getting a severance package, though they can’t talk about it.
Unrelated to the layoffs, both seem pretty excited about the 2024 books. The community playtest feedback is actually something they pay attention to. And they do actually read every comment, so please don’t be a jerk.
They talk a bit about their time there and themselves. The whole thing runs a little over an hour, but it’s really pretty interesting.
https://www.youtube.com/live/-SfXA_sSkDo?si=pEi1k7ymKGRviD55
I have nothing against AI art inherently. I do personally believe (albeit with little evidence) that most current AI art platforms were trained on art they didn't have permission to use, and that that training data should be disclosed and the relevant artists compensated in some way. But if WotC trained an AI using the piles upon piles of art that they do own across all their IP (the amount of art they own from Magic alone is staggering to contemplate) and then used that AI to make more art in a similar style, that would be within their rights as an IP-holder. But they probably shouldn't do that until AI regulations are more concrete.
I use Ai art for my groups but, if i were going to publish the stuff i write i would have to look in the public domain or go with no art. I can't draw to save my life unless i am making a map. I am not fan ripping off artists for personal gain. Also yes getting laid off around christmas time sucks been there done it. However there are slightly less worse times to be laid off memorial day or labor day where a person might not be as worried about heating their home severance only goes so far
Except increasing or decreasing CEO salary doesn't change your productivity at all. You can still make product at the same rate. Laying off 20% of your workforce probably results in more than a 20% drop in productivity.
i wonder what's the ROI for increasing CEO pay? not that we could trust the answer since it would be coming from a CEO with interest in remaining relevant. like listening to a coyote standing in the hen house doorway explaining why fewer daily eggs is likely a factor of market conditions and nothing to do with the coyote's management style nor rumors of recently vacated positions and really chickens in general just don't want to work anymore.
unhappy at the way in which we lost individual purchases for one-off subclasses, magic items, and monsters?
tell them you don't like features disappeared quietly in the night: provide feedback!
Not necessarily. Sometimes you’re over staffed. I’ve been places where we laid people off with no appreciable loss in quality of our work. The business climate changed and we had people sitting around not doing too much.
I’d guess many of the layoffs fit in that pattern. Hasbro has been selling fewer toys, stands to reason they don’t need as many people making them. WotC is a different case, where its sales are up and they still had to cut a few people. I’m not trying to say anything bad about those people or the quality of their work. But even with MtG and D&D’s growth, it’s possible they were also over staffed.
Funny you should say that, lol.
THe standard ROI measure that is used to determine "adequate compensation" typically involves a series of factors that can be narrowly brken down into three broad categories:
Strictly speaking, Boards look to those metrics to identify the ROI, but there is one final factor that tends to overwhelm them and that is not a statistical measure, but a purely subjective one:
This one is blown out of context, and is essentially the Ego factor. But it has existed as long as the concept of Corporations (that's roughly 500 CE/AD, for you D&D people), and no one casually tosses away 1500 years of tradition, especially these days when the CEO is one of the shareholders or possibly a founder.
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities
.-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-.
An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more.
Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
Great podcast featuring two of the more prominent recent laid-off creators, Dan Dillon and Eytan Bernstein, as well as Owen KC Stephens who was laid off from WotC some years prior to provide his more historical perspective on this sort of thing. It's a bit of a long watch but they share just about as direct an eyewitness account of things as we've seen:
To briefly summarize some of the key points for those interested:
1) Obviously they can't talk about the content of the severance packages they received, other than to confirm that they did in fact receive packages.
2) While sad about being laid off from what they saw as a dream job, they are still very optimistic about the quality of the upcoming 2024 books, and plan to continue playing and supporting D&D themselves, as well as supporting their still-employed colleagues and creatives still on the inside. They also want to remind all of us that surviving layoffs is no fun either, survivor's guilt is a real thing, and those who remain deserve our empathy too.
3) They would obviously rather there have been no layoffs at all, but they didn't see anything particularly out of the ordinary with these events or their timing. In particular, they saw the upside e.g. from a tax and benefits perspective for the layoffs to happen late this year as opposed to early next year.
4) Nothing but good to say about Crawford and Perkins and their dedication to improving the game, and requests that no hate is directed at them or any other creative still on the inside. They also both reiterated that yes, every single playtest comment is being read.
5) The most helpful thing we can do is to focus on positivity and support those laid off directly - send them nice words if you can, signal boost any posts they make seeking employment, support them if they have a patreon or any other crowdfunding avenue. Hate, vitriol and death threats do not help, and in fact tend to hurt those still on the inside.
Upward and onward, I hope they have something where they won't pursue antagonizing competition. The community is split enough, don't need them furthering a divide in that.
In general, all the publicly-available data indicates that it has a statistically negligible impact on company performance.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Agreed. But that doesn't stop 'them' from trying! But as long as the software provides enough usability that users can get by, users will stick with it. Sure, they'll gripe and leave comments on message boards, :-) but the users will still pay the company and plod on.
Hasbro's stock has been downgraded to Neutral (not Buy anymore), and target price lowered from 60 dollars to 53. Analyst that wrote the article below doesnt predict they have enough cash flow to pay their $400million dividends to shareholders this year (for the 2nd year running apparently), so they wont meet their 2.5x EBITDA goal (a financial ratio of company value compared to costs,
https://m.uk.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/hasbros-stock-outlook-dims-analyst-downgrades-to-neutral-amid-persisting-industry-headwinds-3284641
Explains why they were slashing costs in order to pay shareholders at this point. Their massive staff cutting was focussed more on the plastic toys side of their company, with not many taken from WotC, but it does leave D&D and MtG seemingly as their only potential saviours.
My table and I expect this'll lead to heavy advertising and monetization of products this year, as they need to make a lot of money fast.
That is an interesting reflection on the difference between US and UK trade styles. Do you have an average of other analysts, or are you waiting to see what the consensus is?
NASDAQ's current average for this week still has it as a Buy, based on am average target of $60.4 (high of 78, low of 52), and includes the DA Davidson analyst as part of the set -- the full list being:
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities
.-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-.
An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more.
Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
Waiting to see the consensus. DA Davidson is an outlier at the moment to be sure. But if they cant meet EBITDA then I'd imagine that the average target is going to slip lower. In a week or so we may be able to pick up a trend analysis.
Worth clarifying though I'm just a statistics nerd, not a trader :p