Wizards Turns D&D into a Franchise — Fans Losing Their Minds

0:00 a couple of days ago on my TikTok feed and somebody was talking about this. And this is one of the VPs, the big VPs over at Wizards of the Coast. And he he came out and of course it was on LinkedIn, right? Came out on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is fucking useless. Anyway, about the future of Dungeons and Dragons. And so I'm going to read his statement. And Jay, I want you to know what I want to know what you think. He goes. He talks a lot about coming to Wizards of the Coast and what he's doing. He goes, here's what we did today. We shifted our structure internally and D &D moved to a full franchise model, meaning everything.

0:43 Books, video games, film, and TV. Everything touching the franchise lives under one roof. The impact here cannot be overstated. This is massive for D &D and will allow a strong, coordinated, and well -funded approach for the franchise, and most importantly, for the fans. So they've moved on to a franchise model basically saying nope, we're not we're not really a game publisher anymore Are you in any way surprised by this move by Wizards of the Coast? Not really no, I mean no Are you surprised by this? No, and I think one of the reasons I wanted to touch on this story This for a lot of people who were who've been talking about this and I ran it again I ran to this a lot of my tick -tock right which was we're so surprised Dude they've been and I put this out a few weeks ago my tick -tock with something else happened They've been telegraphing this for years for years. They've been talking about this now I'm going to tell you whose fault it is It's gamers fault It's y 'all's fault You did this right Because I and I love you guys

2:13 right, but here's the facts, right You guys they don't especially tabletop RPG players right y 'all don't spend money you spend shit You don't spend any fucking because it's not like magic. It's not like Pokemon. It's not like other games like video games even right Tabletop RPG players do not spend money right and Every release in an addition is a law of diminishing returns, right? And I'm going to explain this and Jay feel free to jump in here anytime You think what I'm saying is wrong or you'd like to add to the record? Okay, let's take an average five player group five of you In an average five player group, four of them are going to buy the player's handbook.

3:04 Four of you are going to buy the player's handbook. Why? Because there's always going to be that one guy in the group that just borrows everybody else's shit and doesn't buy the player's handbook. The DM's guide. The DM's going to buy it and then there's going to be the other guy in the group who's just kind of a completionist and a collector and he's going to buy it. That's two. Monster manual, same thing. DM's going to buy it. One per group and the one guy who's a completionist, right? Well, now you've gotten through the three core books. Now let's talk about adventure modules. Who buys that? The DM. You buy one per five players. One, okay? Rise of Tiamat, Curse of Strahd. Doesn't matter. You're not buying five copies per play group. You're just not, okay? Every single release is a law of diminishing returns, okay? This is why they've been pushing to a subscription model. This is why they've been doing all the other BS they've been doing. And Baldur's Gate 3 taught them a lesson. The tabletop community is just not that big. They knew this already and Wizards knows how big the community is. The amount of people who play tabletop RPGs compared to the amount of people who play video games, watch television, go to movies, right, is miniscule. Right? And what Dungeons & Dragons has is a very valuable, very recognizable intellectual property that's been around for 50 fucking years. Right? And quite frankly, again, it's a law of diminishing

4:34 returns. Okay? And you guys don't spend money. Right? That's it. I mean, that's really what it boils down to. Okay? And so am I in any way shocked that they're going, hey, we got to go full franchise mode, right? This is MCU of fucking role playing games, right? Nope, not surprised at all. And again, I've said this and you can go back on this fucking channel. You can go to my TikTok. You can go back to this channel though. And how many times I've said, if Dungeons and Dragons, if Wizards of the Coast could never publish another fucking book again, they wouldn't.

5:17 They don't want to be in the printing business and they don't want to be in the logistics business Fuck that. Why do I want to print things and ship it deal with tariffs and all this other BS? Nope Okay It's it's there okay Before I get to the the chat questions that are coming in along this thingy Jay, do you have any anything to add to my sorry guys like It sucks, but this is what it is. No, because like, I, I think you're a hundred percent correct. Like, um, I, this is something I didn't really understand, um, because like, once you come out with a rule book, like, I know that there's multiple additions to the rule book. I really do. But once you have a rule book and like, you're a DM, like why would you need another rule book? Like once you, once you buy, you can also just like go to eBay, right?

6:23 And just buy secondhand. You don't have to buy books. Um, and then we covered this like a few weeks ago, I believe like using AI to like help DMS, like, and then you're just cutting, you're cutting Dungeons and Dragons completely out. Like it's, I, Yeah, I, I'm not surprised. And I, you know, we talked about this, even at Comic -Con, like the printing business itself is a horrible business to be in. Like it's hard to actually make that profitable. So yeah, I'm not surprised by this. Um, yeah, I don't know. That's a, that's really all I have to say about it.

7:05 Um, somebody in the chat says, Prices have gone up and paychecks have gone down. This is true. This is absolutely true. And the cost of this has changed significantly. And it's also due to changing consumer habits, right? Because I'm going to combine two other questions that just came in the chat. Why did it work for all those years before? And this wasn't a problem in the 80s and 90s. And I will explain this. Very, very easily. Right. And I saw this when I was publishing my game and I've talked to I don't know how many publishers. OK. And if I knew this question was going to come in, I would have grabbed a couple of books. In fact, I'm going to do that right now. So hang on two seconds. OK, quickly while he's gone, let's talk about the real topics like.

7:59 I think Alex should get better lighting in his bookshelf. Like, what is that? Like, where is he? He's in the darkness. Like, he has a lightsaber. It's a light. Top right corner. That thing turns on. Like, why is that not on? You know, I mean, oh, he's back. Okay. Okay. Oh, okay. He's back. Somebody, somebody asked. Somebody asked the question so now I'm gonna answer the question Okay, and we're gonna talk about a design is an early early 2000s. Okay. This is a pretty cool little book right here It's for 3o. It's called the hero builders guidebook. It MSRPed for $14 and 95 cents. Okay Now I'm gonna kind of see if I could flip through this book so you guys can get it a few okay This it's a lot of words There's not a crap ton of art Okay It's a total of like 70 pages 64 pages Right and it's got a lot of like, you know Family stuff and how to do life events and how to build a character and it's just kind of a fun little splat book Okay, this was the last module that was released for Advanced Dungeons the Dragons second edition Okay, it's called the apocalypse stone. It was designed to destroy your campaign again black and white These are not gloss pages and there ain't much art in it. Okay Now we're gonna go

9:32 this the 2014 players handbook, right? Okay very glossy pages and art fucking everywhere Art everywhere. Okay So here's the thing and again, I've talked to so many publishers about this. Okay Those first two books, which were like $14, $15, which are black and white, non -glossy pages with not much art, but a lot of gaming material. Do you know what happened to those books? Nobody bought them. Nobody bought them. Gamers now will not buy something unless it's in full color, with glossy pages, right? In hardcover, right? with lots and lots of art. And do you know what the single most expensive thing to put into a role -playing game book is? Art. The art cost for Identico was somewhere around $25 ,000. That's how much we spent on art. It was by far the single largest line item of cost to publish our game.

10:44 Okay, and again the problem is gamers Will not even if the material is the best you could write the best material ever written. Okay Okay It will not sell Somebody in the chat saying this is a Gen Z issue. No, it really starts with Millennials So I'm gonna fully pull it on the millennial generation and here's the thing. It's filtered to the old timers, too They won't buy it anymore unless it's high quality, right? And I'll tell you something else. The printing cost, when you go to that higher quality of paper, that higher grade paper, that higher gloss paper, and in full color, right? The printing cost doubles.

11:26 Doubles, okay? Somebody's saying, I will, yeah. You are the exception that proves the rule, okay? The reason it worked for so long is you could come out with a splat book like that, like five times a year, and as opposed to two people in the group buying it, like three or four of them would, right? and you can get a lot more out of it, right, until gamers just stop buying that stuff, right? It's like DLC. It honestly was a lot like DLC. You had your core book, your three core books, the player's guide, DM's guide, monster manual, and then every little piece of that, the stronghold builder's guide, the hero's book, all that stuff. It's DLC. That's what it is. And gamers right around the mid -aughts decided they were done with it. right they just weren't spending money on it anymore and that was not going to be the style of game they wanted anymore they didn't want all this stuff they didn't want crunchy they didn't want more stuff they didn't want too many words they wanted pretty pity okay now the other thing that somebody's going to come at me with is well what about the indie guys here's the thing i had the largest selection of independent rpgs in the entire seattle metro it hardly sold okay for all the talk about people who say they want indie RPGs they're you know i'm just gonna say they're fucking lying they are lying okay most of them are like oh i want to support it no you don't no you don't okay i had stacks of that crap and people just didn't buy it okay um so everybody who's getting upset

13:00 that dnd is like oh we're going franchise mode Right? And Jeremy Crawford and Chris Perkins left Wizards. And D &D is not for the gamers anymore. Do you know why? Because you guys don't spend any money. That's all there is to it. Okay? Am I happy about this? Not particularly. I think it's iffy for the brand, but I'm not shocked because the amount of money they can make in TV, movies, and video games is ten times what they make in role -playing games. Yeah Yeah So if you're out there complaining about this whole D &D situation first off if you're surprised I don't know what to tell you I've been talking about this for Four or five years now on this show on other shows on every media book. None of this is a surprise D &D again, I encourage you to read their investor reports Jay and I have been over some of the investor reports from Wizards on this channel Right where we reviewed them. They've been telegraphing this for years that this was the way they were going So don't be don't be surprised and if you're upset I Don't know what to tell you Like what did you expect?

14:29 Maybe actually and let me pose that question to you Jay Realistically for all the people who are upset about this. What what are they expecting? Like what about? What did, what did you expect to happen? Well, one, I don't know why you guys do this. You guys get like Alex. So wound up and upset. Um, come on now. Uh, but so I think, I, I think this is, you know, a lot of consumers, not all consumers. Okay. Maybe not the people in our chat that's watching our stream because you guys are amazing, but consumers want the world for nothing really. And you just can't do that. And I think they get upset when companies will pivot to try to make sure that they survive.

15:30 Cause I mean, I think that, I mean, obviously they want to become richer and make more money, obviously, but, but also As a company, you have to make these pivots to try to stay afloat. Like, you know, Alex, I was there for the gamers after dark. That was a pivot for you guys. You have to kind of like sometimes test new things out, see how it works to try to stay afloat. So there you go. Yeah, I Don't know so some of the chance that gamers need to come to Jesus moment I think that this is a thing across kind of geek dumb It's it it comes down to I don't know if that's gonna happen there have been so many things There are so many things that have happened over the last four or five years from the OGL debacle To everything else that D &D has done sending Pinkerton's to people's houses and things like that That every time I turn around it was like I'm swearing off wizard. No, you're not. No, you're not The fact of the matter is is that that there come to Jesus is probably never gonna happen Somebody else said outside of things like D &D Beyond this is the end of RPGs. I don't

17:02 think it's the end of RPGs Here's the thing about about RPGs and and a lot of people who know me know that I play with know this to this right here That's stacks of RPG books. You know, it's really cool about that. I own those I Have enough RPG shit in my thing and enough dice in my house where I can run campaigns until the day I die and never run out of material Never Because once you own the books once you have them they're yours Right and unlike video games. You can't take my you can't take my games away from me. My books are right there. They're mine So unless my house burns down you're not taking my RPGs away from me. So I Don't use the end of RPGs.

17:50 I do think that this it's another one of the reasons why this industry struggles, right? And it goes back to the story we talked about earlier today, which is the diamond distribution story, right? Whether it's comic books or tabletop RPGs, these Geekdom thingies, because of the way the business runs, because of cashflow, like you are always two bad months away from done, right? That's what happened to us with our game store. We were just... two bad months away from being done all the time and then it just stacked us boom boom and then we were toast right um it was just nothing else we could do so take that for what it's worth uh jay do you have any closing thoughts on this particular topic that is how the cookie crumbles let us know down in the comments below