Dungeons & Dragons Embarks on Epic Quest to Finally Make Money

With Honor Among Thieves soon to hit theaters, can Hasbro overcome 50 years of D&D business disasters without enraging its fan base?

By Felix Gillette and Thomas Buckley

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Past the Mr. Potato Head statuary in the parking lot, past the phalanx of vintage GI Joe soldiers lining the hallway, past the old-timey Monopoly board hanging on the wall, Chris Cocks stops in front of a whiteboard. "Let me just erase these corporate secrets," says the chief executive officer of Hasbro Inc. Two reporters visiting the toymaker's headquarters in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, corkscrew their necks trying to decode what appears to be company financials. Then Cocks raises his hand and wipes it all away.

If only he could make some recent entries in Hasbro's ledger disappear as easily. In January, following a bout of weak holiday sales, the company announced it would cut 15% of its workforce. By March, its shares were down by more than 40% from the year before. It has suggested to anxious investors that brighter days are coming as it doubles down on one of the most seemingly valuable franchises in gaming, Dungeons & Dragons, the classic tabletop role-playing game, or RPG. "It's a good time to be a fan," Cocks says.

On March 31, Hasbro will kick off a D&D blitz, starting with the release of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. It's a big-budget, CGI-laden spectacle co-produced by Paramount Pictures and Hasbro's in-house EOne Studio, starring Chris Pine and Michelle Rodriguez as a couple of wisecracking, world-saving thieves. In August, Baldur's Gate III, the latest sequel in a popular series of video games based on D&D, is set to go on sale, followed by the release of a live-action D&D TV series being developed for Paramount+. And sometime next year, Hasbro is expected to unveil One D&D, the next iteration of the tabletop game.

D&D, the granddaddy of RPGs at almost 50 years old, has been enjoying a cultural renaissance. Thanks in part to its starring role in Netflix's hit series Stranger Things—perhaps the biggest coup in non-product placement—the game has minted a new generation of dice-slinging fans, along with D&D-themed podcasts, Twitch shows and D&D influencers on YouTube and TikTok. Cocks, himself an avid D&D player, says that the traditional version of the game is played by millions of people and that "the bigger opportunity for us" will come from product extensions and new audiences.

Which is a very gentle way of saying that Hasbro needs to finally make some money from the revered franchise. Cynthia Williams, president of Wizards of the Coast and Digital Gaming, the Hasbro division that operates D&D, told investors at an event in December that "D&D has never been more popular...but the brand is undermonetized."

Hasbro is now trying to replicate with D&D what it did with its geeky corporate sibling, Magic: The Gathering. It built the fantasy card game into its first billion-dollar brand, thanks in part to an aggressive expansion into mobile gaming, media licensing agreements and ancillary products. Today, Hasbro makes about $4 billion a year from toys, $1 billion from entertainment and $1.3 billion from its Wizards of the Coast and Digital Gaming division. The company doesn't break out D&D-specific numbers for investors, but Arpine Kocharyan, an analyst at UBS, has estimated that D&D generates more than $150 million in annual sales. In October 2022, the toy company set a goal of increasing its overall profit by 50% over the next three years, noting that D&D would be "a major growth priority."

Judging by the game's history, supersizing D&D's coffers won't be a simple quest. The brand has often struggled to live up to its potential, leaving in its wake decades of infighting, litigation and squandered opportunities. And sure enough, just as Hasbro was gearing up to mobilize its zealous fan base for the feature film, it hit yet another self-inflicted snag. For more than 20 years, Wizards had maintained an explicitly laissez-faire system in which anyone was free to use D&D's basic game mechanics and trappings to create supplementary books, spinoff games and other products catering to fans. In late 2022, though, Hasbro began approaching tabletop gaming companies with a new, more restrictive licensing contract that would seemingly end D&D's open-source era and replace it with one controlled more tightly by the company.

When the contract leaked online, angry fans began circulating petitions chastising Hasbro for its perceived avarice and threatening to boycott various D&D products, including the forthcoming movie. On social media, they slammed promotions for Honor Among Thieves. With the risk to its big Hollywood play mounting, Hasbro apologized and backtracked, temporarily defusing the controversy.

But for those who've managed the business of D&D in the past, the great licensing war of 2023 was a reminder of how difficult it can be to get its fans to go along with change. Lorraine Williams, who led D&D's original parent company, TSR Inc., for a decade between the 1980s and '90s, describes its players as voracious, intellectually driven readers "with unusually long attention spans." They also tend to be instinctively hostile toward anything reeking of commercialization. "I say this with all due reverence and tons of respect: There's a certain snobbishness among D&D players, because they are so bright," she says. "Any new addition, particularly if it's perceived to be dumbed down, is going to burn up the wires."

D&D was invented in 1974 by a pair of Midwestern gaming enthusiasts, Gary Gygax and David Arneson. It emerged from two evolutionarily convergent groups: hobbyists who collected miniature war figures such as soldiers and tanks, and writers who conjured up sets of rules for war games that people could play using dice to guide their Lilliputian armies. D&D's creators added a fantasy spin and shifted the focus from battalions and brigades to the individual.

Players each create a character from a particular race, such as elves or dwarves, and a vocational class, such as barbarians or clerics. They and their friends then steer their characters through various group missions, fighting monsters and overcoming obstacles. Characters gain power by accumulating experience and wealth, carrying it over from one session to the next. In every pod of players, one managerially inclined type serves as the dungeon master, organizing the challenges and transforming the game into a richly imaginative group adventure. The star of D&D isn't a particular hero or villain but rather the elaborate set of rules laid out in three dense hardcover books that can each retail for around $50: Player's Handbook, Monster Manual and Dungeon Master's Guide. The Player's Handbook alone has more than 300 pages of directives, covering virtually every scenario imaginable, whether it's waging combat, casting spells or filing lifestyle expenses.

Typically, D&D gatherings come in two flavors. In "theater of the mind" sessions, the dungeon master describes all the action without much in the way of physical props. In "tactical combat," objects such as maps, terrains and minifigurines help players keep track of the action. Both styles rely heavily on dice—including a 20-sided die, a magnificently contrived vortex of chance and the reigning icon of D&D culture—to determine outcomes. Both also rely on supplemental adventure modules, slim books with intriguing titles (Tomb of Annihilation, Ghosts of Saltmarsh), that lay out a specific set of challenging biomes with monsters that the players can attempt to navigate under the dungeon master's guidance.

When D&D arrived, many in the war-gaming community—adults often hailing from military backgrounds—decried the fantasy elements of D&D as child's play. But by the late 1970s, it had become a mainstream hit. As the game's popularity soared, TSR, the company Gygax had started in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, seemed ready to soar with it. But then TSR embarked on an ill-advised spending spree. To diversify revenue, it acquired a needlepoint shop, hoping fans would embrace D&D-themed knitting kits. (They did not.) To improve community relations, it funded an effort to salvage a sunken ship discovered at the bottom of Geneva Lake. (Parts of the Lucius Newberry were successfully recovered.) And in a half-baked marketing stunt, the company sponsored the US Olympic bobsled team. Between 1976 and 1984, according to the book Game Wizards by Jon Peterson, TSR's annual revenue grew from $300,000 to $29.6 million—but over the same stretch, the company went from an annual profit of $19,000 to losses of $750,000. Debts mounted, lawsuits proliferated, and a feud raged between Gygax and Arneson, resulting in years of recriminations and litigation.

D&D adventures are often set in treacherous terrain, including shadowy catacombs teeming with orcs and scruffy archipelagos overrun with ghost pirates. But arguably no milieu would prove more frightful for TSR's executives than the sun-kissed hills of Hollywood. In the early 1980s, Gygax, freshly divorced and antsy for a new revenue source, decamped from Wisconsin to Los Angeles. There he racked up sizable bills for the company, renting a sprawling mansion, throwing decadent soirees and retaining the Oscar-winning screenwriter James Goldman to work on a script for an R-rated D&D movie.

Tinseltown riches proved elusive. In 1983 an animated D&D cartoon series began airing on Saturday mornings, but it was bludgeoned by The Smurfs in the ratings and was canceled after three seasons. Any attempt at gaining a bigger cultural foothold would have to contend with fundamentalist Christian groups, who appeared regularly in local and national media to accuse D&D—with its magic spells, ornate bestiaries and horned deities—of being a plaything of the devil. A family-friendly live-action film would have helped counter these sensationalist accusations, but one failed to materialize throughout the 1980s. So in the early 1990s, TSR sold its movie rights to Courtney Solomon, a 19-year-old Canadian science-fiction fan with big dreams of making a Star Wars-like trilogy of films. According to the Los Angeles Times, Solomon initially approached the company incognito, posing as an economics student. Somehow—perhaps because roguish bravado is a much-cherished quality in both the D&D universe and Hollywood—Solomon won the confidence of TSR executives.

Over the next several years, some A-list directors, including James Cameron and Francis Ford Coppola, took a look at Solomon's project, but ultimately they all passed. Williams, TSR's CEO at the time, says in retrospect that she should have paid closer attention to Solomon's Hollywood moonshot. "I didn't see it going anywhere, quite frankly," she says.

In fairness, she had more pressing issues, such as finding a buyer for TSR. Williams says Hasbro executives began sniffing around during the 1990s, but they seemed alarmed by the prospect of managing a business with a reputation for unruliness. "They could visualize the potential, but they were terrified of it," she recalls. Instead, in 1997, TSR was sold for about $25 million to Wizards of the Coast, a hobby company based outside Seattle that was flush with cash from Magic: The Gathering. Two years later, Hasbro acquired Wizards for $325 million, adding both Magic and D&D to a stable of classics that included Scrabble and Play-Doh, many of which were secured over decades of aggressive acquisitions of rival companies.

The sale imposed new pressure on Solomon. If he didn't make the movie soon his rights would expire; if he did, he'd control the rights for an extended period. So the twentysomething decided to direct it himself, with backing from Hong Kong import-export magnate Allan Zeman, somehow attracting a cast that included Jeremy Irons, Thora Birch and Marlon Wayans.

When Dungeons & Dragons arrived in theaters in 2000, critics knocked its absurd costumes, meandering plot and unintentionally hilarious script. The movie "sinks in a sea of cheesy effects, cheap clichés, dispiriting narrative and the one thing an action fantasy can't afford: boredom," noted the Houston Chronicle. "Close your eyes and the dialogue sounds like an overwrought junior-high-school play," wrote Roger Ebert. The film grossed less than $35 million worldwide, a missed financial opportunity for Hasbro that would grow even more glaring the next year, when the first Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings films arrived in theaters. Each of those earned upwards of $850 million in box office sales and gave rise to two of the decade's most lucrative film franchises.

As much as Hasbro execs might have wished for the embarrassing saga to end there, over the next dozen years, Solomon would have a hand in two additional D&D movies, both of which went direct to basic cable. With a planned fourth, he told an entertainment website in 2013 he was optimistic he'd finally get it right. "Hopefully," he said, "I'll be forgiven by most of the D&Ders, and they'll get the movie that they always wanted to have in the first place." By 2015, after two long years of litigation and an undisclosed settlement, Hasbro finally regained control of D&D's Hollywood fate.

Three years into Chris Cocks's career at Procter & Gamble Co., he found himself researching an osteoporosis medication, listening to a focus group of elderly women discussing bone health. "That kind of prompted me to want to get into video games," he says. He ended up working on the Xbox at Microsoft Corp., eventually spending 15 years in two stints at the company. Then in 2016 he was hired by another Seattle business, becoming president of Wizards, which by then had owned D&D for almost two decades. In many ways it was full circle for Cocks, who'd been indoctrinated into the rich and dank D&D cosmos by a friend's older brother as an elementary schooler in Cincinnati. "One of the wizards had this cool ruby at the end," says Cocks. "I was like, 'Oh, what's that? It's cooler than your Star Wars figures.'"

Wizards had taken a much different strategic posture with D&D than its previous owners. As D&D grew far bigger than anything else in the field, Gygax exerted tighter control over everything in its vicinity—from the industry's trade publications to its annual conventions. He was not shy about lashing out verbally or legally against anyone he felt was infringing on his territory. "Quite a few individuals and firms have sought to cash in on a good thing by producing material from, or for, D&D," he once wrote in Dragon, the company's official D&D magazine. "For most of these efforts, TSR has only contempt." After Wizards took over and discovered how bad the game's economics were, they decided to focus on its core products—such as the three big hardcover rulebooks—and relax their control over everything else, says Brian Lewis, a lawyer for the company at the time. Third parties could create adventure modules, trade publications, figurines and other related products.

To alleviate the mistrust that had been accumulating for years, Lewis and his colleagues came up with a broad and generous licensing framework, modeled on the open-source software movement popular in Seattle's tech community. They called it the Open Game License, or OGL. Under that framework, anyone could build upon the core mechanics and concepts of D&D to make new games or supplemental products aimed at fans, without worrying about legal blowback from its owners. They wouldn't have to reach out to Wizards for permission; all they needed to do was slap some generic OGL language on their products.
Supporters say that, over time, the new license came to work exactly as intended. Legions of outside creators—from small publishing houses to dudes working in dice-themed sweaters out of Midwestern garages—made all sorts of things that enhanced the D&D experience. "The whole industry absolutely thrived," Lewis says. "It was magnificent." And there wasn't much need for the small businesses to communicate with Wizards execs or vice versa. For the most part, everybody was happy to leave each other alone to pursue their visions of warring orc tribes in misty mountains or whatever.

At times, the radio silence between the adjacent camps led creators to speculate feverishly about the inner workings of the company. In 2007, as Wizards executives were preparing to roll out the fourth edition of D&D, they dropped some tantalizing news: The classic tabletop game was going digital in a big way. They showed a prototype for something called the D&D Game Table, a virtual play space where dungeon masters would be able to lay out maps, arrange 3D minifigs, spawn monsters and unspool scrolls. "It turns the internet into your kitchen table," an executive explained in a promotion.

But when the fourth edition hit the market in 2008, many of the promised digital tools, including the D&D Game Table, were missing. Absent a straightforward explanation about what had happened, fans circulated news reports in online forums about a manager at Wizards who'd murdered his estranged wife and killed himself. In some corners, the tragic event morphed into an explanation for the mysterious digital misfire. For the next several years, Wizards continued to experiment with a two-dimensional virtual gaming table. But in 2012, after beta-testing the feature, the company finally announced that it would be ending the effort, because "we were unable to generate enough support for the tool to launch a full version to the public."

Overall, however, the hands-off approach seemed to work. In 2014, Wizards released the fifth edition of D&D, which changed the rules of combat and lowered the barriers to entry. By the time Cocks became president of Wizards, the fifth edition was on its way to becoming the most popular version of D&D in its history.

When the pandemic hit in 2020, dungeon masters flocked online, convening their parties using a slew of new digital tools and enhancements created not by Wizards or Hasbro, but by the thriving ecosystem the OGL had seeded. One service, D&D Beyond, which helped players track character evolution and campaign progress, suddenly seemed unstoppable, raking in up to $5.99 a month from each subscriber. "Every kind of growth metric took a sharp incline during the pandemic," says Adam Bradford, the founder of D&D Beyond.

Wizards couldn't fail to notice that it was being left behind by small businesses cashing in on the excitement, especially as it was simultaneously being cited by its parent company as a source of future growth. During the early pandemic, Hasbro's entertainment-driven fortunes took a hit as several movies with its toy tie-ins, including Walt Disney Co.'s Black Widow and Paramount's GI Joe prequel Snake Eyes, were delayed by the coronavirus shutdowns. Hasbro's 2020 annual report noted to investors that Magic and D&D were "at the center of an aggressive digital transformation." For D&D, that was still largely fantasy.
Then, in February 2022, with D&D's popularity soaring and money pouring in from Magic, the company promoted Cocks to CEO following the recent death of longtime Hasbro boss Brian Goldner. The D&D community largely ignored the ascension of one of its own to the top of the corporate empire. Cocks's first big move at the helm: acquiring D&D Beyond for $146.3 million. Hasbro executives said that the acquisition would give it a direct look into the behavior of D&D customers, allowing Wizards to capitalize on the game's increasingly digital future. Almost 15 years after its first major attempt, the world's most famous fantasy game was still trying to crack digital.

Typically, during the runup to a big movie based on a popular franchise, Hollywood studios spend months courting die-hard fans, sending them swag and jetting them off to private screenings. A few months before the release of Honor Among Thieves, Hasbro and Paramount inadvertently tested what might happen if, instead of pandering to its most devout geeks, they enraged them.

The great licensing war began in late 2022, when Wizards executives began asking publishers to agree to an updated version of the OGL. The new legal framework would require any publisher with greater than $50,000 in annual sales to report details of their D&D-related dealings to Wizards. Those topping $750,000 would trigger a licensing fee of 20% to 25% on any revenue above that amount.

When copies of the contract leaked online, the RPG community accused Hasbro of trying to restrict their work and stifle innovation. D&D fans were outraged. Mike Holik of Mage Hand Press, an RPG publishing company, and Noah Downs, a lawyer and D&D influencer, started a petition called #OpenDND, decrying the new OGL as an attempt to "dismantle the entire RPG industry." More than 77,000 people signed.

By late January, only a few weeks after the new contract leaked, Hasbro capitulated, announcing that it would no longer be revoking the original OGL and would be moving key parts of the existing fifth edition rule set into an "irrevocable" creative commons licensing agreement. "It's clear from the reaction that we rolled a 1," the D&D staff wrote in a statement. (Translation: They'd failed.)

The petitioners claimed victory but were also left questioning what might come next. Holik says he wonders if Hasbro's gambit was less about generating money from the RPG industry—which barely cracked $145 million in retail revenue in the US and Canada in 2021, according to trade publication ICv2—and more about exerting greater control over the D&D brand. The company might be afraid, he says, that if outsiders keep creating D&D supplements without oversight, it will be harder for D&D's brand managers to craft an overarching narrative for film and TV. "They were dealt a hand, they tried to play it, they folded, and now we're going to see what they play on the second hand," he says. "Until then, it's kind of bonkers that they gambled that badly."

Although the unrest has largely subsided online, some players are still ticked off. Kevin Donville, an information technology consultant, lyricist, magician and exacting dungeon master from Los Angeles, says the licensing mess upset him not only as a player but also as a Hasbro shareholder. "How tone-deaf can you be to your audience?" he asks. "It's just bad business."

Donville wasn't entirely convinced by the corporate cleanup job and now finds himself scrutinizing every announcement for hidden clues to Hasbro's true intentions for the future. He says he might not renew his D&D Beyond subscription when it expires later this year and is considering switching to another tabletop RPG. He's also on the fence about seeing the film. "The stockholder in me is saying, 'Oh God, I hope everybody goes to the movie,' " he says. "But I'm also like, 'Well, do I reward your bad behavior?' "

If anyone attending the Honor Among Thieves premiere at South by Southwest three weeks ago was carrying the franchise's baggage, they left it at the door. Inside the packed Paramount Theatre in Austin, where the movie kicked off the opening night of the annual film and TV festival, the event's director confessed that she'd never played the game but praised the movie for its accessibility. D&D die-hard and co-director Jonathan Goldstein, who was behind fare such as Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 and Spider-Man: Homecoming, amped up fellow fans in the audience. In a Q&A afterward, the film's star, Pine, said he'd recently learned to play the game along with his 82-year-old father.

With a healthy $150 million budget, the action-comedy tells the story of Edgin, a raffish, lute-wielding bard (Pine) who rallies a ragtag group of gifted and talented misfits with the help of his barbarian buddy Holga (Rodriguez) to find a lost relic and rescue his estranged daughter from a mopey red wizard (Daisy Head) and a beguiling, double-crossing poltroon (Hugh Grant). En route they encounter a cavalcade of D&D monsters including an owlbear, a gelatinous cube, a displacer beast, a stone golem, an intellect devourer, a mimic and a plump red dragon. Deploying a whirlwind of classic spells, the band of adventurers travel far and wide, ultimately tapping their inner potential for greatness.

The movie's success rests not only on whether it produces big numbers this spring, but also on whether it spawns a long-living franchise. Hasbro has already set the industry bar for this dynamic. Since 2007 its six Transformers films, based on its humanoid-vehicles toys, have generated almost $5 billion in ticket sales. Cocks, who says he sat in on early cuts and offered feedback on Honor Among Thieves, thinks it has similarly broad potential. "It's a love letter for the fans," he says. "But it's still really accessible in a Guardians of the Galaxy kind of way."

The initial reviews out of Austin were promising. "Delightful Nerd Bait," read the headline from Vanity Fair. The hardcore proved to be a tougher audience. A review on RPG site dicebreaker.com called it "a forgettable story in a fantastic, faithful world," featuring plot and characters that are "disappointingly uninspiring and derivative." By late March, Honor Among Thieves was tracking to open at $21 million to $30 million domestically for a total US run of $52 million to $110 million, according to Box Office Pro. Not exactly peak-Marvel numbers, considering Guardians of the Galaxy opened at $94 million domestically.

Of course, the other goal is for the film to entice newcomers to play the game. Around the time of the movie's arrival, the company will roll out a feature on D&D Beyond's website to cater to newbies who walk out of the theater and hop online to learn the basics. And for existing fans, sometime in 2024 Hasbro will release One D&D, the latest edition of the game. Along with a new set of rulebooks, it promises an immersive "virtual tabletop" built using the Unreal Engine, the 3D computer graphics tool created by Epic Games Inc., maker of the video game Fortnite. Hasbro's plan is to lean into a model that's proven lucrative for video games: Give away the game for free, or at a low cost, then upsell players on flashy avatar apparel, loot boxes and other extras.

It's hard to imagine that D&D fans will readily accept being shaken down for micropayments. Ever since the licensing debacle, the vanguard has gone from ignoring Hasbro's new CEO to watching him closely. "Chris Cocks really only became a focal point this year after the OGL thing kind of spiraled out of control," says RPG publisher Holik. "Before then, I don't think anyone had really heard his name." Since then, they concede he's said the right things and avoided any Gygaxian bigfooting, but they don't plan to let down their guard anytime soon.

Even so, it remains something of a mystery how an executive could come out of the gate with such a misfire when he's also a D&D obsessive. Cocks says he still finds time to dungeon master several times each year. His typical setup is centered around a flat-screen TV repurposed as a virtual tabletop and outfitted with a map and miniatures, ranging from cheap commercial stuff to limited-edition collectibles. On the weekend before the red-carpet debut in Los Angeles of Honor Among Thieves, he'll be doing what he's done on and off since elementary school: gathering a group of his friends around a table for a marathon D&D session. "It's how I kind of relax," he says.

They skipped a lot of stuff, downplayed a lot of other stuff, and in general were far too kind to Hasbro and Cocks. I don't believe for a second that Cocks actually plays D&D (or any RPG). I could be wrong. If he does, I would put money on him being a That Guy. All in all, nothing about the past three-ish months of his involvement and stupidity in the OGL clusterfuck convinces me that he actually likes the game, let alone actually plays it. And since not a single fucking person has been fired over the whole thing, I feel pretty confident that I'm close to if not completely right.

Quote from: Wasteland Sniper on March 30, 2023, 04:15:02 PM
They skipped a lot of stuff, downplayed a lot of other stuff, and in general were far too kind to Hasbro and Cocks. I don't believe for a second that Cocks actually plays D&D (or any RPG). I could be wrong. If he does, I would put money on him being a That Guy. All in all, nothing about the past three-ish months of his involvement and stupidity in the OGL clusterfuck convinces me that he actually likes the game, let alone actually plays it. And since not a single fucking person has been fired over the whole thing, I feel pretty confident that I'm close to if not completely right.

Yeah this really looks like a real softball article.   As for as Chris Kucks, I agree I doubt he actually plays.  He may have played once but normally? Nope.

They make plenty of money. It's just a poor us article.

The Lorraine Williams quote certainly gives the lie to the "she had nothing but contempt for gamers" myth, or suggests that at the very least, she's grown more appreciative of the audience in her older years.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer on March 30, 2023, 07:17:38 PM
The Lorraine Williams quote certainly gives the lie to the "she had nothing but contempt for gamers" myth, or suggests that at the very least, she's grown more appreciative of the audience in her older years.

She was known for being really nice to the employees and was really into the book side of things far more than the game side.

No clue if she ever actually disliked gamers. There is alot of falsehoods tossed around from her era. Some directed at Gygax for stuff Loraine and especially the Blumes did.

More revisionist nonsense about Williams? 

Quote from: Chainsaw on March 30, 2023, 03:38:21 PM
Dungeons & Dragons Embarks on Epic Quest to Finally Make Money

Starting off an article with a lie isnt a good look.

WOTC makes plenty of money, the mothership Hasbro just wants to make more.

Quote from: GhostNinja on March 31, 2023, 09:07:46 AM

Quote from: Chainsaw on March 30, 2023, 03:38:21 PM
Dungeons & Dragons Embarks on Epic Quest to Finally Make Money

Starting off an article with a lie isnt a good look.

WOTC makes plenty of money, the mothership Hasbro just wants to make more.

I really want to say it's that they want to make more RIGHT NOW as opposed to the long-term organic growth they've seen over the past several years, but then I remember it's almost impossible to find a mobile game that isn't just a black hole for cash in the form of microtransactions and it occurs to me that they know the demographic they are chasing. (On that note, if anybody knows of a good mobile RPG that is a one-time payment please feel free to share.) If they can get a decent AI DM working they'll have access to a far larger pool of people who won't have a crusty pre-D&D Beyond IRL DM telling them not to waste their money on what amounts to stupid cosmetic video game crap.

Quote from: Wasteland Sniper on March 31, 2023, 11:30:28 AM
I really want to say it's that they want to make more RIGHT NOW as opposed to the long-term organic growth they've seen over the past several years, but then I remember it's almost impossible to find a mobile game that isn't just a black hole for cash in the form of microtransactions and it occurs to me that they know the demographic they are chasing. (On that note, if anybody knows of a good mobile RPG that is a one-time payment please feel free to share.) If they can get a decent AI DM working they'll have access to a far larger pool of people who won't have a crusty pre-D&D Beyond IRL DM telling them not to waste their money on what amounts to stupid cosmetic video game crap.

I agree.  I do not think that a AI DM is ever going to beat a human being.   I am not sure they are going to be as successful and they think they are.  People can just stick with 5e, any of the earlier versions or one of the many OSR options that are out there.

D&D belongs to them so they can do whatever they want, but I am not sure if it is going to work.  Online gaming does fill a need, but it never beats an in person game.

Quote from: GhostNinja on March 31, 2023, 12:35:52 PM
I agree.  I do not think that a AI DM is ever going to beat a human being.   I am not sure they are going to be as successful and they think they are.  People can just stick with 5e, any of the earlier versions or one of the many OSR options that are out there.

True. For now. But anyone who has followed the development of this tech for any period of time it is obvious that at the exponential level of growth and improvement of AI it will soon be a master at running an RPG game. Writing a novel. Painting a picture. Writing code. Making a video game. Making an animated film, and eventually a live action (looking) film. And so on. Not in the distant future, but soon. Very soon.

But here is the key, I think it will always need humans to direct it. All this talk about AGI (artificial general intelligence) I don't believe, it is always going to be a really sophisticated database. Though many will be fooled that it is intelligent.