Another take on Sauron's One D&D

I watched these; in hindsight, they take on more meaning than they did when I saw them the first time.

Then, of course, I looked at the stock price over time.

I think Hasbro is in trouble, and Wizards of the Coast, as the engine of Hasbro's profitability, is being looked at to solve it. They've taken on this aggressive, Microsoft and video-game inspired approach, and replaced most of their management, from the CEO of Hasbro to the heads of the WotC division and the D&D brand overall. And I think this new management team is under the gun to produce some results, and quickly.

Of course, the problems with D&D include their increasing wokeness and DEI poisoning their products. Naturally, they did absolutely nothing to address that. Strixhaven, Radiant Citadel and Spelljammer were all poorly received products, as best as we can determine, with relatively poor sales, and Magic: The Gathering (which has historically been a cash cow that dwarfs D&D anyway) has had a very rough year, as the downgrading to sell by Bank of America highlights. The structural problems with D&D means that a cash-grab is unlikely to do very much to improve their position except maybe for a single quarter. And the bigger problem is Magic: The Gathering anyway.

So, not that this makes me more sympathetic to the WotC management, because I think that the WotC staff from developers to management both are still terrible people for all of the reasons I gave in my last post, but at least it has given me a very different perspective on what's happening and why it's happening. It's not just random and arbitrary mean-spiritedness and greed; it's a desperate, panicked move meant to steal from content creators to artificially prop up their own failing bottom line. The chickens of both poor prior decisions and likely the inevitable tides of the market are coming home to roost, and Hasbro is in denial of it, and trying to bail the water out of a sinking ship. 

Given the likely short term significant downturn in the economy that we'll be facing going forward, this is a quixotic endeavor, and taking your colleagues and fans with you in a blaze of kamikaze nihilism hardly seems like an admirable way to deal with adversity, but I did mention the sociopathic nature of these people in my last post already, didn't I? Yes, I believe that I did.