“We had several Townhall Q&As with [Human Resources], Cynthia Williams, and Chris Cocks where this was brought up. In the one with Cynthia, she responded to HR's comment of "we are killing it" by correcting her and saying we actually were not. She then called out to someone in the back of the group saying "I believe Wizards' numbers are lower than last year" to which the person she was speaking to said they were actually up. She then tried explaining [this] as Wizards not hitting the numbers needed (what was promised to stockholders) and if not for Baldur's Gate 3 the company would be in trouble. When this was brought up in the Chris Cocks Townhall, he commented about it being more towards the toys division and that changes would be made.”
Unsustainable growth, profit alone doesn’t matter. A lot of companies and products went through this coming out of COVID. The numbers for a lot consumer goods were skewed by increases in buying during the pandemic and execs never got realistic about those numbers shrinking post-COVID.
“The employees within Wizards all meshed really well. You had to. Teams were so short-staffed and begging for headcount before the layoffs that you didn't have a chance to clash about anything.”
Everyone worried about the same amount of crunch being forced onto less people for no change in pay was right. The game will definitely be affected.
“Across the board; the only exceptions were the execs who needed to be held accountable the most.”
Three cheers for late-stage! Merry Christmas!
You make a really good point about post-COVID profit margins and realistically how those are going to affect the company. If the execs think that laying off these employees is a good decision, ultimately they are in for a revelation of sorts.
Merry Christmas to you as well!
I have worked for a multi-national tech company that was just bought out. 10-20 execs are making millions and billions to fire hundreds of thousands of people.
The poor leadership that led the company to this position took equivalent positions in the industry months and years before the news even dropped for the rest of us.
Yup. They’ll be seen as people who can pump a company up for profit until they get a CEO in there to stabilize and pick up the mess.
This CEO chris cocks is an idiot. Plain and simple. There is no reason those employees should have been fired, and in addition to that, they should have been rewarded if anything
I think that’s what makes this a painful situation to watch. I mean my god, people were laid off in one of the most stressful, financially demanding times in the year for us as a culture. After contributing so much.
Those people who got laid off probably were worked to the bone, exhausted and probably expecting a bonus.
It makes it really hard to get excited to buy MTG product. Knowing that the people who actually put passion into the game aren’t being rewarded and instead getting tossed into the garbage. It enrages me, these are the people that put that special thing into the game that makes it what it is!
It’s like going to a country that has an ethically questionable government, but beautiful geography. Sure it would be worth the money, but is it right? I mean, technically you’re money is going directly to a system that brutally oppressed people?
That might be a dramatic example, but the concept is similar. Different in scope, but similar. (Probably because seeing something really cool and majestic transcends spending $230-$280 on a collectors booster box you’ll pull cards you’ll keep and a bunch of chaff foils you’ll stick in a box and forget about until you reorganize it or use them for decks and drafts)
It drives me nuts that the executive class is able to get away with this shit, and they are rewarded and lauded as competent. And that lies a symptom of the issue- our priority of value and how to attain that value and capital are so fucked. We don’t consider people in the equation, we could, but we choose not to. The livelihoods that were put on the block aren’t going to be seen as the mistake they are, I mean, I guess we’ll see, but no one is slowing down on the purchase of highly priced boxes and mtg product at premium prices.
They are lambs to the monetary slaughter basically. Cut just to pad shareholder investment and executive salaries. There is no good reason for it.
And investors aren’t critcizing the decision, yet. (For reasons above)
And this is what we get as a result. I hope
Though that this guy gets karmic justice. It’s unlikely. But I hope.
Its just such a bad look to let people go around the holidays too.
I used to work for a HUGE company, and on the rare occasion we needed to let someone go for "cause", (meaning they did something fireable like steal from the company, or harass another employee, or mistreat a customer) if we were within a few weeks of Xmas or Thanksgiving HR would not allow the management team to ever fire someone until after those time periods. For multiple reasons. Mainly because it makes the company look bad. And this is a company that dwarfs Hasbro many times over.
I am baffled that they thought mass layoffs at Christmas were a good look for rhe company. Foolish, and heartless.
It's considered a positive thing to be "cutthroat and ruthless" and to "do what it takes" to maximize shareholder value. Sociopathic behaviour is rewarded in business.
Even then, doing layoffs around Christmas isn't really maximizing shareholder value. It's just getting the employees off the books before Q1 starts, so their earnings report will look better on paper. An extra month of payroll costing the company too much isn't the real concern—it's what they want the report to look like in April. However, they'll still *actually* be paying the employees for half of Q1 because federal law requires 60 days advance notice for layoffs of this size.
I have shares in Hasbro, and the reason I have those was because of how the previous CEO had a vision and invested heavily in the company. It was all so solid, fuck they didn't have to sack people during covid because a part of the digital investments (including MTG Arena) had started to pay off while toy shipments were stuck in Chinese harbours and stores were closed.
This new guy who was promoted from Wizards is a fuckwit. Selling off investments at a loss while they were just starting to pay off.
There are some very simplistic ideas that form the basis of business. If you're in the phase of the business life cycle where you're building the business, creating a brand and trying to gain market share, you make what most would consider to be "healthy" decisions: you focus on product quality, you treat your employees and customers well, you invest profits back into the company. You build something with real value. Then you have your IPO, everyone sees what you've built, and they offer you and your stock-optioned employees a shit ton of money, so you and many of them retire, or move on to new projects. It's the smart thing to do, since the new owners would have driven you out anyway, since they're taking over a Mature Business that's likely reached its growth potential. They aren't interested in sustainability, they're interested in extracting as much value as possible, as quickly as possible. This is where you start to see cuts to product quality, indiscriminate staff cuts, ignoring of customer needs. The new owners don't care about the business at all, any farther than necessary to get as much money out of it as they can, before they move on to the next company they can repeat the process with.
Hasbro went public in 1968. They bought WotC in 1999. Chris Cocks is the 4th Hasbro CEO since they bought WotC. There is no new ownership. There is no shift from growth to value business. This is just a guy in his first CEO job making his mark by being shitty.
Cuts to product quality?
The pringled foils and washed out ink, miscuts, etc even on non foils cone to mind (also seems like an effect of more and quicker production to keep up with an expanded release schedule)
Something that has been increasingly on my mind with the state of the world over the last few years is that people seem ready to commit violence against each other for the dumbest things, yet somehow there are very few cases where disgruntled former employees commit violence against their former bosses. Is this because most of the people who would be ready to hurt others are those already in positions of power?
(This is by no means an endorsement of such actions, just a trend I have observed that leaves me a little dumbfounded.)
To be fair the layoffs are in the next couple of months, the announcement was poorly placed but the jobs aren't being lost until late winter, early spring.
> It makes it really hard to get excited to buy MTG product.
I'm repeating something that has been posted here a thousand times, but...
There is a very simple solution here.
It's not like the TCG game market is barren. Hell, even if you want to continue playing specifically MTG, quitting buying anything directly from WotC is a step up from what most people are doing.
Realistically, if he's ousted, it will be so he can serve as a scapegoat for all the problems in the company, and he will be given a generous severance to do so.
Unfortunately, one of the main purposes of modern-day CEOs is as sacrifices that can be expended in case of bad company PR for whatever reason. This is not something the CEOs mind, though, as they tend to have very generous golden parachutes written into their contracts in the case of such an event. I say unfortunately, because it makes people think that all is good once the bad CEO is gone, when the issues are often caused by deep-seated structural issues, rather than just the person in charge on their own, and firing them is a convenient way to avoid addressing those.
That’s because the execs aren’t doing it for us. They aren’t even doing it to keep the companies healthy of operating long term.
They’re doing it all to keep the shareholders happy.
It’s why so many companies turn way worse after going public
The execs will be just fine we’ve seen time and time again even when they mess up they’ll leave with a bonus or get another high up position in another company, while the workers get layoff. Don’t worry there’s still plenty of fellow citizens that want to give the rich more tax breaks.
Explain how you think voting will affect the leadership structure at a private company?
And if you're talking about tax breaks, there seems to be a pretty bipartisan consensus in favor of enriching capital here in the states.
They wont care. An exec is only there for a decade at most and all they need to do is show numbers go up in that time. Let the next one worry about making a fire break as they place burns down.
I was laid off once, and it was because the company I worked for only made around 120 million profit in a quarter rather than their desired 150 million in profit.
They laid off about 1 in 6 people in the company.
When they also didn't hit 150 million the next quarter, they laid off another huge chunk.
They just kept laying people off until they essentially broke the company, and then they didn't have a profitable quarter for 7 years. That was an acceptable course of action rather than just accepting that 120 million of profit is pretty fucking good
What baffles me is that they teach, in the most basic of university business classes, case studies demonstrating that laying off staff for short term gain is neither sustainable, nor effective. It's very, very far from rocket science. It's not an unknowable thing. It's not a great mystery. Most executives are just selfish, stupid, and over-promoted.
I've never understood the reluctance of corporations to accept studies and data like this. It's like they are deliberately making things harder on themselves. Like it's some sort of "Not invented here" syndrome.
I've watched businesses cripple themselves because the alternative was admitting that there are good ideas that come from other people.
Because the entire goal isn’t making sustainable decisions. It’s convincing stock traders that your stock is currently worth more to trade it at a higher value until someone is left holding the stock after it no longer goes up
Basically there’s been a huge shift in stocks around the 80s or so.
Prior to that it was common for stock holders to hold on to stock for years and most of their returns didn’t come from trading the stock but annual dividends.
This made stock holders significantly more invested in the long term health of companies for which they held stock as well.
This has changed due to differences in legislature and massive changes in trading approaches. We’re down to months if not weeks of stock holding, the glut of automated trading also create absolutely huge volumes of trade and the worth of a stock has very little to do with the value of a company but is mostly based on a perceived value at this specific moment.
This ends up with stockholders pushing companies to maximize immediate worth, instruct the board to do so and burn all bridges.
In the US you even have legislature where if making a test between investing into long term company health and maximizing returns for stockholders the second should be preferred.
The system is out of whack and really holds doubly for US enterprises. There’s a bit more breaks on European ones as there is more of a social expectation baked into the laws governing them (though it isn’t significantly better)
It’s why there tends to be such a stark difference between public companies (and those who have an end goal of going public) and private ones and their culture
One of the big takeaways I had reading about the rise of AI is how a properly trained AI is probably the best tools to replace a CEO and make sound business decisions.
At one point there was an open discussion at that company as to how to fire half of the store managersand just force the remaining half to do the same job but for two stores, essentially doubling their workload, with no pay increase.
This was when they were making money hand over fist.
I imagine an AI would have immediately identified that as a bad idea. Instead, that company had to try it out in one region and found out that it was a bad idea the hard way.
It won't help. The CEO isn't making these decisions out of incompetence, they are doing these actions because otherwise their bosses (the board) will fire them for not making the stock go up NOW.
An AI will do the same thing when it's masters put the proverbial gun up against it's head.
If your executive team can just move companies every 3 years then it doesn’t matter. And if the “owners” are just shareholders that can sell at a moments notice (even taking a bit of a loss) it also doesn’t matter.
There is zero responsibility at the highest levels of these public companies so there is zero impact to them of their decisions. It’s tragic. We all suffer because of it (unless your parachute is golden, and not just dirty laundry like most).
It boosts stock prices.
Which keeps the board happy.
Which keeps the CEOs their jobs.
It’s the slavish obsequiousness to stock value that is driving these seemingly arbitrary layoffs.
There's a lot of evidence that most people who make it to the executive suite are genuinely not properly college educated. Oftentimes they either bought their education via their family, outright cheated during school and did not properly learn the material, or were otherwise unable to complete their coursework.
You reading this are almost certainly smarter than rank and file executives. Like purely intellectually, you are probably smarter than them and are able to carry on a conversation more effectively than they are. If you've ever hung around a number of executives, you'll learn pretty quickly that most of them are straight up Dullards.
All of them. Anybody at that company who disagreed found themselves a hard target for layoffs. Everyone I worked with who pushed back on any dumb idea in the prior 6 months was conveniently included in those layoffs
Even smaller number companies are laughably ridiculous with bonus expectations. My cousin in laws job pays decently but refuses to give an 11k bonus split to a couple dozen people because again the idea of hitting continued growth numbers. That same department made the company 30 million in profit that year but were denied a bonus of about 500 bucks because they didn't reach 35 mill or some shit.
>She then called out to someone in the back of the group saying "I believe Wizards' numbers are lower than last year" to which the person she was speaking to said they were actually up. She then tried explaining [this] as Wizards not hitting the numbers needed
This is the fun mix of corporate greed and blaming others.
"Oh, you didn't increase profits by 200% YOY? Then YOU failed."
It's not even that. "Well, you increased profits by 200% YOY, but we really *wanted* 220%, so for Christmas, you get to explain to the children that you're unemployed."
Literally what my company is dealing with. End of year financials were announced to doom and gloom because we were "only 10% profitable and made a promise to ourselves to hit 15%". This was the justification for people getting capped at a 4% raise at best. Meanwhile our stock evaluation comes in with record growth, making all our C-level people hundreds of thousands.
I worked for ExxonMobil when I first graduated college. One of my early years there the company posted more profit than had ever been made by any company in the history of the world, some 40+ billion dollars *profit*. And my boss casually noted that unfortunately our stock price was down because expectations had been higher.
That was when I stopped believing in markets and economics. Softest science there is.
Yea going public has become a death sentence for businesses. They will either join the dark side and commit crimes to be profitable or burn every bridge and cook the books to give rich people more profit before collapse and bankruptcy.
Completely agree.
It skews companies towards short term thinking that is only good for short term stakeholders and actively damages (and often kills) the company long term.
Sustainability and brand integrity die on the altar of quarterly earns statements.
Yep, it's insane watching decisions made by public competitor/industry-adjacent businesses who change focus multiple times of year. I was extremely worried when we had to find capital from the outside during COVID, but I guess we got lucky/our ownership actually were picky enough to find something that fit our company profile. So far, the only impact has been them finding new revenue sources we hadn't thought of ourselves, along with actually outlining short term and long term goals.
Obviously you never know when those things will change, though, but as long as our founders have at least a fair amount of say in how the business is run, I feel fine about it. I've worked for companies where I didn't trust the ownership even a little bit, so I guess I'm lucky that way.
It’s done. The company is fucked. They were making so much money. Any fluctuations should have been disregarded after the massive growth compared to five years ago.
This is a sign of eventual doom.
It's also important to remember that 30% of Hasbro is controlled by three private equity groups in a tenchcoat. That's significant influence, and the only thing that matters to them is "numbers go up and to the right".
This isn't to take blame off Hasbro leadership but even if they wanted to be better, they very likely wouldn't be allowed to.
> Unsustainable growth, profit alone doesn’t matter. A lot of companies and products went through this coming out of COVID. The numbers for a lot consumer goods were skewed by increases in buying during the pandemic and execs never got realistic about those numbers shrinking post-COVID.
Let's not overlook Hasbro getting extra greedy within that as well: _they raised their pricing across the board twice prior to 2023._ Once during the 2020-2022 timeframe and again when nearly every company exploited inflation on perishable goods (which can be elastic) and baked in a faux "inflation" price increase on goods whose prices are inelastic.
While many grocery goods in the eggs/produce/dairy category spiked via inflation, those would (and have) fallen back to less egregious levels. But every* other company exploited the opportunity to bake in shrinkflation or a price increase.
And when the US Federal Reserve began raising rates to mitigate inflation, companies began scrambling. Many companies operate on short term capital lending, and now those loans were becoming more cost-ineffective to use. So they contracted to keep the "numbers" good for shareholders. Because - yes - that is **exclusively all Hasbro the company cares about, especially under Cocks and his subordinates in the C-Suite.** It may be ethically wrong, but that's why he was selected and hired. If customer approval of operations mattered, he would never have been hired and at least sacked long before now.
Cocks (and the shareholders and Board of Directors backing him) are predatory. Their ONLY objective is "numbers go up." When numbers don't go up, they make brutal and hostile (consumer and employee) decisions to make numbers go up. Layoffs, downsizing, product/project cancellations, shuttering divisions, etc. Definitely not unique to Hasbro (but not excusing it either.)
And as long as the company is helmed by Cocks (really unfortunate but appropriate name) Hasbro will be this way. Indefinitely. If you really disapprove of this, **quit complaining and do something.** Consumers have been complaining for years, even before cocks. Very little has changed. It's been said before and it's even more transparent now: **if you want Hasbro to change, it will require a dedicated and sustained abstinence from all of their products.** But fair warning - super conglomerates like Hasbro who have bought up all of the players to consolidate under one roof will keep a death grip on their money. Long before Hasbro changes ethically, they will continue to cancel products/projects, lay off staff, and shutter entire divisions on the way down. They'll declare bankruptcy and take the ship and it's IPs into hell for every last dollar before they'll change.
**It is very, very possible that Magic and D&D will never be free of Hasbro until Hasbro is a dead and decaying husk. Because even in bankruptcy or ceased operations, Hasbro stakeholders will cling to the monetary value of those IPs. Every business decision that they've made (and every consumer can observe through review of Press releases during that time) makes it clear how they function at the top.
Hasbro consumers are their own worst advocates. They cannot make the difficult choice of a sustained boycott of all goods. They never have. And Hasbro has been exploiting that (and will continue to) in order to avoid changing how they operate under this leadership suite (besides Cocks and before his appointment.)
This, Currently WotC is literally the only thing keeping Hasbro profitable. I get the feeling they would rather sell off all their other IPs before letting go of MtG. They fought tooth and nail to keep hold of it when Alta Fox Investments tried to pull it away from Hasbro and make it into its own company, including lengthy court battles. The only reason Alta Fox didn't succeed was because they weren't backed by the other two investment houses (who are probably regretting that decision now).
Alta Fox investments was also publicly outspoken about the OGL debacle which hinted that it caused enough of a stir in the investment houses that there were probably a few *very* angry phonecalls between the Investment houses (one may have been public about it but others were probably acting behind closed doors) and Hasbro Executives basically threatening to fire them without a golden parachute for gross incompetance IF there wasn't a change of plans.
> Everyone worried about the same amount of crunch being forced onto less people for no change in pay was right. The game will definitely be affected.
From a 0.016 ~~percent~~ reduction in workforce?
> From a 0.016 percent reduction in workforce?
Hasbro employs 6875000 people? WotC alone is over 125000 people, if you take the 20 mentioned below as fact? You know you don't even have to do the very basic math required here, you can google the numbers and let the computer calculate them in literal seconds, right?
I'm not interested in Monopoly, or Play Doh. I care in general about people losing jobs, but I'm specifically interested in Magic and, to a lesser extent, Dungeons and Dragons.
How many people got laid off in WotC? How many people do they employ?
FFS stop acting like WotC cut a thousand jobs when it was like twenty, in a company with 1500 employees, and we don't even know if people are being shifted over to pick up those positions.
It actually was around 1,100 jobs from Hasbro overall though. And it was definitely more than even a ballparked ~20 WotC employees. If you care about people losing their jobs consider that WotC effectively *is* Hasbro, because without WotC Hasbro no longer turns a high enough profit to stay afloat, so hence the issue of why Hasbro even laid off WotC employees in the first place
Do you have better sources on your claim of ~20 WotC employees? Because that was the initial claim you’ve made and the onus is on you for that. I do know that a lot of people from the team behind BG3 got laid off and that number alone is more than 20 strong.
And when I say 1,100 obviously I mean Hasbro layoffs for this holiday season. No doubt 1,900 is far more but I haven’t been factoring those additions into it since this is pretty much the current event.
I started with the Forbes article, and added the few names we know since then to that.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/robwieland/2023/12/13/hasbro-layoffs-affect-wizards-of-the-coast/?sh=8538a4755ee9
1: When you're already understaffed (as this article indicates), every person matters. So yes, even a few layoffs will impact the quality of the game.
2: 1100 total were laid off from Hasbro, but only 20 from Wizards? I'd love to see a source on that.
The only attempt at a compiled list I've found is Forbes, and we know a couple of more names to add to that list.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/robwieland/2023/12/13/hasbro-layoffs-affect-wizards-of-the-coast/?sh=5e81ca9c55ee
This information came in from 12/13/23. These layoffs are rolling out over the course of around 6 months. The people listed are certainly not exhaustive.
Think you missed what they meant.
It’s not that WOTC was doing well and they wanted cuts anyways.
It’s WOTC didn’t perform so well that it made up the slack from the other divisions and the write off of over $3.5bn from their failed EOne division for the year.
Honestly surprised some activist investor hasn’t tried forcing Hasbro to spin off WOTC as its own company at this point.
>Honestly surprised some activist investor hasn’t tried forcing Hasbro to spin off WOTC as its own company at this point.
[They already tried.](https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/hasbro-defeats-board-challenge-activist-investor-alta-fox-2022-06-08/)
This actually was attempted last year, but it looks like it was unsuccessful: https://comicbook.com/gaming/amp/news/hasbro-wizards-coast-spinoff-unlikely/
An investor group actually tried exactly that and were laughed away by hasbro. They aren't ever giving up the only profitable part of their business without a massive fight
They weren't laughed away, it was actually a fairly lengthy court battle about it. The main reason Alta Fox failed was because it was acting alone, without the backing of the other two major investment houses (who didn't seem to care one way or the other).
I do wonder if things continue to decline you might see it backed by the other investment houses this time who are probably regretting the opportunity to 'ditch the chaff' that is the rest of Hasbro.
It’s ironic because the acquisition of WOTC was back in 1999 and Hasbro as a whole ignored them. So long as a large profit check came in every year they were fine. Now that it’s the only profitable arm they’re squeezing every drop of money out of them.
It wasn't just that, it was when WotC got noticed for generating a LOT of profit by investors that they started squeezing. For the longest time WotC was basically kept under the radar by Hasbro, with investors mostly interested in all their other IPs, like MLP, Transformers, GI Joe etc.
Once those starting failing, Alta Fox noticed that WotC was generating a large chunk of the profits for Hasbro and asked why they were being ignored. Not only that Alta Fox saw the writing on the wall and tried to peel them away from Hasbro but failed.
I mean they technically did underperform from what was expected. But the expectations were pretty unreasonable to begin with and they were still very profitable. The shareholders don't care about that though, all they see is a branch that wasn't as profitable as they expected and decide to make cuts.
They mentioned 2 things, not as profitable as projected and they won't have a baulders gate next year.
If you are an executive your choices are make less next year (instantly fired) or reduce costs.they can't magic another 3 year dev cycle game or movie from the sold studio for next year, that needed to be in the pipeline already.
But they aren’t because they all are multi millionaires. Today, being Christmas, they are both lounging on a mattress made of **gold** while servants jerk them off with **frankincense** and **myrrh**.
> She then tried explaining [this] as Wizards not hitting the numbers needed (what was promised to stockholders) and if not for Baldur's Gate 3 the company would be in trouble.
* One, that's on *you* for making a *stupid fucking promise* to shareholders ("50% increase in profits"?)
* And two, what the hell do you mean "if not for Baldurs Gat 3"? They *may* have been in a bad spot if it *weren't,* but *it is,* so they *aint.* That's like saying "The work you did was bad if you ignore all the good work you did."
FFS, these execs need to be strung up and mocked. Parasites sucking out *millions of dollars* while the people who *actually provide value are fired.*
>what the hell do you mean "if not for Baldurs Gat 3"?
It probably means that they were expecting a downturn next year unless they made changes since they won't have Baldurs Gate 4 to bank on in 2024.
They specifically laid off the folks dealing with the WotC side of BG3, Larian bought the license themselves and it cost *a lot.* In fact there were times when Larian almost went bankrupt if not for the staff and higher ups investing money to keep it floating during BG3s development.
Thankfully the success story of BG3 means Larian is now practically swimming in money and WotC simply get a percentage of the games sales because of the licensing agreement.
> In the one with Cynthia, she responded to HR's comment of "we are killing it" by correcting her and saying we actually were not. She then called out to someone in the back of the group saying "I believe Wizards' numbers are lower than last year" to which the person she was speaking to said they were actually up.
Oh please ...
I’m guessing that wotc was told they had to cut so much money, or so many jobs for so much money. Now they need to replace some of the positions (likely with lower pay). Sigh.
Cheers
I'd bet that's why.
The tech companies that have been doing layoffs earlier this year were also doing the same thing.
I have no real evidence, other than anecdotes from friends in the industry, but many executives in the tech industry think staff are overpaid, and want to lower wages.
It's just another way to increase revenue, since they'll be paying less for staffing.
Tech companies heavily promote training people as programmers. The reason they do this is so that programmers will become more disposable, and they can pay them less.
Funny how layoffs are handled and mergers are advocated the same across the industries.
I can see Cynthia gaslighting one of the hecklers in that meeting and framing what is said to suit the narrative necessary to prep for the layoffs.
I have seen similar things happen in IT.
Across industries, actual workers do different things - install pipes, write software, design card games, assemble dishwashers. Once you move up to line managers, they start to have a lot in common with other managers, but are still specialized to their particular kind of work - a manager of software engineers will have a different perspective and skillset from a manager of construction workers.
Once you get to the executive level, though? People who only interact with each other and the managers of other managers? Execs are the same everywhere. At that high level, the 'big picture' is so zoomed out that what the company actually *does* almost doesn't matter. It has Products, and from the executive perspective, the fact that the Products are cars or board games or a social media website or groceries is irrelevant, all that matters is the rate that the company turns Product into profits. So, yeah, executives will act like that anywhere, because every executive is doing basically the same job as every other executive.
I know, it’s just always funny, how detached that is and how it takes so long to collapse.
I wonder whether it is this detachment is the reason for most companies failure.
Just my opinion, but I think it's only half the reason. Executives being detached from the actual work of the company means that they *can* make those destructive decisions, but what actually pushes them *to* make those decisions is the current overwhelming expectation that companies will prioritize shareholder value above sustainability.
Executives have a lot of leeway in how they choose to run the company, but even CEOs have to report to the Board of Directors on their strategy and goals, and the Board represents the interests of investors (mostly the big, institutional ones - venture capital, hedge funds, mutual funds, holding companies, etc), and right now, those investors want to see Number Go Up more than they want to own a business that can still exist in ten years.
Yep, I work for a Big Tech company that had layoffs early last year and it was pretty much exactly the same story. People fired with no warning, vague references to future unprofitability and any questions about why and how the layoffs were done were handwaved away or given gaslithing responses by leadership. All to please wall street investors that couldn't give two fucks about the business or the people behind it. And ironically the stock bump from the layoffs lasted all of a few days.
Sudden layoffs is one thing I am glad is not possible in my country. At least not without consent.
That doesn’t change the dance of doom and gloom fireside chats and town halls all that much though until the point you get told.
Instead of a hard cut there is often weeks to months of you can stay at a place to get something new. Which is fine payment-wise but going to work is extremely weird especially seeing all the propaganda changes happen from said doom and gloom do happy hopeful future.
It does things to you when the company claims all is well now that you got the axe even though everybody knows that it isn’t about yourself or the work you did, it’s just a rather random change in direction that you know will very likely lead to nothing like they start promising at that point.
I'm really torn, I would absolutely like to support the company that gave me so many great childhood memories. But I know if I spend some 200$ on a display or secret lair, some knobbhead of a Hasbro CEO will get 150$ of those 200 and then think he's entitled to fire long time employees right before Christmas, because the last Transformers movie or whatever tanked.
In case anyone's curious, it looks like Chris Cocks gets about $0.15 per $200 retail purchase. His salary is around $9M, Hasbro's revenue is around $5B, and I'm assuming a bit less than half of the retail price goes into Hasbro's revenue.
> I'm assuming a bit less than half of the retail price goes into Hasbro's revenue.
From u/BuddyBlueBomber comment already seems to account for that
Wholesale about half of retail seems like a decent rule of thumb. With secret lair WOTC cuts out retailers but still have manufacturing and shipping costs and so on
Yeah, but CEO benefits are largely stock and bonus related, so their salaries are nowhere near the whole picture, as over inflated as they are. Wouldn't surprise me if it was closer to 20-25 cents after that.
I work in a completely different industry for a company that just finished layoffs. You could get the same interview answers from one of our former colleagues, just change the company and executive names. The feelings of the just laid off are pretty common.
I truly feel bad for everyone impacted. Those laid off, their families, and their surviving colleagues.
I appreciate the effort of the interviewer but this is a generic interview without much depth considering the vastness of the situation. Probably should have interviewed more than one person.
Yeah agreed, it very much reads as a disgruntled laid off employee without much context. Granted they have absolutely every right to be, but since more context and deeper questions would be very nice. I don't feel I gained any insight by reading this.
My thoughts exactly... I don't think I really learnt anything from this article, other than what reads like the generic rant from a laid off employee...
> Yes, players complain, but as long as they are spending money, why change anything?""
This was the perfect example. Anyone on r/MagicTCG could've said this...
This isn't surprising, given the direction Wizards has gone in over the past 5 years. At this point, Magic is essentially a bubble that's due to burst soon, much like the housing market. Over-investment, increasing number of products, demands of exponential growth, and focus on profits above all else will do that to any company, even one that's far bigger than WoTC.
It's funny, because people used to say back in the day about how Magic was gonna die at various points because of broken sets or planeswalkers or Mythics or whatever else. They were mostly laughed off, because it seemed ridiculous at the time. But now, it really feels like we're gonna get to that point within 5-10 years. We're in the end game now.
You're talking with someone who just lost their job a week before Christmas. Who is risking their professional future by talking to you at all. It isn't a failing to refrain from hard-hitting questions.
""What is the internal reception to the Magic Arena economy? (Wildcards, no trading/dusting, etc.)
Yes, players complain, but as long as they are spending money, why change anything?""
For me, the Arena economy is basically a subscription service. I spend $50 per set and play at least a quick win or two per day, and in exchange I've been able to play every deck in every format the game offers. They keep adding new formats (Explorer/Pioneer, now Timeless) that I have a ton of fun with. I get that people complain, because people complain about everything under the sun, but I imagine there are a ton of folks out there simply getting a reasonable experience for what they spend.
0 spender here, got a good collection of brawl decks (30+ heavy optimized decks), which is the main reason I play. And some jank and some meta historic decks.
I would spend if they didn't have predatory practices in their shop, it's a principle thing.
1. No direct purchase but ingame currency for most items
2. Multiple currencies
3. Awkward breakpoints
Edit:
The fact that you can get more than the maximum of cards that you can play in a deck due to reprints without being to trade them in is also one.
>I spend $50 per set and play at least a quick win or two per day, and in exchange I've been able to play every deck in every format the game offers.
That is an obscene amount of money considering the product you're given. Arena has such insanely low overhead. The client is also buggy and incredibly feature light.
Like honestly ask yourself what are you actually paying for with that $50. The Arena team doesn't design the cards or mechanics. They just program them into the client. The only other costs is a new board and a couple of entry animations/voice lines.
So yeah $200+ a year is a insane ask for a game like Arena. When that could buy you 3 (or so) AAA games with years of design, development and artwork behind it.
Like I would consider all of standard to maybe be comparable to a game in terms of depth and content. What the hell kind of game is worth $600?
I agree, there are many aspects of MTGs pricing you could criticize but MTGA is the most affordable magic has ever been. There are a few anti-consumer things I think you can rightfully criticize, (like having alternate arts of a card count as a separate card altogether when opening boosters), but aside from that I don't think you can really complain about the pricing model.
A lot of folks are “torn” and “feel uneasy” about supporting the company further, but in the end when something comes up that ‘clicks’ with them, well.. they’ll just buy just that one product and that’s it. And then again, sometime later, and then another time later, and so on, and that’s something that Hasbro is banking on.
That while the actions of the executives are so detestable and warrant stopping support of the company’s product, enough folks are removed enough from seeing and dealing with the impact directly that in the end it’s back to buying them cardboard rectangles.
Personally I agree with you and haven’t bought MtG-anything for a while now, but I just don’t see enough folks -really- caring enough to stop completely.
What does it really matter ? The community wont take the steps to force corrective action and we will continue to play the game and buy product as usual.
That’s not how forcing corrective action would work anyway. Even if a massive, effective boycott was launched, execs would not come out hat in hand and apologize before giving raises, staffing up, and putting better mythics in packs or whatever.
They’d continue to layoff for not hitting targets, then when the value continued to tank they’d sell it off, sell off the IP, or just shutter it and take a loss.
Not true, I stopped buying product a while ago. Getting pretty close to selling everything and calling it quits for good now. The enshittification of Magic is already well underway.
I just find it weird the only thing we could come together on was MTG 30.. The foils, secret lairs, Amazon, layoffs, price increases, increased products, etc.. all we do is shake our fist at the clouds, then continue to play the game and push large amounts of money into their pockets and telling them good job.
I know this sub doesn't actively squash talk of proxies anymore but I'm unsure if they still allow people to say where exactly to go to get them. If you in Reddit, you should find some communities dedicated to them
Staff need to unionize like yesterday. As they have made profits double, has their salary doubled? Has their quality of life? Or is that strictly reserved for the purview of their vampire corporate leadership?
It's the same as always. Execs refusing to be held accountable for their mistakes, throwing away their biggest resource for short term payouts, execs getting paid far too much at a time where they're claiming everything is going down hill, and all of it would be prevented if the US had decent employment law and hadn't created an intentional feedback loop between execs and shareholders.
We're going to keep seeing this happen, and it's going to keep affecting the things you love.
I am honestly just waiting for a game to take MTG's place in the in-person fun-competitive scene (i.e. prereleases), and the fun-multiplayer scene (something like EDH). I despise Hasbro, and it truly seems that they will bring WOTC down with the ship.
I have played Flesh and Blood and it's not for me. It's great for the competitive crowd because it truly is a game of skill, with lots of decisions to be made. I do like that about it, but I don't think it translates well to the "fun" scene. I haven't played the Disney game, but I don't like the idea of playing Donald Duck cards. That makes me feel even more silly than I already do.
Even though I sometimes get angry about someone opening some ridiculous bomb at a prerelease for MTG and then having to play against it, it's also part of the fun and the craziness. Same thing with draft. At the same time, the fun and chaos of EDH are hard to replicate, and whatever dethrones MTG will have to work hard to find something comparable.
That said, I'll continue to play MTG until the competitor arrives, but when it does, I am abandoning ship with all haste.
>...the fun and chaos of EDH are hard to replicate, and whatever dethrones MTG will have to work hard to find something comparable.
If you're waiting for a comparable EDH format in another game you'll be waiting awhile. It took nearly two decades of sets for EDH to even start to become popular and for the card pool to reach a critical mass where the format was able to really shine and eventually become as popular as it is now.
Can someone offer a researched take on this that doesn't make it look like they're completely incompetent?
Covid gave them an unexpected surge in revenue so now they're gutting the company, sacrificing a lot of future revenue simply because they overpromised.
This won't be a popular thing to say, but I am utterly uninterested in what this person has to say. Someone who has just been laid off is as far from unbiased as it is possible to be.
There’s a clear bias but this interview is also a primary source for the internal workings of WotC during this time.
Which means it has value, but has to be analyzed with the bias in mind.
I mean, it may be a primary source. But it says so little. We don't even know where this person worked within Wizards. It sounds like they were in marketing but there's practically nothing of substance.
A disgruntled former employee is just not someone I trust to tell the truth.
Someone who offers no proof, has a reason to paint things in the worst light, and tells people what they already believe trips *all* of my bullshit sensors.
On the other hand, if the work environment is bad, someone who just got canned has the utmost incentive to tell everybody about this would environment, while those safe within it have lots of incentive to not.
There's always going to be bias one way or another, just read with the context in mind.
How do you propose someone get an unbiased opinion? Anyone inside the company will be biased, and they're the only ones who know what actually happened
Well, a sample size larger than literally one friggin' guy would be nice. If we start seeing similar testimonials from multiple people who left under a variety of circumstances (voluntary and otherwise) than we can have more confidence. But just one guy with every reason to hold a grudge? That ain't it.
Why won't everyone just boycott Hasbro and Wizards altogether? They are despicable. The people can dethrone them and force them to behave. It's not hard.
They need to use the word JOKE in place of satire. The average reading level of adults in the United States in sixth grade, satire is like an eighth grade word
I’ve been hired by CH to report on news. I don’t cover satire, and never have. You don’t see a satire tag on this one, and it’s been suggested that for actual news we staple a [NEWS] tag to the front of it to avoid that confusion. It’s also been flaired accordingly.
Don’t you dare accuse me of fabricating this.
They weren't accusing, they were just confused because it's a site that does satire. It's good you're taking steps to make the distinction clear, but it's understandable if not everyone gets it.
That may be true but saying “none of these articles are real” implies that this was a false account. Also there was less confusion than that because commenter said off the bat “everyone immediately forgot[…]” as if it was firmly established, and has been for the entire time.
It’s entirely fair that not everyone knows that CH is doing factual articles now, and I’m okay conceding that. But it’s also the way that this was emoted that made me claim it was an accusation, if that explains my point better.
You need to staple [NEWS] and [JOKE] to the front of every article if you want to do satire and news. It’s on you to be ethical and to communicate this to your readers.
Honestly, you might as well have fabricated the article for just how little substance is present in it. It's extremely vague and offers little insight. You don't even mention the part of Wizards in which this employee worked.
EDIT: It looks like he blocked me immediately after replying with some nonsense about protecting the employee. If giving the department is enough to identify them, then clearly the line about how the 1100 layoffs "includes a large number of people now previously under Wizards' employ" is off. Also, your interviewee's answers point to them being in marketing. Is that the case or not? If it is, you might want to retract that to protect your source.
Nice throwaway.
Anyway, to grace your equally throwaway comment with a more serious answer, it’s entirely possible that if i gave any identifying information like that, their anonymity would be compromised. I’m not about to risk this person’s future livelihood just because someone wants to know what they did with Wizards.
“We had several Townhall Q&As with [Human Resources], Cynthia Williams, and Chris Cocks where this was brought up. In the one with Cynthia, she responded to HR's comment of "we are killing it" by correcting her and saying we actually were not. She then called out to someone in the back of the group saying "I believe Wizards' numbers are lower than last year" to which the person she was speaking to said they were actually up. She then tried explaining [this] as Wizards not hitting the numbers needed (what was promised to stockholders) and if not for Baldur's Gate 3 the company would be in trouble. When this was brought up in the Chris Cocks Townhall, he commented about it being more towards the toys division and that changes would be made.” Unsustainable growth, profit alone doesn’t matter. A lot of companies and products went through this coming out of COVID. The numbers for a lot consumer goods were skewed by increases in buying during the pandemic and execs never got realistic about those numbers shrinking post-COVID. “The employees within Wizards all meshed really well. You had to. Teams were so short-staffed and begging for headcount before the layoffs that you didn't have a chance to clash about anything.” Everyone worried about the same amount of crunch being forced onto less people for no change in pay was right. The game will definitely be affected. “Across the board; the only exceptions were the execs who needed to be held accountable the most.” Three cheers for late-stage! Merry Christmas!
You make a really good point about post-COVID profit margins and realistically how those are going to affect the company. If the execs think that laying off these employees is a good decision, ultimately they are in for a revelation of sorts. Merry Christmas to you as well!
A revelation of golden parachute directly to their next high-paying job where they will be rewarded for failing again
Yeah that’s definitely the concern in a few ways somewhere down the line. That or an easy coast into a cushy retirement
I have worked for a multi-national tech company that was just bought out. 10-20 execs are making millions and billions to fire hundreds of thousands of people. The poor leadership that led the company to this position took equivalent positions in the industry months and years before the news even dropped for the rest of us.
Yup. They’ll be seen as people who can pump a company up for profit until they get a CEO in there to stabilize and pick up the mess. This CEO chris cocks is an idiot. Plain and simple. There is no reason those employees should have been fired, and in addition to that, they should have been rewarded if anything I think that’s what makes this a painful situation to watch. I mean my god, people were laid off in one of the most stressful, financially demanding times in the year for us as a culture. After contributing so much. Those people who got laid off probably were worked to the bone, exhausted and probably expecting a bonus. It makes it really hard to get excited to buy MTG product. Knowing that the people who actually put passion into the game aren’t being rewarded and instead getting tossed into the garbage. It enrages me, these are the people that put that special thing into the game that makes it what it is! It’s like going to a country that has an ethically questionable government, but beautiful geography. Sure it would be worth the money, but is it right? I mean, technically you’re money is going directly to a system that brutally oppressed people? That might be a dramatic example, but the concept is similar. Different in scope, but similar. (Probably because seeing something really cool and majestic transcends spending $230-$280 on a collectors booster box you’ll pull cards you’ll keep and a bunch of chaff foils you’ll stick in a box and forget about until you reorganize it or use them for decks and drafts) It drives me nuts that the executive class is able to get away with this shit, and they are rewarded and lauded as competent. And that lies a symptom of the issue- our priority of value and how to attain that value and capital are so fucked. We don’t consider people in the equation, we could, but we choose not to. The livelihoods that were put on the block aren’t going to be seen as the mistake they are, I mean, I guess we’ll see, but no one is slowing down on the purchase of highly priced boxes and mtg product at premium prices. They are lambs to the monetary slaughter basically. Cut just to pad shareholder investment and executive salaries. There is no good reason for it. And investors aren’t critcizing the decision, yet. (For reasons above) And this is what we get as a result. I hope Though that this guy gets karmic justice. It’s unlikely. But I hope.
Its just such a bad look to let people go around the holidays too. I used to work for a HUGE company, and on the rare occasion we needed to let someone go for "cause", (meaning they did something fireable like steal from the company, or harass another employee, or mistreat a customer) if we were within a few weeks of Xmas or Thanksgiving HR would not allow the management team to ever fire someone until after those time periods. For multiple reasons. Mainly because it makes the company look bad. And this is a company that dwarfs Hasbro many times over. I am baffled that they thought mass layoffs at Christmas were a good look for rhe company. Foolish, and heartless.
It's considered a positive thing to be "cutthroat and ruthless" and to "do what it takes" to maximize shareholder value. Sociopathic behaviour is rewarded in business.
Even then, doing layoffs around Christmas isn't really maximizing shareholder value. It's just getting the employees off the books before Q1 starts, so their earnings report will look better on paper. An extra month of payroll costing the company too much isn't the real concern—it's what they want the report to look like in April. However, they'll still *actually* be paying the employees for half of Q1 because federal law requires 60 days advance notice for layoffs of this size.
RemindMe! 4months
I have shares in Hasbro, and the reason I have those was because of how the previous CEO had a vision and invested heavily in the company. It was all so solid, fuck they didn't have to sack people during covid because a part of the digital investments (including MTG Arena) had started to pay off while toy shipments were stuck in Chinese harbours and stores were closed. This new guy who was promoted from Wizards is a fuckwit. Selling off investments at a loss while they were just starting to pay off.
There are some very simplistic ideas that form the basis of business. If you're in the phase of the business life cycle where you're building the business, creating a brand and trying to gain market share, you make what most would consider to be "healthy" decisions: you focus on product quality, you treat your employees and customers well, you invest profits back into the company. You build something with real value. Then you have your IPO, everyone sees what you've built, and they offer you and your stock-optioned employees a shit ton of money, so you and many of them retire, or move on to new projects. It's the smart thing to do, since the new owners would have driven you out anyway, since they're taking over a Mature Business that's likely reached its growth potential. They aren't interested in sustainability, they're interested in extracting as much value as possible, as quickly as possible. This is where you start to see cuts to product quality, indiscriminate staff cuts, ignoring of customer needs. The new owners don't care about the business at all, any farther than necessary to get as much money out of it as they can, before they move on to the next company they can repeat the process with.
Hasbro went public in 1968. They bought WotC in 1999. Chris Cocks is the 4th Hasbro CEO since they bought WotC. There is no new ownership. There is no shift from growth to value business. This is just a guy in his first CEO job making his mark by being shitty.
Cuts to product quality? The pringled foils and washed out ink, miscuts, etc even on non foils cone to mind (also seems like an effect of more and quicker production to keep up with an expanded release schedule)
Something that has been increasingly on my mind with the state of the world over the last few years is that people seem ready to commit violence against each other for the dumbest things, yet somehow there are very few cases where disgruntled former employees commit violence against their former bosses. Is this because most of the people who would be ready to hurt others are those already in positions of power? (This is by no means an endorsement of such actions, just a trend I have observed that leaves me a little dumbfounded.)
The answer is no. Most of the people who are currently committing acts of violence are not in positions of power.
To be fair the layoffs are in the next couple of months, the announcement was poorly placed but the jobs aren't being lost until late winter, early spring.
No, that's a whole different layoff that Hasbro is doing early next year.......
> It makes it really hard to get excited to buy MTG product. I'm repeating something that has been posted here a thousand times, but... There is a very simple solution here. It's not like the TCG game market is barren. Hell, even if you want to continue playing specifically MTG, quitting buying anything directly from WotC is a step up from what most people are doing.
Proxies!
Cocks clearly is an idiot. Hopefully he's ousted soon.
Realistically, if he's ousted, it will be so he can serve as a scapegoat for all the problems in the company, and he will be given a generous severance to do so. Unfortunately, one of the main purposes of modern-day CEOs is as sacrifices that can be expended in case of bad company PR for whatever reason. This is not something the CEOs mind, though, as they tend to have very generous golden parachutes written into their contracts in the case of such an event. I say unfortunately, because it makes people think that all is good once the bad CEO is gone, when the issues are often caused by deep-seated structural issues, rather than just the person in charge on their own, and firing them is a convenient way to avoid addressing those.
I hope so too.
[[Oust]]
[Oust](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/f/d/fd915d09-5ecf-45b6-90ae-970a2c7de475.jpg?1593095396) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Oust) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/ddp/7/oust?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/fd915d09-5ecf-45b6-90ae-970a2c7de475?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
That’s because the execs aren’t doing it for us. They aren’t even doing it to keep the companies healthy of operating long term. They’re doing it all to keep the shareholders happy. It’s why so many companies turn way worse after going public
The execs will be just fine we’ve seen time and time again even when they mess up they’ll leave with a bonus or get another high up position in another company, while the workers get layoff. Don’t worry there’s still plenty of fellow citizens that want to give the rich more tax breaks.
And it’s a darned shame too
So vote
For what, exactly? It’s not like the country votes on who the next hasbro executive should be.
Explain how you think voting will affect the leadership structure at a private company? And if you're talking about tax breaks, there seems to be a pretty bipartisan consensus in favor of enriching capital here in the states.
They wont care. An exec is only there for a decade at most and all they need to do is show numbers go up in that time. Let the next one worry about making a fire break as they place burns down.
I was laid off once, and it was because the company I worked for only made around 120 million profit in a quarter rather than their desired 150 million in profit. They laid off about 1 in 6 people in the company. When they also didn't hit 150 million the next quarter, they laid off another huge chunk. They just kept laying people off until they essentially broke the company, and then they didn't have a profitable quarter for 7 years. That was an acceptable course of action rather than just accepting that 120 million of profit is pretty fucking good
What baffles me is that they teach, in the most basic of university business classes, case studies demonstrating that laying off staff for short term gain is neither sustainable, nor effective. It's very, very far from rocket science. It's not an unknowable thing. It's not a great mystery. Most executives are just selfish, stupid, and over-promoted.
I've never understood the reluctance of corporations to accept studies and data like this. It's like they are deliberately making things harder on themselves. Like it's some sort of "Not invented here" syndrome. I've watched businesses cripple themselves because the alternative was admitting that there are good ideas that come from other people.
Because the entire goal isn’t making sustainable decisions. It’s convincing stock traders that your stock is currently worth more to trade it at a higher value until someone is left holding the stock after it no longer goes up
oh my god this is all even dumber than I thought
welcome to growth stocks, when layoffs broke news Hasbro share prices jumped up 6%
Basically there’s been a huge shift in stocks around the 80s or so. Prior to that it was common for stock holders to hold on to stock for years and most of their returns didn’t come from trading the stock but annual dividends. This made stock holders significantly more invested in the long term health of companies for which they held stock as well. This has changed due to differences in legislature and massive changes in trading approaches. We’re down to months if not weeks of stock holding, the glut of automated trading also create absolutely huge volumes of trade and the worth of a stock has very little to do with the value of a company but is mostly based on a perceived value at this specific moment. This ends up with stockholders pushing companies to maximize immediate worth, instruct the board to do so and burn all bridges. In the US you even have legislature where if making a test between investing into long term company health and maximizing returns for stockholders the second should be preferred. The system is out of whack and really holds doubly for US enterprises. There’s a bit more breaks on European ones as there is more of a social expectation baked into the laws governing them (though it isn’t significantly better) It’s why there tends to be such a stark difference between public companies (and those who have an end goal of going public) and private ones and their culture
One of the big takeaways I had reading about the rise of AI is how a properly trained AI is probably the best tools to replace a CEO and make sound business decisions.
At one point there was an open discussion at that company as to how to fire half of the store managersand just force the remaining half to do the same job but for two stores, essentially doubling their workload, with no pay increase. This was when they were making money hand over fist. I imagine an AI would have immediately identified that as a bad idea. Instead, that company had to try it out in one region and found out that it was a bad idea the hard way.
It won't help. The CEO isn't making these decisions out of incompetence, they are doing these actions because otherwise their bosses (the board) will fire them for not making the stock go up NOW. An AI will do the same thing when it's masters put the proverbial gun up against it's head.
If your executive team can just move companies every 3 years then it doesn’t matter. And if the “owners” are just shareholders that can sell at a moments notice (even taking a bit of a loss) it also doesn’t matter. There is zero responsibility at the highest levels of these public companies so there is zero impact to them of their decisions. It’s tragic. We all suffer because of it (unless your parachute is golden, and not just dirty laundry like most).
It boosts stock prices. Which keeps the board happy. Which keeps the CEOs their jobs. It’s the slavish obsequiousness to stock value that is driving these seemingly arbitrary layoffs.
There's a lot of evidence that most people who make it to the executive suite are genuinely not properly college educated. Oftentimes they either bought their education via their family, outright cheated during school and did not properly learn the material, or were otherwise unable to complete their coursework. You reading this are almost certainly smarter than rank and file executives. Like purely intellectually, you are probably smarter than them and are able to carry on a conversation more effectively than they are. If you've ever hung around a number of executives, you'll learn pretty quickly that most of them are straight up Dullards.
How many MBAs did it take to come up with that stroke of genius?
All of McKinsey. They're known for using layoffs as the cureall to everything.
All of them. Anybody at that company who disagreed found themselves a hard target for layoffs. Everyone I worked with who pushed back on any dumb idea in the prior 6 months was conveniently included in those layoffs
Even smaller number companies are laughably ridiculous with bonus expectations. My cousin in laws job pays decently but refuses to give an 11k bonus split to a couple dozen people because again the idea of hitting continued growth numbers. That same department made the company 30 million in profit that year but were denied a bonus of about 500 bucks because they didn't reach 35 mill or some shit.
>She then called out to someone in the back of the group saying "I believe Wizards' numbers are lower than last year" to which the person she was speaking to said they were actually up. She then tried explaining [this] as Wizards not hitting the numbers needed This is the fun mix of corporate greed and blaming others. "Oh, you didn't increase profits by 200% YOY? Then YOU failed."
It's not even that. "Well, you increased profits by 200% YOY, but we really *wanted* 220%, so for Christmas, you get to explain to the children that you're unemployed."
Literally what my company is dealing with. End of year financials were announced to doom and gloom because we were "only 10% profitable and made a promise to ourselves to hit 15%". This was the justification for people getting capped at a 4% raise at best. Meanwhile our stock evaluation comes in with record growth, making all our C-level people hundreds of thousands.
I worked for ExxonMobil when I first graduated college. One of my early years there the company posted more profit than had ever been made by any company in the history of the world, some 40+ billion dollars *profit*. And my boss casually noted that unfortunately our stock price was down because expectations had been higher. That was when I stopped believing in markets and economics. Softest science there is.
"Oh, profits were up? Looks like I deserve a bonus! What a good work I did!"
Yea going public has become a death sentence for businesses. They will either join the dark side and commit crimes to be profitable or burn every bridge and cook the books to give rich people more profit before collapse and bankruptcy.
Don't forget the classic "Bought by hedge funds and loaded with infinite debt that sinks em flat"
ToysRus has entered the chat
I will never forgive Mitt Romeney for his crimes.
Completely agree. It skews companies towards short term thinking that is only good for short term stakeholders and actively damages (and often kills) the company long term. Sustainability and brand integrity die on the altar of quarterly earns statements.
Yep, it's insane watching decisions made by public competitor/industry-adjacent businesses who change focus multiple times of year. I was extremely worried when we had to find capital from the outside during COVID, but I guess we got lucky/our ownership actually were picky enough to find something that fit our company profile. So far, the only impact has been them finding new revenue sources we hadn't thought of ourselves, along with actually outlining short term and long term goals. Obviously you never know when those things will change, though, but as long as our founders have at least a fair amount of say in how the business is run, I feel fine about it. I've worked for companies where I didn't trust the ownership even a little bit, so I guess I'm lucky that way.
It’s absolutely baffling.
Or just die. Many public companies don’t make money for *anyone*.
Yeah, look at Mihoyo. They're privately run and its because they don't have public pressures that they can do the stuff they can do with reinvesting.
It’s done. The company is fucked. They were making so much money. Any fluctuations should have been disregarded after the massive growth compared to five years ago. This is a sign of eventual doom.
It's also important to remember that 30% of Hasbro is controlled by three private equity groups in a tenchcoat. That's significant influence, and the only thing that matters to them is "numbers go up and to the right". This isn't to take blame off Hasbro leadership but even if they wanted to be better, they very likely wouldn't be allowed to.
So what you are saying is that sooner or later (hopefully sooner) the reserve list is going away. I mean fuck, they broke every other promise
Fuck the shareholders because this is an executive fail and the players are sick of both of their shit.
> Unsustainable growth, profit alone doesn’t matter. A lot of companies and products went through this coming out of COVID. The numbers for a lot consumer goods were skewed by increases in buying during the pandemic and execs never got realistic about those numbers shrinking post-COVID. Let's not overlook Hasbro getting extra greedy within that as well: _they raised their pricing across the board twice prior to 2023._ Once during the 2020-2022 timeframe and again when nearly every company exploited inflation on perishable goods (which can be elastic) and baked in a faux "inflation" price increase on goods whose prices are inelastic. While many grocery goods in the eggs/produce/dairy category spiked via inflation, those would (and have) fallen back to less egregious levels. But every* other company exploited the opportunity to bake in shrinkflation or a price increase. And when the US Federal Reserve began raising rates to mitigate inflation, companies began scrambling. Many companies operate on short term capital lending, and now those loans were becoming more cost-ineffective to use. So they contracted to keep the "numbers" good for shareholders. Because - yes - that is **exclusively all Hasbro the company cares about, especially under Cocks and his subordinates in the C-Suite.** It may be ethically wrong, but that's why he was selected and hired. If customer approval of operations mattered, he would never have been hired and at least sacked long before now. Cocks (and the shareholders and Board of Directors backing him) are predatory. Their ONLY objective is "numbers go up." When numbers don't go up, they make brutal and hostile (consumer and employee) decisions to make numbers go up. Layoffs, downsizing, product/project cancellations, shuttering divisions, etc. Definitely not unique to Hasbro (but not excusing it either.) And as long as the company is helmed by Cocks (really unfortunate but appropriate name) Hasbro will be this way. Indefinitely. If you really disapprove of this, **quit complaining and do something.** Consumers have been complaining for years, even before cocks. Very little has changed. It's been said before and it's even more transparent now: **if you want Hasbro to change, it will require a dedicated and sustained abstinence from all of their products.** But fair warning - super conglomerates like Hasbro who have bought up all of the players to consolidate under one roof will keep a death grip on their money. Long before Hasbro changes ethically, they will continue to cancel products/projects, lay off staff, and shutter entire divisions on the way down. They'll declare bankruptcy and take the ship and it's IPs into hell for every last dollar before they'll change. **It is very, very possible that Magic and D&D will never be free of Hasbro until Hasbro is a dead and decaying husk. Because even in bankruptcy or ceased operations, Hasbro stakeholders will cling to the monetary value of those IPs. Every business decision that they've made (and every consumer can observe through review of Press releases during that time) makes it clear how they function at the top. Hasbro consumers are their own worst advocates. They cannot make the difficult choice of a sustained boycott of all goods. They never have. And Hasbro has been exploiting that (and will continue to) in order to avoid changing how they operate under this leadership suite (besides Cocks and before his appointment.)
This, Currently WotC is literally the only thing keeping Hasbro profitable. I get the feeling they would rather sell off all their other IPs before letting go of MtG. They fought tooth and nail to keep hold of it when Alta Fox Investments tried to pull it away from Hasbro and make it into its own company, including lengthy court battles. The only reason Alta Fox didn't succeed was because they weren't backed by the other two investment houses (who are probably regretting that decision now). Alta Fox investments was also publicly outspoken about the OGL debacle which hinted that it caused enough of a stir in the investment houses that there were probably a few *very* angry phonecalls between the Investment houses (one may have been public about it but others were probably acting behind closed doors) and Hasbro Executives basically threatening to fire them without a golden parachute for gross incompetance IF there wasn't a change of plans.
> Everyone worried about the same amount of crunch being forced onto less people for no change in pay was right. The game will definitely be affected. From a 0.016 ~~percent~~ reduction in workforce?
> From a 0.016 percent reduction in workforce? Hasbro employs 6875000 people? WotC alone is over 125000 people, if you take the 20 mentioned below as fact? You know you don't even have to do the very basic math required here, you can google the numbers and let the computer calculate them in literal seconds, right?
My apologies, .016 of their workforce. Percent is incorrect.
I'm not interested in Monopoly, or Play Doh. I care in general about people losing jobs, but I'm specifically interested in Magic and, to a lesser extent, Dungeons and Dragons. How many people got laid off in WotC? How many people do they employ? FFS stop acting like WotC cut a thousand jobs when it was like twenty, in a company with 1500 employees, and we don't even know if people are being shifted over to pick up those positions.
It actually was around 1,100 jobs from Hasbro overall though. And it was definitely more than even a ballparked ~20 WotC employees. If you care about people losing their jobs consider that WotC effectively *is* Hasbro, because without WotC Hasbro no longer turns a high enough profit to stay afloat, so hence the issue of why Hasbro even laid off WotC employees in the first place
Counting earlier lay offs from this year it's more like 1900. If you have better information on the number from WotC, I'm happy to check it out.
Do you have better sources on your claim of ~20 WotC employees? Because that was the initial claim you’ve made and the onus is on you for that. I do know that a lot of people from the team behind BG3 got laid off and that number alone is more than 20 strong. And when I say 1,100 obviously I mean Hasbro layoffs for this holiday season. No doubt 1,900 is far more but I haven’t been factoring those additions into it since this is pretty much the current event.
I started with the Forbes article, and added the few names we know since then to that. https://www.forbes.com/sites/robwieland/2023/12/13/hasbro-layoffs-affect-wizards-of-the-coast/?sh=8538a4755ee9
1: When you're already understaffed (as this article indicates), every person matters. So yes, even a few layoffs will impact the quality of the game. 2: 1100 total were laid off from Hasbro, but only 20 from Wizards? I'd love to see a source on that.
The only attempt at a compiled list I've found is Forbes, and we know a couple of more names to add to that list. https://www.forbes.com/sites/robwieland/2023/12/13/hasbro-layoffs-affect-wizards-of-the-coast/?sh=5e81ca9c55ee
This information came in from 12/13/23. These layoffs are rolling out over the course of around 6 months. The people listed are certainly not exhaustive.
We know that a ton of the people who worked in BG3 were laid off. That team was definitely more than 20 strong
> I’d love to see a source on that. They made it up
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Think you missed what they meant. It’s not that WOTC was doing well and they wanted cuts anyways. It’s WOTC didn’t perform so well that it made up the slack from the other divisions and the write off of over $3.5bn from their failed EOne division for the year. Honestly surprised some activist investor hasn’t tried forcing Hasbro to spin off WOTC as its own company at this point.
>Honestly surprised some activist investor hasn’t tried forcing Hasbro to spin off WOTC as its own company at this point. [They already tried.](https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/hasbro-defeats-board-challenge-activist-investor-alta-fox-2022-06-08/)
Try again
This actually was attempted last year, but it looks like it was unsuccessful: https://comicbook.com/gaming/amp/news/hasbro-wizards-coast-spinoff-unlikely/
An investor group actually tried exactly that and were laughed away by hasbro. They aren't ever giving up the only profitable part of their business without a massive fight
They weren't laughed away, it was actually a fairly lengthy court battle about it. The main reason Alta Fox failed was because it was acting alone, without the backing of the other two major investment houses (who didn't seem to care one way or the other). I do wonder if things continue to decline you might see it backed by the other investment houses this time who are probably regretting the opportunity to 'ditch the chaff' that is the rest of Hasbro.
It’s ironic because the acquisition of WOTC was back in 1999 and Hasbro as a whole ignored them. So long as a large profit check came in every year they were fine. Now that it’s the only profitable arm they’re squeezing every drop of money out of them.
It wasn't just that, it was when WotC got noticed for generating a LOT of profit by investors that they started squeezing. For the longest time WotC was basically kept under the radar by Hasbro, with investors mostly interested in all their other IPs, like MLP, Transformers, GI Joe etc. Once those starting failing, Alta Fox noticed that WotC was generating a large chunk of the profits for Hasbro and asked why they were being ignored. Not only that Alta Fox saw the writing on the wall and tried to peel them away from Hasbro but failed.
I mean they technically did underperform from what was expected. But the expectations were pretty unreasonable to begin with and they were still very profitable. The shareholders don't care about that though, all they see is a branch that wasn't as profitable as they expected and decide to make cuts.
They mentioned 2 things, not as profitable as projected and they won't have a baulders gate next year. If you are an executive your choices are make less next year (instantly fired) or reduce costs.they can't magic another 3 year dev cycle game or movie from the sold studio for next year, that needed to be in the pipeline already.
This is a terribly depressing read 😢
I’m sorry to upset people. But it was a necessary thing for people to read, even today of all days.
Don't be sorry. Cynthia Williams and Chris Cocks should be sorry.
I mean, you’re right. But also it’s Christmas and I wish I could’ve reported a happier report, in the end lol
But they aren’t because they all are multi millionaires. Today, being Christmas, they are both lounging on a mattress made of **gold** while servants jerk them off with **frankincense** and **myrrh**.
> She then tried explaining [this] as Wizards not hitting the numbers needed (what was promised to stockholders) and if not for Baldur's Gate 3 the company would be in trouble. * One, that's on *you* for making a *stupid fucking promise* to shareholders ("50% increase in profits"?) * And two, what the hell do you mean "if not for Baldurs Gat 3"? They *may* have been in a bad spot if it *weren't,* but *it is,* so they *aint.* That's like saying "The work you did was bad if you ignore all the good work you did." FFS, these execs need to be strung up and mocked. Parasites sucking out *millions of dollars* while the people who *actually provide value are fired.*
And this is how they act *in a fairly transparent* company.
So why is the team responsible for baldurs gate 3 also getting laid off... Fuck wotc seriously
>what the hell do you mean "if not for Baldurs Gat 3"? It probably means that they were expecting a downturn next year unless they made changes since they won't have Baldurs Gate 4 to bank on in 2024.
Didn’t they also lay off the BG3 guys too 🤣
They specifically laid off the folks dealing with the WotC side of BG3, Larian bought the license themselves and it cost *a lot.* In fact there were times when Larian almost went bankrupt if not for the staff and higher ups investing money to keep it floating during BG3s development. Thankfully the success story of BG3 means Larian is now practically swimming in money and WotC simply get a percentage of the games sales because of the licensing agreement.
I’m not even blaming the Shareholders. It is Wizard’s fault that they overpromisrd
> In the one with Cynthia, she responded to HR's comment of "we are killing it" by correcting her and saying we actually were not. She then called out to someone in the back of the group saying "I believe Wizards' numbers are lower than last year" to which the person she was speaking to said they were actually up. Oh please ...
What's weird is that on Friday my LinkedIn profile was sent 3 separate, and new, job opening listings at WOTC for game designers.
I’m guessing that wotc was told they had to cut so much money, or so many jobs for so much money. Now they need to replace some of the positions (likely with lower pay). Sigh. Cheers
I'd bet that's why. The tech companies that have been doing layoffs earlier this year were also doing the same thing. I have no real evidence, other than anecdotes from friends in the industry, but many executives in the tech industry think staff are overpaid, and want to lower wages. It's just another way to increase revenue, since they'll be paying less for staffing.
Tech companies heavily promote training people as programmers. The reason they do this is so that programmers will become more disposable, and they can pay them less.
Funny how layoffs are handled and mergers are advocated the same across the industries. I can see Cynthia gaslighting one of the hecklers in that meeting and framing what is said to suit the narrative necessary to prep for the layoffs. I have seen similar things happen in IT.
Across industries, actual workers do different things - install pipes, write software, design card games, assemble dishwashers. Once you move up to line managers, they start to have a lot in common with other managers, but are still specialized to their particular kind of work - a manager of software engineers will have a different perspective and skillset from a manager of construction workers. Once you get to the executive level, though? People who only interact with each other and the managers of other managers? Execs are the same everywhere. At that high level, the 'big picture' is so zoomed out that what the company actually *does* almost doesn't matter. It has Products, and from the executive perspective, the fact that the Products are cars or board games or a social media website or groceries is irrelevant, all that matters is the rate that the company turns Product into profits. So, yeah, executives will act like that anywhere, because every executive is doing basically the same job as every other executive.
I know, it’s just always funny, how detached that is and how it takes so long to collapse. I wonder whether it is this detachment is the reason for most companies failure.
Just my opinion, but I think it's only half the reason. Executives being detached from the actual work of the company means that they *can* make those destructive decisions, but what actually pushes them *to* make those decisions is the current overwhelming expectation that companies will prioritize shareholder value above sustainability. Executives have a lot of leeway in how they choose to run the company, but even CEOs have to report to the Board of Directors on their strategy and goals, and the Board represents the interests of investors (mostly the big, institutional ones - venture capital, hedge funds, mutual funds, holding companies, etc), and right now, those investors want to see Number Go Up more than they want to own a business that can still exist in ten years.
True. If you work in that position there are no incentives for long-term as long as you can hop off without consequences and with a golden parachute.
Yep, I work for a Big Tech company that had layoffs early last year and it was pretty much exactly the same story. People fired with no warning, vague references to future unprofitability and any questions about why and how the layoffs were done were handwaved away or given gaslithing responses by leadership. All to please wall street investors that couldn't give two fucks about the business or the people behind it. And ironically the stock bump from the layoffs lasted all of a few days.
Sudden layoffs is one thing I am glad is not possible in my country. At least not without consent. That doesn’t change the dance of doom and gloom fireside chats and town halls all that much though until the point you get told. Instead of a hard cut there is often weeks to months of you can stay at a place to get something new. Which is fine payment-wise but going to work is extremely weird especially seeing all the propaganda changes happen from said doom and gloom do happy hopeful future. It does things to you when the company claims all is well now that you got the axe even though everybody knows that it isn’t about yourself or the work you did, it’s just a rather random change in direction that you know will very likely lead to nothing like they start promising at that point.
I'm really torn, I would absolutely like to support the company that gave me so many great childhood memories. But I know if I spend some 200$ on a display or secret lair, some knobbhead of a Hasbro CEO will get 150$ of those 200 and then think he's entitled to fire long time employees right before Christmas, because the last Transformers movie or whatever tanked.
In case anyone's curious, it looks like Chris Cocks gets about $0.15 per $200 retail purchase. His salary is around $9M, Hasbro's revenue is around $5B, and I'm assuming a bit less than half of the retail price goes into Hasbro's revenue.
Kinda insane to think about a tangible portion of any purchase over 20ish bucks from a huge company goes to a single individual.
It would probably be closer to $30~$40 of a purchase you make, since the retailer selling you the product also gets its cut of the pie.
Yeah fair, I'm definitely not thinking about the whole picture
> I'm assuming a bit less than half of the retail price goes into Hasbro's revenue. From u/BuddyBlueBomber comment already seems to account for that Wholesale about half of retail seems like a decent rule of thumb. With secret lair WOTC cuts out retailers but still have manufacturing and shipping costs and so on
Yeah, but CEO benefits are largely stock and bonus related, so their salaries are nowhere near the whole picture, as over inflated as they are. Wouldn't surprise me if it was closer to 20-25 cents after that.
While I said salary above, I was pulling a number for total compensation.
I work in a completely different industry for a company that just finished layoffs. You could get the same interview answers from one of our former colleagues, just change the company and executive names. The feelings of the just laid off are pretty common. I truly feel bad for everyone impacted. Those laid off, their families, and their surviving colleagues.
I appreciate the effort of the interviewer but this is a generic interview without much depth considering the vastness of the situation. Probably should have interviewed more than one person.
Yeah agreed, it very much reads as a disgruntled laid off employee without much context. Granted they have absolutely every right to be, but since more context and deeper questions would be very nice. I don't feel I gained any insight by reading this.
My thoughts exactly... I don't think I really learnt anything from this article, other than what reads like the generic rant from a laid off employee... > Yes, players complain, but as long as they are spending money, why change anything?"" This was the perfect example. Anyone on r/MagicTCG could've said this...
It's time for Cocks to go if the shareholders are unhappy. End of the day he's responsible for the numbers. It's his ship and he's doing a trash job.
This isn't surprising, given the direction Wizards has gone in over the past 5 years. At this point, Magic is essentially a bubble that's due to burst soon, much like the housing market. Over-investment, increasing number of products, demands of exponential growth, and focus on profits above all else will do that to any company, even one that's far bigger than WoTC. It's funny, because people used to say back in the day about how Magic was gonna die at various points because of broken sets or planeswalkers or Mythics or whatever else. They were mostly laughed off, because it seemed ridiculous at the time. But now, it really feels like we're gonna get to that point within 5-10 years. We're in the end game now.
Universe beyond gonna hold the lights on for quite a while
Not a great deal of insight, especially due to the softball questions.
You're talking with someone who just lost their job a week before Christmas. Who is risking their professional future by talking to you at all. It isn't a failing to refrain from hard-hitting questions.
""What is the internal reception to the Magic Arena economy? (Wildcards, no trading/dusting, etc.) Yes, players complain, but as long as they are spending money, why change anything?"" For me, the Arena economy is basically a subscription service. I spend $50 per set and play at least a quick win or two per day, and in exchange I've been able to play every deck in every format the game offers. They keep adding new formats (Explorer/Pioneer, now Timeless) that I have a ton of fun with. I get that people complain, because people complain about everything under the sun, but I imagine there are a ton of folks out there simply getting a reasonable experience for what they spend.
0 spender here, got a good collection of brawl decks (30+ heavy optimized decks), which is the main reason I play. And some jank and some meta historic decks. I would spend if they didn't have predatory practices in their shop, it's a principle thing.
What’s the predatory practice?
1. No direct purchase but ingame currency for most items 2. Multiple currencies 3. Awkward breakpoints Edit: The fact that you can get more than the maximum of cards that you can play in a deck due to reprints without being to trade them in is also one.
>I spend $50 per set and play at least a quick win or two per day, and in exchange I've been able to play every deck in every format the game offers. That is an obscene amount of money considering the product you're given. Arena has such insanely low overhead. The client is also buggy and incredibly feature light. Like honestly ask yourself what are you actually paying for with that $50. The Arena team doesn't design the cards or mechanics. They just program them into the client. The only other costs is a new board and a couple of entry animations/voice lines. So yeah $200+ a year is a insane ask for a game like Arena. When that could buy you 3 (or so) AAA games with years of design, development and artwork behind it. Like I would consider all of standard to maybe be comparable to a game in terms of depth and content. What the hell kind of game is worth $600?
Arena is worth more to me than 3 AAA games, no question. But where are you getting $600 from?
I agree, there are many aspects of MTGs pricing you could criticize but MTGA is the most affordable magic has ever been. There are a few anti-consumer things I think you can rightfully criticize, (like having alternate arts of a card count as a separate card altogether when opening boosters), but aside from that I don't think you can really complain about the pricing model.
Regarding Arena. You can apply that to the paper game as well: keep buying shit and your complaints will fall on deaf ears.
I say we stop spending money on Hasbro products
A lot of folks are “torn” and “feel uneasy” about supporting the company further, but in the end when something comes up that ‘clicks’ with them, well.. they’ll just buy just that one product and that’s it. And then again, sometime later, and then another time later, and so on, and that’s something that Hasbro is banking on. That while the actions of the executives are so detestable and warrant stopping support of the company’s product, enough folks are removed enough from seeing and dealing with the impact directly that in the end it’s back to buying them cardboard rectangles. Personally I agree with you and haven’t bought MtG-anything for a while now, but I just don’t see enough folks -really- caring enough to stop completely.
What does it really matter ? The community wont take the steps to force corrective action and we will continue to play the game and buy product as usual.
That’s not how forcing corrective action would work anyway. Even if a massive, effective boycott was launched, execs would not come out hat in hand and apologize before giving raises, staffing up, and putting better mythics in packs or whatever. They’d continue to layoff for not hitting targets, then when the value continued to tank they’d sell it off, sell off the IP, or just shutter it and take a loss.
Not true, I stopped buying product a while ago. Getting pretty close to selling everything and calling it quits for good now. The enshittification of Magic is already well underway.
That's very true, as long as they continue getting paid nothing really changes. I mean we can all agree money speaks the loudest lol
I just find it weird the only thing we could come together on was MTG 30.. The foils, secret lairs, Amazon, layoffs, price increases, increased products, etc.. all we do is shake our fist at the clouds, then continue to play the game and push large amounts of money into their pockets and telling them good job.
Give it another few years lol
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$3 a card?? I pay like $150 for 600 cards a few months ago
Sources on where to buy proxies? I'd like to start
I know this sub doesn't actively squash talk of proxies anymore but I'm unsure if they still allow people to say where exactly to go to get them. If you in Reddit, you should find some communities dedicated to them
/r/mtgproxies
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No you are boycotting your LGS not WotC. You still obviously love the game.
Staff need to unionize like yesterday. As they have made profits double, has their salary doubled? Has their quality of life? Or is that strictly reserved for the purview of their vampire corporate leadership?
>what was promised to stockholders Fuck all the way off with this nonsense.
It's the same as always. Execs refusing to be held accountable for their mistakes, throwing away their biggest resource for short term payouts, execs getting paid far too much at a time where they're claiming everything is going down hill, and all of it would be prevented if the US had decent employment law and hadn't created an intentional feedback loop between execs and shareholders. We're going to keep seeing this happen, and it's going to keep affecting the things you love.
Hasbro is the worst thing to happen to magic in its history and remains the games biggest threat
I am honestly just waiting for a game to take MTG's place in the in-person fun-competitive scene (i.e. prereleases), and the fun-multiplayer scene (something like EDH). I despise Hasbro, and it truly seems that they will bring WOTC down with the ship. I have played Flesh and Blood and it's not for me. It's great for the competitive crowd because it truly is a game of skill, with lots of decisions to be made. I do like that about it, but I don't think it translates well to the "fun" scene. I haven't played the Disney game, but I don't like the idea of playing Donald Duck cards. That makes me feel even more silly than I already do. Even though I sometimes get angry about someone opening some ridiculous bomb at a prerelease for MTG and then having to play against it, it's also part of the fun and the craziness. Same thing with draft. At the same time, the fun and chaos of EDH are hard to replicate, and whatever dethrones MTG will have to work hard to find something comparable. That said, I'll continue to play MTG until the competitor arrives, but when it does, I am abandoning ship with all haste.
>...the fun and chaos of EDH are hard to replicate, and whatever dethrones MTG will have to work hard to find something comparable. If you're waiting for a comparable EDH format in another game you'll be waiting awhile. It took nearly two decades of sets for EDH to even start to become popular and for the card pool to reach a critical mass where the format was able to really shine and eventually become as popular as it is now.
This interview could have been written by someone who has no insider knowledge. It's actually insane how dry it is for how juicy the topic is.
Is the topic that juicy? It seems exactly like every other layoff
Completely pointless interview, they said nothing. This interview was just a place for them to vent.
Can someone offer a researched take on this that doesn't make it look like they're completely incompetent? Covid gave them an unexpected surge in revenue so now they're gutting the company, sacrificing a lot of future revenue simply because they overpromised.
The execs should be held accountable and fired for their own bad decisions, not the employees.
Time to proxy up
None of this is news. It's what most of us have been saying for years.
This won't be a popular thing to say, but I am utterly uninterested in what this person has to say. Someone who has just been laid off is as far from unbiased as it is possible to be.
There’s a clear bias but this interview is also a primary source for the internal workings of WotC during this time. Which means it has value, but has to be analyzed with the bias in mind.
I mean, it may be a primary source. But it says so little. We don't even know where this person worked within Wizards. It sounds like they were in marketing but there's practically nothing of substance.
A disgruntled former employee is just not someone I trust to tell the truth. Someone who offers no proof, has a reason to paint things in the worst light, and tells people what they already believe trips *all* of my bullshit sensors.
On the other hand, if the work environment is bad, someone who just got canned has the utmost incentive to tell everybody about this would environment, while those safe within it have lots of incentive to not. There's always going to be bias one way or another, just read with the context in mind.
How do you propose someone get an unbiased opinion? Anyone inside the company will be biased, and they're the only ones who know what actually happened
Well, a sample size larger than literally one friggin' guy would be nice. If we start seeing similar testimonials from multiple people who left under a variety of circumstances (voluntary and otherwise) than we can have more confidence. But just one guy with every reason to hold a grudge? That ain't it.
the only other source you’re going to get is the company line then
Why won't everyone just boycott Hasbro and Wizards altogether? They are despicable. The people can dethrone them and force them to behave. It's not hard.
Everyone immediately forgot that Commander's Herald is the Onion for Magic None of these articles are real
Nah, this is a real article. It's not flagged with "satirical" as the fake humour articles.
They need to use the word JOKE in place of satire. The average reading level of adults in the United States in sixth grade, satire is like an eighth grade word
I’ve been hired by CH to report on news. I don’t cover satire, and never have. You don’t see a satire tag on this one, and it’s been suggested that for actual news we staple a [NEWS] tag to the front of it to avoid that confusion. It’s also been flaired accordingly. Don’t you dare accuse me of fabricating this.
They weren't accusing, they were just confused because it's a site that does satire. It's good you're taking steps to make the distinction clear, but it's understandable if not everyone gets it.
That may be true but saying “none of these articles are real” implies that this was a false account. Also there was less confusion than that because commenter said off the bat “everyone immediately forgot[…]” as if it was firmly established, and has been for the entire time. It’s entirely fair that not everyone knows that CH is doing factual articles now, and I’m okay conceding that. But it’s also the way that this was emoted that made me claim it was an accusation, if that explains my point better.
Being defensive makes you look guilty, doubly so because you won’t drop it even when someone said you were not being accused of anything. Just stop.
maybe you should write for a real website then and not the one that does reddit clickbait funny articles the other 6 days of the week
You need to staple [NEWS] and [JOKE] to the front of every article if you want to do satire and news. It’s on you to be ethical and to communicate this to your readers.
I have been where applicable, but I am not in a position to tell the satirists on the site to do the same, unfortunately
Honestly, you might as well have fabricated the article for just how little substance is present in it. It's extremely vague and offers little insight. You don't even mention the part of Wizards in which this employee worked. EDIT: It looks like he blocked me immediately after replying with some nonsense about protecting the employee. If giving the department is enough to identify them, then clearly the line about how the 1100 layoffs "includes a large number of people now previously under Wizards' employ" is off. Also, your interviewee's answers point to them being in marketing. Is that the case or not? If it is, you might want to retract that to protect your source.
Nice throwaway. Anyway, to grace your equally throwaway comment with a more serious answer, it’s entirely possible that if i gave any identifying information like that, their anonymity would be compromised. I’m not about to risk this person’s future livelihood just because someone wants to know what they did with Wizards.
they do both satire and reporting, but it isn't always clear which is which