The WOTC Pricing Scandal Just Got Worse
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If your competition is Konami and Konami is the good guy, you are doing something wrong.
_Something_ wrong? Not, like, _EVERYTHING_ ?
@@Xenobears Well most of the game designers are really cool guys & gals in contrast of management, maybe just create an equity funded by fans to buy Hasbro and gives the management the boot. If anyone has a better idea I'm all ears.
@@LowinBayrodThe thing is you don't even have to buy Hasbro. You just need to buy WotC and clean house.
Though at this point the name has been dragged through the mud. So it's likely that a rebranding should be part of the house cleaning.
Konami just doubled the price to participate in a YCS (their official tournament) without changing anything. Somehow still not as bad as wizards and their product gouging.
Konami is not the good guy. At least the ones handling the North American product. WotC is no better.
Run, don't walk, away from wotc/Hasbro. Like you already should have
Come to Quark's. Quark's is fun. Come right now. Don't walk, run!
I've already loved indie RPGs before. XD I feel even better about backing away from D&D already.
Shadowdark is pretty good... Going on 14 sessions currently
Yessss join the pathfinders friend. Explore Golarion with me...and for the love of God don't complain about the fighters proficiency. They need some win man
@@cedrickulacz8468 yeah, I want to play hard SF, but try out pbta. Scum and villainy was too science fantasy, like Star Wars...
Went back to g'space for campaign design and solo, but should probably go to 2300
Imagine thinking you need to spend ever increasing amounts of money on a game that takes place in the imagination of its players and only supercedes the old edition because....reasons.
woosh.
💯👍
AD&D 2e death came with the Players Hand (Splat) Books, Wizards, Thieves, Elves etc. Kits are the prelude to Sub-Class. With 2e and 5e, early on the books look like options. But after sometime, it just becomes confusing. Both cases, players try to break the game and have OP level 1 characters.
Adding books boosts sales while killing the game. This is the life cycle of D&D and other TTRPG's. 6-One will do the same. Unify mechanics for a year or two. The as the new books come out, the cycle will repeat. Will likely be made worse with Mirco-Sales/Transactions.
@@TheNanoNinja Good point. If WotC are able to make their VTT get widely adopted then they're going to pump out so many micro transactions it'll make the d20 supplement glut look like an appetizer.
Also with regard to your points about 2e and 5e, the same thing is true of 3rd edition and Pathfinder. But at least every rule in Pathfinder is free online, so you can look up a class or monster or item etc. without buying the books unless you want to. Speaking of wanting to, you can implement that "core+1 book" or "core+2 books" rules or just a curated list of supplements if you want to force a semblance of balance on 3.x/Pathfinder. But your players probably won't like it if you do, as the character building meta-game is a major attraction for a lot of players. Not surprising given that Magic the Gathering was an influence on 3e's design philosophy.
@@TheNanoNinjayay Loot Crates but now I can touch it. Ooooooo New Book Smell. CoD has stuck again boys!
Meanwhile, Paizo has their rules published online and freely available.
It's almost like Paizo wants you to have fun, and WotC wants your money.
To be fair. Paizo does still charge people for their beautifully rendered, deeply written and incredibly fun adventure modules.
So making the rules available online is really more like underpricing your laser printers so you can sell toner cartridges.
LMAO. Paizo's new ORC License turned out to be way worse than the OGL changes. So one evil for another evil.
@@SmolAnarchy How did it turn out to be worse? I haven't kept up on the ORC stuff lately
@@xalxikaI want to know that too.
@@SmolAnarchy really!
It is wild to think that Konami has been doing a better job with pricing their products. We Yugioh players would bash Konami all the time for their money grubbing methods, even earning them the nickname "Komoney". But Wizards has just blown Konami out of the water when it comes to sheer greed. I thought it was impossible, but they did it
that's because we've always hated konami.
Wizards of the Coast make Konami looks like a Charity. 😂
That's just because Konami is newer at this and knows they need people to buy video games too.
@@michaellane5381 "newer"
Unless you're century old, there's no way Konami is in any way "new"
@@bryanmerel is Konami 100 years old in the gaming space? I didn't that was even a thing in Japan until post WW2.
The rare cards in booster packs are random and therefore rare. The "rare" cards in a box where you get the same exact card each time are not rare, they're controlled. Their value is fixed and the "secondary market" will price them lower accordingly.
Sold my Magic cards 20 years ago, playing Pathfinder. Not regretting either.
This is just like 1993 and the comics bubble. I worked back then in a comics shop. We saw it in real time. There was a speculator boom. First there were the enthusiasts, who liked the books and bought multiples and grew the audience and the business These were the fans, the collectors, the geeks you could talk characters and stories with for hours. They were "one of us". Then came the pure speculators who didn't see art or characters or narrative, they saw investments that will only gain in value and they could end up making a killing. Then the companies started catering to the speculators with floods of products, variant covers, gimmicks, etc. Not long after, the values of the flood of production plummeted, the speculators finally saw "no future" in comics, no massive return on investment, and other things plummeted - interest, investment, the culture of comics and comics stores in general. Somewhere in this paragraph, imagine a big blue arrow pointing at a random place exclaiming "YOU ARE HERE".
My arrow pointed at the word "arrow"
I agree. I've seen WotC going through this pattern for years, and dreaded what happens to the games after the market collapses.
Absolutely! It's rather disgusting how hobbies are ruined by people who are only in it for profits. Predatory. It is why we can't have nice things.
Man you and I saw the comic industry differently. I collected from the 70's to the 2k, and noticed something. In the later 80s comics for the most part were not for younger children at all. Sure some parents didn't care but man oh man the average content was tracking far more mature. I asked back then what this could do to the new kids that need to get in to this market to keep it alive in the future, but nobody cared because comics like the X-men were selling 750k+ a month. I said to an editor at a HUGE comic company back then that they are killing their future much like the WWF(E) was doing, in that no new fans would be replacing older ones. The WWF(E) did pivot and got back to their core business though. Then the real downfall started.... the radical SJW influence in the space. It started slowly much like an small infection, but grew over time. The comic writers wanted to push "new an diverse" characters and showed their hate of straight white males. First it was subtle but showing any Christian as an idiot and any minor straight white male character an evil guy but others as good people. They would introduce a new character that was part of the alphabet community, and it wouldn't sell though. Nobody cared if they did this though and sales stayed okay but started to fade a bit because comics at that time were basically made up of younger straight white males by a large percentage. Once the writers realized that nobody was going to buy their new characters, they started to do alternate universe characters that are already established but now they were gay and or race swapped. They hid behind the "it isn't the main universe" though. The thought was that this would expand their current base to new people and it might have but it did this at the expense of their current comic book base. Very quickly they just started to do it with the main characters that people use to love and that was the final nail in the coffin. Soon 750k a month was laughable as comics struggled to sell 200k. Even issue 1s. Now though the writers had gone total SJW and started attacking, what use to be their core fans for not supporting characters they hated, and it got even more deep in the rabbit hole. They wanted to push fat, ugly alphabet people as hero's and of course put any straight white person or Christian in a bad light in their comics. So yes they did in fact expand their brand to new audiences but those people don't really buy comics and make up less than 3% of the population. Now we see hot comics selling around 50k a month. This even with movies that had those characters in them. All this while Manga sells are super strong and now independent writers are actually outselling the big boys. I just had a discussion with one of the supporters of this at a convention break out session and he got angry. I don't want to name names but this dude has been around for a long time and I just pointed out the facts and his defense was that comics are just dying, until I brought up Manga, then he tried to say that Manga was just porn for straight guys.... I had to laugh because obviously he is wrong. The moral is that, in my opinion what killed comics was not the speculators at all but the radical SJWs that want to push and agenda more than tell a good story. I know for a fact that quite a few of the writers now HATE the original characters. Think about that. They hate the product they are trying to sell. It has become their religion and comics died because of it.
@@SteveMichael That's a really long post to say that your biases aren't letting you remember the 90s objectively.
Steve Jackson Games reprinted the original 'game in a bag' version of OGRE, the game that launched Steve Jackson's career back in the late 70's, and priced it at $10; which was the original price adjusted for inflation. Which is how you maintain goodwill.
Steve Jackson games always hit !
This is what happens when you allow FOMO to fester. Everyone that I ever knew that played Magic has left it behind. They knew they were getting screwed. Anyone still playing D&D needs to stop giving WotC any money. That's the thing with role-playing. It doesn't require a constant investment. You could play with the original set to this day and never miss anything. All you need is a group and an imagination. WotC is terrified of that, which is why they're trying to make it a lifestyle brand. You pay them forever.
Screw that.
I’ve been a paid DM now for three months, my sessions are booked solid and I’m making money off of WOTC published works. It’s the only way to play D&D 😂
I’m happy with my existing 5e books, need no more, certainly not supplements of more classes to buy
All you need is the core books and be done
Haven't bought a D&D book since just before the OGL fiasco. Paizo gets my cash now.
@@Sturmjaeger lol
My wife surprised. Me with the core books and Tasha because I expressed an Interest and then I bought Ravinca because I had MTG players and thought it would be interesting
I have since back converted all to BRP and Hero system
There is a reason I stopped purchasing 40k, Warhammer Fatnasy and D&D...I want to be able to afford my retirement! The lack of situational awareness that Games Workshop and WotC are displaying is positively astonishing. In the middle of a world wide inflation period where people are starting to cancel their entertainment memberships to Netflix, Disney+, HBO, Showtime, etc. we have two game companies increasing prices at rate that even the 1% are raising an eyebrow at! Every indie game company should send a Thank You/Condolence card to GW and WotC for driving a stake through the heart of their respective games and divesting themselves of their unwanted unwashed masses (eh...I mean consumers).
Ran/payed in a home brew 2e campaign and world (Multiple DMs) with my much loved but ancient PH, DMG, and MM until about 3 years ago. A friend finally convinced me to make the jump to 5e for his campaign. Decided I liked it, and grabbed the new PH, DMG, and MM. WoTC got $75 from me. That will be it, don't much care what they do moving forward. The 5e integration into our home brew world is essentially complete and any tweaks to those rules have and will come from us.
WoTC has nothing to do with our worlds, and the ONE thing I wanted from them I already have. The D&D I play remains intact, no heart piercing going on over here.
I keep trying to like 5th just can't I run it, but really refuse to buy more than the core books
I run D100 mostly and have since late 80s, but do run dnd for new players
But 5th is the couch has jumped the shark,
@@TheMemo659, after the neglect that wotc has been doing to my country, never translating the new books (not every player is fluent enough to understand English) and/or years of delayed products, I set sails to better seas. If I want something from 5e, I can wait for the d&d youtuber to make a review or go to dubious waters with my eyepatch.
I also play MtG, and I don't buy a new product in a very long time, and the difference in power is ridiculous in each new release. Feels like they are trying to force the players in general to buy to keep playing fun. It's ridiculous.
@@stefanjakubowski8222 As a gamer, I want people to play games and have a great time. Having played for as long as I can say without a doubt that it is the people around the table that drive the fun not the rules. If you are having fun with D100 then why change? For those people still playing 5E, well the point is fast approaching where they are going to get to choose between buying a 5E book or making their mortgage payment (hyperbole is in play). If people want to play 5E I am NOT going to tell them otherwise. :)
@@Zarlos01 Can't argue with any of your points! :)
Glad people are finally connecting the dots between the two products, instead of pretending they exist in separate universes. When I quit Magic, I quit D&D. Never looking back.
I'm having a real quandary here. I want to buy baldur's gate 3, and the developers really deserve my money, but then some of my money will go to Hasbro wizards of the Coast. I'm an old magic pro, and I know just exactly how fubar those guys are these days. What a bunch of slimy social justice sleaze balls.Everybody cool left for poker. I think I just solved my problem though: I will pirate the Gog version. Then I'll send Larian in 20 bucks in the mail and tell em to get a pizza at the office. Good talk!
YOUBDONT HAVE TO QUIT D&D JUST MAKE YOUR OWN ADVENTURES AND HOME BREW RULES.
It's best to quit D&D@@ceranko . YOu don't have to, but it's best. That way you'll be tempted to buy someone else's product instead of shitbag Hasbrosofthecoast. Not a fucking PENNY to those scum. For any game. Ever. If you gotta have Robo Rally, pirate it. Mtg? used or proxies only.
@@ceranko Ikr, I don't understand why people are quitting.
Sure, you don't want to give Hasbros more money, but- but you already OWN the books and stuff you need to get started, I assume?
JUST USE THOSE AND DON'T BUY ANYMORE! MAKE STUFF UP! CREATIVITY!
I agree. I can make better things than Hasbro. That company sucks. Also Dungeon Crawl classics, osr, AD&D, old school essentials ect are much better.
This is the same reason why our group stopped buying the last 4 MTG sets. It's just another greedy money grab by Wizards. The D&D and Magic players need to stop buying these expensive products. Not that long ago, Commander decks used to be $25.00 to $30.00. Another big problem with Wizards that they reprint a lot of cards. Thank you for the video.
I haven't given WOtC a penny for years. All of my Magic decks are proxied printed from images skimmed off Gatherer.
@@artor9175 We have printed out proxies and bought some on Etsy as well.
If 5e has taught me anything, its that more content just means more covers with nothing between them.
"Figure it out yourself. Make it up on your own."
Which really was not the case in 4E or 3.x. Every single one of those splat books had awesome stuff inside. WotC grew fat and lazy with 5E. Their books over the last 2 years have been terrible.
I haven't bought since Frostmaiden 🤷♂️
Power creep made Palladium a lot of money, but it ultimately held them back as people started to shy away from the game.
Yeah it leads to short term profit, but it's a long term killer
Rifts was really good for that, fun game but still.
Could you tell me more of tht story? Mot of players in my country started with a blurred fotocopy of Palladium RPG 1st edition.
@@dungeonsanddiscourse That can be said about all drugs.
Still ha e a soft spot for the system
All I can do is implore my D&D and MTG friends to just flat out boycott WOTC. I've already decided I won't give WOTC my money ever again. I'll use the books I have or play other systems. But if enough people stop buying. They will have to either lower the costs or die.
@CrunchBar-zi5jw reason they charge so much is to make a profit. The cardshops I go to are extremely transparent and they had to charge a lot because they payed a lot for them, less then the players obviously but still more than a normal product. There is not a single person that agrees with the pricing if the products but just because the MSRP has been gone doesn't mean shops wanna charge an exorbitant price for cards with fancy ink, if anything they want MSRP back so that way the price can be regulated, people know what they're buying, and the blame can go back to WotC like it truly deserves to be
I stopped buying and started proxying. There is no competitive scene anymore so why play with real cards? it doesn't make sense
Agreed, stopped buying magic over a year ago and switched from DnD to Pathfinder 2e
Or, we could just all use the books we already own, ignore any new versions and Hasbro/Wotc can learn a new lesson in supply/demand.
Little secret. You don't need any books to play dnd. A lot of info is online, and the rest you could simply home brew. I have been running a game for a year now without any books with players that don't have any books.
@@UnofficialTranslator same. Anyflip is a blessing for poor DMs
@@riccardozanoni2531 anyflip?
That was the reason why the Commander format was invented in MTG, to encourage people to use their old cards and cards that were ignored. It was a fan creation. But it's hard to do that when MTG releases products catered to that format primarily and all the rich kids got the good cards, forcing everyone to also play catchup. Now, the most accessible format is what WOTC is trying to squeeze money from.
@@UnofficialTranslator I prefer having the physical books since it's a lot easier for me to flip through them. I also have a no electronics policy at my table, so a physical copy lets me look stuff up if I'm ever unsure about something.
I know what you mean though, all the information can be found fairly easily online. You could even print the books out yourself if you really wanted to, albeit a little effort.
Given how WotC have stated that D&D is "undermonetized", and how they have been developing their own VTT, and how they have been encouraging people to use theirs where they can set price gates instead of, say, roll20, it would not come as a shock to me if they said they are re-releasing the White Box again at the price of one human kidney.
When she started talking about MTG prices doubling, I thought “What? To $20 for a pre-constructed deck?” I guess that shows you how long it’s been since I played Magic and, at this point, it seems like my wallet’s better for it.
The whole OGL scandal is the reason I really stopped buying D&D products at the start of the year. Before that, I bought every book TWICE (Limited Edition cover for display, normal cover for use- I don't even run the premade campaigns. Yes it was a problem). I haven't bought anything since. I actually backed Kobold Press' Tales of the Valiant RPG at the last minute and have been looking at their Playtest and Alpha rules. It's 5e, just a bit better, and run by a company I trust to put out quality products without a corporate overlord. Would love to see more coverage for it as I think it's great for people who liked 5e rules and don't want to change too much.
Beyond that, I played Magic as a kid and some friends are getting back into it. We mostly play on TableTop Simulator so every card is free there! Some people are buying (reasonably priced) precons, others are putting in orders for proxies so we can play in person without selling our souls.
Reminder that most games are dramatically easier to learn and play than DnD, plus way cheaper (many even consenting to free or pay what you want).
DnD was so clunky but popular that it convinced people that learning games would always take a lot of effort.
But then you find out that there are "Core" rules, and rules that nobody bothers with anyway.
"Survival" games, where people actually care about rations and waterskins.. camping gear.. travel costs... coin weight.. encumberment...
A few juicy details and other scandals you missed:
- Magic 30th - the cards printed were on the Reserved List. Which means those cards are never supposed to printed ever again in any form whatsoever, not even as official fake cards.
- The swarm of new products have been laced deliberately with misinformation to get players to mistake a bad product for a good product, notably two different kinds of "starter sets."
- Special prints have become so commonplace their value is not much better than regular versions. Full art lands used to fetch for several dollars, sometimes more than $10 if they're from an un-set. Now you can get full-art lands for 10 cents. When everything is special, nothing is actually special.
- WotC shipped an order of cards to a small time TH-camr. They were actually cards for an upcoming set rather than the latest release, but the names were easily confused. The TH-camr opened the content and posted the video on TH-cam. Rather than accept the free publicity, WotC hired Pinkerton, a private security firm, to go to the TH-camr's apartment, collect the merchandise, and scare the shit out of the TH-camr and his girlfriend.
She did talk about the Pinkerton incident in a different video that was completely about it.
If WotC values proxies over actual playable cards. Then, maybe you should too.
Start doing that thing that so many gamers somehow think is impossible; play other games and franchises that don't shit on their fanbase.
I am sorry but when you refuse to change your behaviour as a customer then you deserve WotC raising prices. You have to WALK AWAY as a customer to get companies to behave. If your desire to play a game is greater than your desire to have decent pricing then you will get ripped off. WALK the FUCK AWAY.
That's the thing, it's not pay to play... If you already have the books there is no need to buy more books to keep playing. And if you really want to play with the Newest classes and monsters? Well eventually it WILL be available through unofficial sources for free more likely than not.... Or possibly the secondhand market.
That and I keep hearing from the MTG community the advice being "Buy singles" (Don't buy from WOTC, just buy from the poor saps that think the cards are gonna be worth more than they end up being worth, assuming you're still buying at all...)
@@minnion2871 I understand what you are saying but i disagree with your position. Being a non playing player for an RPG or MTG game means YOU ARE CONTENT and you are keeping the game popular and so people WILL buy product.
If you are playing the game people can play with you and that makes the game possible. You are content to keep players excited about playing the game. RPGs and card games are not fun if there is no one to play with, so you being someone to play with helps the company.
Players need to do more than bitch and whine about D&D or MTG and actually stop playing. And you should invest in a different game because until hasbro sees their market share shrink which requires people buy other games. If people don't do this nothing will change.
@@AIRGEDOK Implying that I"m not investing in other games or that I have to play just one game.... (And yes I am thinking of getting more into Pathfinder now too.... )
I'm not a brand loyalist by any means. I just don't see any point in throwing out what I've already invested in just because the company that made it has ceased making products worth investing in.
@@minnion2871 whatever dude. This is a YOU problem, not a me problem. I was speaking generally. I explained what the community needs to do, I showed how you as a player are still content and help the company by playing even if you stop buying. i then switched over to PLAYERS in general.
It takes a high level of hubris to turn general statements addressed to the community at large and read them as directed at yourself. Your mother lied to you, you are not the most important person in the world stop acting like it. I am done.
The community can either take my advice or not. What I do know is bitching and moaning while buying the product or playing with your friends social games that build community participation will simply cause hasbro to change nothing. That is my position take it or leave it.
WOTC is making the same mistake as TSR did with AD&D 2nd Ed. creating a book of the month monster, but have to give it to them, their pricing scheme is much more elaborate.
The best option, is for tournaments and Game Masters, to put a stop on additional content. "This is our game, you are allowed anything up to version X". Make the immense cash cow upgrades irrelevant.
Yeah, WOTC has gone full on Disney. No one should go full on Disney.
not even Disney should've gone full Disney
@@thisgoddamusernamestoodamnlong exactly. Hasbro/WOTC and Disney went woke and began price gouging their customers despite the product being of low quality.
@@zenvariety9383 woke=price gouging???🤨
@@Adam-ny5mz Sssh! Don't ask the people abusing "woke" to define it, they get so sad.
@@Adam-ny5mz They were price gouging before going woke. The wokeness made it more apparent. Especially since wokeness is a PR stunt and a cult.
No. I will never give them another penny. I just hope I'm not alone in that.
You are not alone - WOTR hasnt gotten a penny from me in Magic or DnD in over 3 years, and never will again. Products get worse as price goes up. Sickening!
I love the cheerful, sardonic spin you give to the possible demise of D&D.
Yeah as soon I heard the prices were going up for dnd books, I decided, even if stuff sounded cool, I didn’t want them. If I buy any new books of official wotc dnd books, I go to secondhand book stores so my money never goes back to wotc. This price increase is very tone deaf.
And yes, wotc did say they were increasing prices for dnd books.
Wizards of the Coast and Games Workshop makes Bandai and Konami look positively charitable. Gundam models and Yu-Gi-Oh decks come in handy $20-$30 packages.
Thirty bucks US for a poseable hard plastic scale model? Man, I'm in the wrong hobby.
@@stuartbaxter-potter8363 Yes, that is true. Poseable, and far cheaper than a squad of intercessors.
I haven’t played for years but this is why we had “Commons only” decks, you could build one for cheap and was just as fun
Everything that's been happening with wotc has just increased my confidence that ditching 5e for Pathfinder 2e was the right choice. And it's such a better system!
Welcome to the family!
I switched to PF1 when 4E was released. It’s a great company that actually appreciates their customers and the community!
Same. Passing that on as well with a new Pathfinder group for the Homeschool kids every week. D&D doesn't know it yet but it's about to be talked of fondly in all the Dead Games Facebook groups.
Great news Discourse, there is an inexpensive alternative, with only 52 standard cards and 2 bonus 'Joker' cards, for a mere USD 20.00 you can get two decks of standard playing cards and a copy of Hoyle's Modern Encyclopedia of Card Games, with over 70 different games Play classics such as Solitaire, Spades, Gin, Go Fish, Poker, and many more, fun for all ages, never worry about booster packs or rares again.
No D&D is NOT about summoning Demons.. Its about summoning pizza and Mt Dew .. or it was in the early 80's. I started playing in October 1979.
They had delivery back then?!
I used to play heroclix. They did the same thing. Went from 4 to 6 releases a year to 12+. Trying to collect everything became impossible. So, I stopped. I have not spent anything in 5 years.
Back in 2005 someone described heroclix to me as a gateway drug to magic and d&d. And it looked like such a good game too.
Man what wotc has been doing to DND has only been a taste of what they've done with magic in the last 5 years
With the booster packs and overpowered ultra rare cards being part of MTG's original design, the game was rigged from the start.
@@mikeyost3672 As a horrible, terrible bastard I feel obligated to remind you that the original MTG design was built around a world where a secondary card market didn't exist. The intention being that people would find cards they didn't even know existed when they played against new players. That the rarity of powerful cards would mean no deck ever had more than one of any one of them, let alone full sets of power nine. They were, of course, very wrong. But Alpha/Beta/Unlimited wasn't designed with lootbox exploitation in mind. Everything past that though... yeah, not defending that.
I've been "joking" about wizards releasing their new monsters and player character features in boosters for years. But I'm tired of warning WotC fans. They saw reason briefly but seem to have immediately gone back.
"They apologized, and I don't really care."
That's the answer I've mostly gotten from WotC fans. A lot of people are only fans due to Critical Role, and have been with WotC due to Pokemon TCG.
It's addict behavior. Hasbro is their dealer and they are the junkie. They'll never stop, most of them.
Our group already left WoTC. The writing has been on the wall for years and we made the call to switch to PF2E.
Sad thing is, I could totally believe the £1000 1st edition reprint stuff...
Hasbro/Wizards is trying to turn D&D into an MMORPG. I don't fear that roleplayers will fall in love with this method of play and folk to it, abandoning our tables and discord chats, as they can play MMORPGS today (and many of my players do). I think it's something to keep an eye on surely, but I also think that Hasbro/Wizards may have bitten off more than they can chew. The kind of control and customization players want for their D&D games isn't going to fit into a traditional high fantasy MMORPG. They hack their classes, play games that take them to bizzare planes of reality, adapt disney movies to serve as settings. There is no way this app is going to capture the imaginative power and promise of traditional tabletop, in my humble opinion.
Remember when games were made strictly by passionate creators that loved the hobby and they were successful because the games were amazing and not because they imposed gambling like tactics to squeeze the fandom for every possible cent. Good times.
So never
No, I don't. I remember the million splatbooks of 3e. I remember the metaplot fad of the 90's where absolutely every game line seemed to be obliged to have some Big Mystery in the world which would only be revealed if you bought all the splatbooks and an adventure series where a bunch of NPC's would do stuff as the player characters got to watch.
Thats how it mostly still is outside the WotC sphere. I'm sure Paizo, Pelgrane and Pinnacle do what pays the mortgage and keeps the lights on, but they are all much smaller companies, not ruined by corporate pursuit of ever increasing profits. Evil Hat seems less evil in comparison.
I'd be hard pressed to guess the second largest TTRPG company. Paizo, Chaosium, Steve Jackson Games? WotC is easily an order of magnitude larger than any of them.
Beyond that there is a wealth of smaller companies and creators, and many do seem to make a living in the hobby and are driven by passion for the hobby.
@@Grimpen0 paizo engaged in illegal union busting, and evil hat is run by an antisemite. There is no such thing as a "good" corporation.
The problem with the whole commanders Masters thing is that Commander was supposed to be everybody's Magic meaning the go-to format for friends to just mess around and people to play and have fun but with the way their pricing all these new releases for Commander people are starting to argue that it's no longer everybody's magic and they're going to start getting priced out just like they do with competitive
That's a fair point: Commander, when it was still EDH, was a fan-created format developed to give players a new way to play with their bulk/chaff in a creative manner. With Commander being marketed to, and products being tuned and developed specifically for it, the gameplay environment has changed. Commander decks have become more powerful, and the game has taken a more competetive angle, with starter decks now on par in terms of synergy and efficiency and middling-to-strong casual decks of 5-10 years ago.
EDH/Commander was a casual way to play away from the competetive environments of Type 1 and Type 2, but the current-era marketing towards it is pushing it to become a more cutthroat format.
I was planning to buy the Eldrazi deck, but was waiting for the decklist to come out. And as soon as I saw it, I changed my mind. I'll watch the single prices of the good cards instead.
There's a clear cycle here, that's existed since 3e. WotC releases a new DND product -> WotC makes money, but not what they consider enough money -> WotC raises their prices and releases less content into every new book -> WotC makes less money.
It's this endless self-consuming cycle that means the end results of every product is always a little bit disappointing or worse, and it means they always make less money than they want. It's completely clear to an outsider, especially one who doesn't have infinite money and plays the game, which is quite a lot of people. But for some reason the executives have so many $100 bills stapled over their eyes they just can't seem to notice it.
I've dropped this company a few times in the past, and this will be another one but it really feels like a boycott to me. This feels like last straw kind of stuff, and I don't see how they can recover without major changes to how they release, market, and sell products.
They lost me with the integration to D&D Beyond, and Roll 20. I've already bought all of these books, me and my friends have multiple copies of many and of the major books at least one of us has at least one copy. And we play online. But you're telling me that I have to buy everything a second time just to play with a convenient platform? You're telling me that the old third edition stuff that came with digital copies of the book, for some reason that's not something we can do almost 20 years later? Yeah, my sterling silver asshole.
So I will do yet again what I do with every single company that decides to put my convenience not second, not third, but dead last behind a long list of the money they want to take from me. And I'm just going to stop giving them any.
I agree, seeing what WotC has done/is doing with MtG is a good indicator what they'd like to do with DND. Just reason #4356 why I'm not supporting WotC monetarily any more.
I used to buy a lot of the rectangles. I enjoyed the game and was reasonably good at it. But when I started to notice the escalation and how they were constantly looking for new ways to nickle and dime their customers, I stopped. I saw what was happening and I was not going to fall any deeper into their trap. And you know what? My life actually improved when I stopped wasting my money on intrinsically worthless cardboard rectangles. I still enjoy playing the game with friends occasionally, but I can no longer participate in most official events because they usually have restrictions on the sets you can use. Specifically, you can usually only use cards from the most recent sets. And that is one of the ways they "encourage" players to keep buying more cards every time a new set is released.
Back when I could afford to play MTG, a decade ago, precon commander decks were $25-30. I was shocked they were up to $60 even, but $110 is a joke. My LFGS ran a promo where if you pre-ordered all 5 of the precon decks you got em for all for $100.
Wizard is already increasing prices for D&D. Spelljammer and the soon coming Planescape are released as 3 books sets instead of single books with the same total page count, just so they can justify the price hike.
It's simple to see where D&D is going in the stewardship of Hasbro/WotC. They are making it a multi player video game. Super Mario Maker meets TF2. Build your own level and then you can have your friends play the level. You can talk during and between levels. No direct interaction for just a small monthly subscription of $50.00
It will also allow them to add an additional "DM pack" they can have someone read the Description/Box text and add the time markers for it and all of a sudden you are playing a Video game with an AI DM.
Nintendo doesn't sell DLC for MM2 though... so not a good comparison.
Wow Hasbro at its best. This is everything that needs to be said. Hasbro is doing the exact same thing with all of their i.p.'s Gijoe Classifieds are coming out so much so soon that i cant keep track of what is out now. And the prices keep getting higher and higher and the items get harder and harder to find. I cant get over how all these companies right now are jacking the prices up on everything and putting literally everything behind a paywall like its a real life video games with Dlc and Microtransactions.
Resturants are doing things like this as well. Forcing you to download and sign up for an app that doesnt do what its supposed to do and you HAVE to have it and order from it if you want a cheaper meal. We are being fleeced DAILY when are we gonna stand up and show them how it feels by not buying their products until they get the picture. I cant support a company like this not anymore.
The fact that people still give this company with their hard-earned money is truly astonishing to me!
Sunk cost fallacy.
I have no problem never buying from them again. They have behaved very badly, and I'm done with them.
A lot of people have money to burn. Others are die hard fans. Others are new and see what is on TH-cam and it looks fun. A sucker is born every minute.
@@silverthorngoodtree5533 No, I just really like D&D.
I saw this coming once the Type 2 tournament was introduced. It invalidated much of my collection and told me that this hobby was going to get FAR too expensive to stay involved in.
Lizards of the Coast really helping me not buy their products.
The original price was only about £10-15 more than previous preconstructed decks, and the price increases seem to only partly be at WOTC's command
This!☝. While wizards/hasbro fucks things up, some of the blame goes to lgs's beeing greedy.
It's hilarious how much more reasonable 40k has become price wise compared to mtg. A single decent commander deck will easily cost as much as 2k points of whatever army you want.
40K is no longer anything like what could be considered reasonable. Maybe reasonable in the same way as spending £5+ on a bag of popcorn at the cinema is 'reasonable' only because one happens to be in a cinema.
VERY relatively speaking. Games Workshop still shits on their fanbase knowing that they'll lap it up and ask for more. I recently embraced OGRE and already find it far better.
Just to add some context regarding the preconstructed Commander decks, originally they were priced at $20. Then as the format gain popularity, WotC started releasing these decks every 4 months instead of once every year. This change was made just 2 or 3 years ago. Prices varied from $20-40 for these decks at the time of launch. The increase in price for these "premium" products is completely unjustifiable.
Looks like I was first, like any good stalker. WEEEE.
If you’re really really good… you’ll be last as well!!!!!!!!!!
Lol. Someone over at Wizards is like, "what if we shift MTG to a MLM scheme?"
You mean like issuing a set with a single copy of one of the cards (the Ring)?
Has no one told WotC that TTRPGs and Cards are not places to go fishing for whales? Besides, I think there is no acceptable marketing plan if Bob Mannannon hasn't endorsed it.
I have to respectfully disagree with you about Card Whales. They're out there. In fact, I'm pretty sure Card Whales were some of the first "Gaming Whales" that were ever encountered.
I have watched people drop $1,000 per stop at a shop. That's not me trying to be sensationalist, and it was more than one person, and this was back in the late 90's. That $1,000 is on the extreme end though, sure. But if you've ever been in a gaming store of any kind (they are ALL CCG stores now, like it or not) on release day, you can watch people dropping hundreds and hundreds of dollars on as money boxes as the store will let them buy, and they only stop when the store cuts them off (so the store has product to sell to the rest of their customers).
We used to call MtG "Gamer Crack" for a reason.
@@SoulSoundMuisc Yeah, Card Whales are mostly fished out these days. Competition in their ecological niche from Gatcha and Lootbox Whales kind of pushed them out a while back combined with the overfishing.
Fun fact, Wizards has now said the Commander decks are not premium. In fact, the Sliver Pre-Con left out Sliver Hive, causing that card to increase from 5-10 to 40 bucks over the last few days. This whole set is a mess for anyone but the heaviest of spenders.
Surely poker is cheaper to play than MTG. Maybe not...
Honestly probably not
Why are people still giving WOTC and HASBRO money? Screw them. Too many choices that are better.
So, a coworker of mine tried to tell me that bitcoin bros are now investing in magic cards is a positive thing for the hobby. Those hardcore bootlicking deniers are REAL, lol
Everyone knows that mtg cards have no value given the woke nonsense. It's better to invest in Bitcoin mining.
Stick your bitcoin ads where the sun doesn´t shine.
@@zenvariety9383lol, define woke
All of which is why I am playing Traveller these days after playing D&D for forty years.
The magic community needs to band together like the d&d community did. Until then, wotc won't care.
Unfortunately, even without anyone playing, MTG can function with speculators and whales alone.
@@almisamibecause they've never needed players
If it wasn't for the 30th anniversary $1000 proxy box coming straight from Wizards themselves, I would argue that the secondary market would be a valid concern because the middlemen are the ones that set the prices for these preconstructed decks. That said, Wizards are the ones that got rid of MSRP a few years ago. They just handed a blank check to sellars to use the market to justify selling a $40 or $60 deck for hundreds just because ... Well actually I don't remember if they defended removing MSRP. Maybe it was something to do with global releases or something.
Wait a second... OneD&D... One Ring....Sauron, is that you!?
Every single thing that WoTC has done since Tasha's has shown me that I and my group aren't the audience for their products anymore. The dismally lackluster 'design' choices, the weak books, the utterly nonsensical and crippled 'playtest' for what is essentially a slight revision, the heavy lean into digitizing everything, and pre-emptively annihilating anything that could compete by attempts at invoking absurd pseudo-rules around the visuals of spells.. And that's not even going into the money gorging that I've seen the company attempt on both Magic and D&D players.
I'm glad we left. I got the hell out and at first felt like maybe I made a mistake, but every single time WoTC has announced something, opened their mouths, or have come up in the news, it's reinforced my and my group's decision. We are no longer the audience. They want the neuro-divergent people with addictive personalities. They want to prey on people who play the game as an escape that genuinely helped them and force them into an eco-system of gambling exactly akin to the video game markets these days. There is no sanctuary here.
D&D has always had it's money-making schemes. But it's sad to see it dissected to individual parts that will be placed on tiny plates in front of the audience now, each with a price tag and a 'premium' label. Digital class releases, digital 'miniatures', and of course, that little dangling carrot to third parties that they're offering to allow them to sell their third party content on the official 'ttrpg app' they offer. All of it is designed, perhaps in a blundering dumbass kind of way, to direct the whole community back to their ecosystem. Nobody 'won' with the OGL revisions. They just delayed the onset of cancerous turn the company has taken to absurdly enriching their shareholders.
Play other games. They're better designed, more focused, and (for now) won't charge you $5 for blue eyes on your model.
Please play other games.
They're honestly TSRing themselves. The decline isn't going to be right away, but when their VTT blows up in their face... it's going to hit hard.
As long as people continue to buy, why would they stop? XD
This is sad >
Half Priced Books sell them for used, high priced as well. I don't even bother.
I would look up and subscribe to You ( as in, this channel, Dungeons & Discourse ), Dungeon Craft, Greyhawk Grognard, Matt Colville, Ed Greenwood, Seth Skorkowski and Questing Beast; and then never give Hasbro another red cent as long as I live.
Oh wait, I mean, I did that already. I did that when I found out that the guy who they threatened with the Pinkertons wasn't the first time they hired what amounts to the real life Zhentarim to threaten people with weapons and "jail time" over a box of ink and paper that THEY mishandled.
At one point, I shit you not, I would have purchased literally anything with the & on it. Now I can barely look at my bookshelf without getting angry and at this point people can fuck off with the whole "don't blame the creative people" thought process.
At the end of the day, I don't care if you're team-corpo or not, you work for OBEJCTIVELY bad people; a good person couldn't abide that. So anyone who works there and wants to continue to claim to not be a piece of shit needs to stop. DEFINITELY looking at Crawford with this hot-take in particular.
Agreed, the architects of D&D are not as friendly as they try to appear on social media platforms. The Christopher Perkins space monkey slave trade debacle (with no repercussions) verified what I have been suspecting all along.
Securitas (who own the Pinkertons) are major Hasbro shareholders. Many Hasbro employees are former Pinkertons. So to a certain degree, Hasbro ARE the Pinkertons.
It's the same with the Bud Lite boycott. "Don't punish the workers because of corporates' mistake" LOL. How can you not see that as anything other than a Crisis Management ploy to avert a boycott? Boycotts hurt the company. The company is supposed to act in its own best interest, which is also the employees' best interest. If the company goes under, the employees lose a job. So the company needs to keep its customers happy in order to stay in business.
WotC are the living embodiment of the Red Wizards of Thay. Easier to rule over a nation if the nation is full of braindead zombies.
Some of the one liners in this video had me rolling on the floor. Hilarity aside, you're absolutely right. WotC is gonna flog this harder than Epic flogs Fortnite. I'm turning to other TTRPGs, but keeping an eye on WotC until D&D becomes a dedicated video game.
I feel sad for all of the fans and D&D content creators on TH-cam who have already gone back to WotC. Here in a few years they're going to get bitten just as bad as the Magic players have been this year. I think it's going to become increasingly difficult for some of these shills to promote a company that is actively vacuuming money from people's pockets.
Great video. Keep up the good work. 💚👽
thanks Jeff!!! :D
While I do hope that D&D has a long, successful life and is enjoyed by people worldwide, I think that's going to happen with something that isn't D&D(tm) itself.
It's disappointing to me that so many people think they are D&D fans when they are actually RPG fans.
lets not forget too that wizards sends pinkertons to pepoles homes now too
... I owned the white box at the time. I don't think anyone's missing anything by not buying it ;)
You are quite right. I owned it to in 1975, the thing falls apart quickly. I still have all the beginning books though, even Chainmail.
As someone whos played both, I could say the mtg prodcuts would have been worth it if it was a foil deck just like the higher graded 40k crossover decks, but 100+ for a deck many people may still want to foil out is madness. Honestly its just another company I am starting hopes gouges themselves out of the market.
I used to love playing video games but largely stopped due to how the companies act. Now the same thing may happen with RPGs. I know there are other systems out there, but D&D is the dominate one and I have trouble finding others.
I've been running Faerun/Eberron/Krynn campaign settings in Pathfinder 1st ed, & that works just fine. There's a rogue archetype to cover 3rd ed's Scout, & there's a build (class archetype) for everything 3rd ed had, & they've gone all-in on archetypes over prestige classes
As the card box is premade, you can expect every deck to be the same. So the 'Rare' cards in there are going to dumpster their prices due to guaranteed avaibility.
Umezawa Jitte was part of a premade deck back in Betrayers of Kamigawa but it's price skyrocketed nonetheless and stayed that high for many years, until it fell out of use in modern format
I've been making these criticisms ever since 2E. Shameless money grabs trying to stifle imagination. I always had similar problems with MtG, from the very beginning, same era. All the big RPGs pushed big table maps and miniatures then, too, for more sales. Traveller was a noted exception, though they did publish extensive evironments and adventures. The cashgrab totally killed Dragon Magazine, which was awesome, but published fan-made and other competing content, variations on creatures and rules, suggested house rules, discussions of strengths in other games, etc. Axed.
The answer? Homebrew, homebrew, homebrew. Screw branded canon. DIY is where it's been at since the very beginning. You never can be certain a player hasn't already read or played a branded module. You don't need their exact rules or settings. Make your own variations. That's a simple fact in all our games forever: to keep it interesting, nothing -- absolutely nothing -- is quite as written, everything is a variation of some kind. And as to MtG, if they don't let you use photocopied or homebrew cards, don't play with them. Where's the creativity? And don't use it to gamble, fGs! Have you seen the D&D branded slot machines? OmG.
I remember when we got new classes, new spells, new gear, new adventures, tutorials on dming, setting info, every month in DnD. It was called Dragon magazine. It cost me 6 bucks.
I think there's no way in Hell Hasbro will show the slightest restraint in trying to milk D&D players. It'll be microtransactions as far as the eye can see. "Here's a custom beard for your dwaft", "here's a custom d6", ad naseum.
I think they'll eventually release a class for the VTT that combines all classes for the low, low price if $10,000. Gotta get those whales!
Fortunately I think we are at a great convergence of people waking up to the online gaming scams that Hasbro will try pulling, and Hasbro will hit an immediate wall of pushback from consumers and new consumer protections alike.
I remember when Magic came out in the '90s and people were seriously ending their D&D games to play this collectible card game. I was flabbergasted. Sure, card games can be fun, but it is in no way a substitute for an RPG. If they would rather play Magic then I can only imagine the kind of vacuous powergaming these people's D&D games must have been.
. . . As a person who played both in the early 2000's... your description of those players is just ignorant. Magic The Gathering is a _strategy_ game... where strategy and tactics is what brings about victory. It's not even close to being an RPG... *Shakes Head*
Wizards never said Commander Masters was a "Premium" product. Which actually makes it worse.
My purchases of MtG started drying up as I started getting single cards that would do the work of my friends' entire combos.
I played MtG Arena for a while, but I now can't remember when I last played any MtG game.
I think the last straw was when they made new, better boosters and made them the (more expensive) default, turning the old versions into 'draft boosters'.
Or putting proliferate and poison counters in the same set...
I didn't intentionally boycot it, but they managed to drive me away with the power creep alone, let alone the price hikes.
I'm starting to see how they could do the same with D&D.
I officially stopped building decks as of Brothers War. This is too much.
Time to sell high end 3D printed MtG cards on the secondary market. Thanks WotC.
Virtual ttrpg is defeating the purpose of getting out of digital space and interacting with people and physical objects! How can I enjoy a Friday to Sunday 18 hr/day session that ends with the smell of empty chip bags, stale soda and beer, and unwashed bodies if everyone else is in their own home?
Remember when D&D was a game that just needed a couple rulebooks, a few dice, some paper and pencils, and a little imagination? Pepperidge Farm remembers...
Folks, there are now what...5 iterations of D&D? Pick one that you like, and buy used books. Let Wizards & Hasbro whimper fizzle and die. It's time to move on...D&D will never die, but the evil monster that seeks to control it and us, must die.
I happen to find something that might explain some of the pricing. This is on a real estate blog...Fisher Island, FL: Miami Beach's Most Expensive Island...Alan Hassenfeld is the president of Hasbro Toys. He purchased his condo in Palazzo del Sol, one of the newer complexes on the north side of Fisher Island, for $8.2 million.
the difference is, every single thing sold for d&d is 100% optional. You don't need it at all to play a game. I just don't buy anything and keep playing. You could make proxies for every single card in your magic deck on notebook paper but nobody would play with you. They would think you are an asshole. I printed my player handbook with my school printing allotment, I 3d printed my dice, I crocheted a die bag. I 3d print miniatures. I have literally never bought a single thing from wizards and I have been playing d&d 2x a week for 5 years.
As for D&D, I notice that in eds 3 and 4, a book cost 30-35€, now they are €50+ which IS a strain on my modest budget, and that started 10 years ago. I think it's high time gamers voted with their feet and wallets, and went en masse to a game sponsored by a company that would be more reasonable, if nearly as greedy.
How can any VTT be more accessible than a place sheltered from the weather, a few friends, paper, pencils, and some dice?
Better to go to roleplayer conventions and hope to find what you seek at the Bring&Buy.
Basically, the complete corruption, greed and mismanagement of the hobby at the hands of WotC is a good thing. Until this madness started, the new generation of roleplayers were not interested in other gaming systems, if they even were aware that other systems exist. Now, the new generation is branching out, looking for other systems. WotC's corruption may have destroyed D&D, but it safed Roleplay. There are so many great systems out there, way better than 5e could ever hope to be.
I understand your point, and there is indeed one significant difference between Magic: The Gathering (MTG) and Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). Unlike MTG, you don't need the official merchandise of D&D to play it. Thanks to the abundance of online resources, I've been playing 5th edition (5e) for years without purchasing any physical books. If Wizards of the Coast releases new subclasses every week, those materials will likely become available online soon enough. So, unless you are using their virtual tabletop (VTT), players and Dungeon Masters alike can access and utilize the online content without any issues.
I can see why Magic players are pissed. Makes me wonder when the breaking point is, if there is one
>what would you do?
I codified the game I've been running since 1996, hired a lawyer, and I'll be going to market... eventually.
Once my current campaign wraps up, Im out from using WotC rules/products... and my group is definetely not going 6e