Baldur’s Gate 3, last year’s most critically acclaimed video game, has brought in about $90 million since its August release for parent company Hasbro Inc. through a licensing deal.
I’m a recent D&D fan, largely because of BG3. What’s the tl;dr for why people hate Hasbro and Wizards? Hopefully a slightly longer explanation than just the word “greed”.
Jan last year they were going to destroy the 3rd party D&D content creation ecosystem (it was legally debated whether they could anyway) it caused a mass boycott of D&D content and all 3rd party creators (including Critical Roll) to start diversifying. It went on for two weeks, only finally causing them to rollback on it because a campaign to cancel all ongoing D&D beyond subscriptions made them take it seriously.
They’ve been pushing to make a closed garden platform vtt for all their first party digital content, that it seems they’ve just started to rollback on.
Prior to that they’ve been consistently milking and trying squeeze the D&D playerbase and MTG community in more and more shitty and exploitative moves.
To say that community good will and faith in them is below zero is not an exaggeration. The main hardcore community have a very jaded and negative view of Wizards and Hasbro. Really to learn more I recommend crawling through YT of all the news. There’s just no way to do it justice here.
Full disclosure: I’ve never played dungeons and dragons so I’m probably not the best person to ask, I’ve just kinda followed the story after playing bg3
My understanding is that since its creation, DnD has been “open source.” Anyone could make content for the game…like campaigns and maps and stuff and it was fine. A lot of people credited that policy with the success and proliferation of the game - I don’t know if it’s true but I believe it since a lot of my exposure to it has been creative projects.
Last year, Hasbro (who owns Wizards of The Coast who owns DnD and Magic: The Gathering) was going to change* that policy so they get a cut of the sale of said content. Pretty much everyone hated this and it got walked back.
I do not remember if they SAID they were changing it, a memo got leaked, or a fake memo got leaked. So they might not have “walked it back” so much as confirmed that the policy was not changing
I dunno, a corporation taking a huge open source project and putting a pricetag on it feels kind of bad to me. I don’t care that they have a fee for licensing to big companies (which they had already) but the policy change would have been a big deal for small or independent creators
Yeah, but I’m not going to hold it against them when they backed out on it. I would not be playing Street Fighter 6 right now if Capcom went through with their initial licensing changes, but for similar reasons, they didn’t. So for now, it’s cool. In situations like this though, you just have to be ready to leave at the drop of a hat if they misbehave.
I don’t know much, but I heard Hasbro has fired all the guys who created D&D (after they bought the licence). Those guys helped a lot Larian during BG3 development (Larian even tried to speak about them when they won at the Game Awards, but were cut off before they could).
I’m a recent D&D fan, largely because of BG3. What’s the tl;dr for why people hate Hasbro and Wizards? Hopefully a slightly longer explanation than just the word “greed”.
Jan last year they were going to destroy the 3rd party D&D content creation ecosystem (it was legally debated whether they could anyway) it caused a mass boycott of D&D content and all 3rd party creators (including Critical Roll) to start diversifying. It went on for two weeks, only finally causing them to rollback on it because a campaign to cancel all ongoing D&D beyond subscriptions made them take it seriously.
They’ve been pushing to make a closed garden platform vtt for all their first party digital content, that it seems they’ve just started to rollback on.
Prior to that they’ve been consistently milking and trying squeeze the D&D playerbase and MTG community in more and more shitty and exploitative moves.
To say that community good will and faith in them is below zero is not an exaggeration. The main hardcore community have a very jaded and negative view of Wizards and Hasbro. Really to learn more I recommend crawling through YT of all the news. There’s just no way to do it justice here.
Full disclosure: I’ve never played dungeons and dragons so I’m probably not the best person to ask, I’ve just kinda followed the story after playing bg3
My understanding is that since its creation, DnD has been “open source.” Anyone could make content for the game…like campaigns and maps and stuff and it was fine. A lot of people credited that policy with the success and proliferation of the game - I don’t know if it’s true but I believe it since a lot of my exposure to it has been creative projects.
Last year, Hasbro (who owns Wizards of The Coast who owns DnD and Magic: The Gathering) was going to change* that policy so they get a cut of the sale of said content. Pretty much everyone hated this and it got walked back.
Gotcha. If that’s the extent of it, that’s not too bad. Thanks.
I dunno, a corporation taking a huge open source project and putting a pricetag on it feels kind of bad to me. I don’t care that they have a fee for licensing to big companies (which they had already) but the policy change would have been a big deal for small or independent creators
Yeah, but I’m not going to hold it against them when they backed out on it. I would not be playing Street Fighter 6 right now if Capcom went through with their initial licensing changes, but for similar reasons, they didn’t. So for now, it’s cool. In situations like this though, you just have to be ready to leave at the drop of a hat if they misbehave.
Fair enough. I think it’s reasonable that people were rubbed the wrong way that Hasbro even considered it
I don’t know much, but I heard Hasbro has fired all the guys who created D&D (after they bought the licence). Those guys helped a lot Larian during BG3 development (Larian even tried to speak about them when they won at the Game Awards, but were cut off before they could).