this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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For the likely large overlap this audience might have with dnd, it didn't make 100mil a year so it gets to eat shit. It doesn't help that the video game license isn't counted in that total. Other Hasbro brands do make 100mil a year.
I thought magic was one. It is surprising to see layoffs there.
Anyway, of course a corporation does evil shit. The only moral is the line going up.
MtG made over a billion dollars. From what I can see WotC, products/services/licenses, make up over 3 billion of Hasbro's 5.something billion revenue.
Yeah, card crack is real. They've been whaling and getting kids into gambling since the 90s. Don't know why lay offs there. Line go up just a little more probably.
It's not that. It's that the fewer people they have to pay the more money they get to keep. It's incredibly short sighted and self destructive. But they don't care at this point.
That or they’re planning to lean on generative ai to produce content
IIRC they contract and credit the artists. I don't think theyveven use any in-house srtists.
They've been caring less about artists and the community in recent years.
At cons, they used to pay for artists hotels and give them free booths to set up, now artists get nothing and have to pay something like $750 for a booth.
I think that's more about WotC giving up on cons and tourneys than giving up on artists. If they're having events at all, they're not putting as much money into them as they used to.
And the generative card properties?
You mean using AI to design the card's mechanics? I'd like to think we are still a ways away from that, specially since they'd have to train their on model that adjusts not only for the text generated but what the actual card would do in a game. they could use it for french vanilla cards I suppose, but it's not like those take a human that long to make anyway.
I didn't say they needed to be quality or anything, they just need to appear quality to corporate, as all the corps are starting to cannibalize staff at the idea of using LLMs. Corporate doesn't play the game and doesn't care about long term, just the short term gains.
1100 layoffs and they don't use in house artists? I find that hard to believe but you might be right.
Yeah, my partner really likes the art but we're both aware that MtG was just the real world precursor to the current micro-transaction culture.
MTG used to have 2 or 3 releases a year. Enough to keep things fresh, but not an instance amount.
When I was working in a Game Store in the Early 2020's, there as more than one release a week, and a major release about once a month. They set the milking machine to maximum.