It’s the Holidays in 2023.
You just signed off from your work day as a prominent creator with a renown gaming brand, and are spending quality time with your family. It’s a busy season, and there’s a ton to left plan to ensure this Holiday season goes off without a hitch. However, you feel secure in the future. Any why wouldn’t you?
As a passionate artist, storytelling enthusiast, mover and shaker, your work has been integral to the brands growth, and this years has been one of the most successful you’ve had. Sure the larger company is floundering in some of its brands, but you’re part of Wizards of the Coast, its most successful brand in past years. You’re a breadwinner, baby!
Now, imagine you roll to work the next day and come face to face with a termination email. You and a large group of others throughout the company, but including key people from your own brand; the one that actually did well this year financially.
Imagine the immense confusion and frustration experienced by not just those let go, but the wider gaming community at large. Does providing top tier value to your job not matter? Does making the company money not matter? What does job security even mean at that point?
So, what happened at Hasbro? (The writer asked)
Early last week, Hasbro has announced the layoff of 1100 employees, about 20% of the companies total workforce, following a 10% decline in revenue in its third quarter-earnings. This move was claimed to be part of a “strategic transformation” in the words of CEO Chris Cocks ($1.5 million per year), who is set to take home an extra $8 million this holiday season as a bonus.
Furthermore, this appears to be one phase of a larger cost-cutting plan that will include more layoffs over the next six months. Chris states that the company will see “headwinds” heading into 2024.
Many of these former employees took to social media to announce their release from the company, which prompted an impassioned response from the gaming community at large. Of these 1100 individuals, a fraction included key designers, art directors, and creatives from Wizards of the Coast.
While toy sales have slumped over the past year, this last detail was especially perplexing and upsetting to many who were made aware. Despite a downturn in Hasbros overall outlook, its most successful brand has been Wizards of the Coast; the developer of popular games such as Dungeons and Dragons, Magic the Gathering, and may others. It is responsible for producing over 70% of Hasbros profit in current times.
Me Saying Things About Wizards of the Coast
Not only has Wizards of the Coast brought in the money for Hasbro, some would say that it has experienced some of its biggest successes in popular culture over the past few years.
Dungeons and Dragons has been has a huge effect in this dynamic. Not just the quirky roleplaying game from the 1980s and the centerpiece of many a theme in Stranger Things, DnD has become a powerhouse of gaming, claiming over 50 million players worldwide. This has created an explosion of actual play podcasts such as Critical Role, The Adventure Zone, and Dimension 20. The successful release of Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves in theaters, and the smash video game hit Baldurs Gate 3 were simply some of the more recent wins for the brand.
We can’t downplay the prominence of Magic the Gathering, heralded as the first strategic trading card game. In the past decade, over twenty billion cards have been produced, with each set growing in the games overall popularity. In 2022 alone, the game has made for just over a billion dollars of revenue. Current estimates set the game at about 40 million players worldwide.
Granted, revenue does not mean profits, and the expenses and losses that have come with many of the developments of the past year have taken their toll as well. The upcoming pivot to a new VTT-based platform for DnD, the OGL crisis of early 2023, and the mismanaged overproduction of MTG cards along with growing consumer frustrations with Hasbro over multiple unpopular decisions have eaten at their bottom line in recent quarters.
The Creatives Take The Fall, As Usual
Of course, as expected, the laid off included prominent designers, art directors, and creatives: people who are at the heart and soul of WOTC. Not just them, but the people who brought immense value to the properties they worked on, and were instrumental in making them the successes they were.
Granted, rarely is a single layoff ever excusable from a pro-labor perspective, especially when it is abrupt, just before the holidays, and when the workers were instrumental to the companies actual wins. Its jarring for workers to take the fall for a companies bad decisions in any case, but one would not be wrong in calling it categorically ridiculous.
If you plug away at financial publications, you may be used to seeing a theme, treating the executives of large companies making decisions like these look like struggling family people with rags for clothes holding a tin cup and cashing in on pity.
“Poor Hasbro. They just haven’t had a great year. Looks like they’ll have to lay off some people before Christmas. What a shame.”
Meanwhile, Wizards of the Coast is not just a successful brand. Its an entire franchise of intellectual properties and materials of ongoing and ever evolving market potential. The flagship TTRPG of the 20th century! The first and most successful competitive trading card game!
This fact has fueled the mass bewilderment over the layoffs having anything to do with Wizards of the Coast.
Why?? How does that even make sense??
The Part Where I Pointlessly Rant About Toys
One could argue that the non-WOTC related financial issues are at least predictable. Hasbro is not able to rest on its laurels as the producer of Transformers, My Little Pony, and games like Monopoly. A vast portfolio of toy brands does not compare to the growing digitization of the modern kids play experience.
Times have changed in the world of toys. As an uncle who hangs with the nieces regularly, everything is either Bluey, Paw Patrol, or the 100th coming of Baby Shark, not to mention kid tablets and digital games.
The fact is, nobody in 2023 plays Monopoly anymore, unless they have nostalgia and a lick of financial sadism. My Little Pony doesn’t attract attention nowadays, and that ironic “Brony” phase which had everyone laughing and cringing at the same time has become an old meme. Transformers peaked in the 80s, and re-peaked along with Michael Bays career.
However, all of this is less reflective of a changing world with executives throwing their arms up in defeat, and more reflective on Hasbro being a poor flagship to navigate change, while those at its helm find no problem in throwing its crew overboard when it starts taking on water.
There is no doubt in my mind that the rest of the laid off of Hasbro have been committed workers and passionate human beings who equally did not deserve to get axed, and that any downturn is reflective of larger failings beyond their individual control. Still, they are forced to pay in kind for the captains decisions of sending the vessel directly into the storm.
Sleeping on a Dragons Hoard
In summary:
Hasbros poor navigation of the so called “headwinds” has brought the company to perform cost cutting measures. The toy company overshot its goals, didn’t factor in the community response when it tried to milk the cash cow with some badly thought-out strategies which resulted in nasty rug-pulls and socially abysmal situations.
There is a common refrain amongst the “business-minded” that layoffs are the result of cost cutting at a time when it is “necessary” to keep a company “afloat”. However, this years contradiction is as bare-faced as ever.
Every company in existence will defend to the death the internal calculus of its finances, projections, and business dealings regardless how great or terrible those are. None of the corporate double-speak justifies this backwards decision, the awful timing, and the doling out of multi-million dollar bonuses.
When sitting in a boardroom to strategize the best method to lift the perceptions of shareholders, drive the company value upward, and perhaps find a way to increase the clams in your own pocket, you would think that the proper decision as a mindful leader would be to take lessons learned from past shortfalls, herald the successful brands, and announce a pivot in company direction without tossing your valuable workers into the cold. That would make sense, wouldn’t it?
If you cared about the future of the company and its employees, that is.
Instead, what appears before us is the opposite. Rather than secure the future of Hasbro through sensible leadership, the dragon has other ideas. … And why not? Who is going to stop them anyhow? This is all an opportunity to burn down the city and hoard the treasure, thusly creating a golden parachute and shorting the company for what its worth. Its the kind of Neutral Evil play that would make a Yugoloth blush.
We’ve seen this happen time and again.
Its a problem that is pervasive in our economic system, and its not going away any time soon. Not without substantial change. What that change looks like is beyond the scope of this one article, but at the very least, it should be the duty of every worker, enthusiast, and consumer to call out these acts of greed for what they are at every turn, and push for a world that promotes job security, more sensible decision making during the bad times, and better benefits to workers during the good times.
A personal message to those who have been let go:
Thank you!
Your work with Hasbro has produced amazing things; inspired and passionate projects that have changed the lives of millions of people. It saddens me that the value you have provided has been disregarded by those above you in the corporate hierarchy.
The silver lining is that there is no doubt in my mind that your work will continue on. No matter where your journey takes you, I guarantee you will continue to kick ass! My greatest hope is that you will find new projects that benefit from the immense value you can provide, and that those future opportunities give you the benefit and recognition you deserve.
I salute you,
Matt (Chaotican Writer)
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