Wizards of the Coast, the owners of the games Dungeons and Dragons and Magic: The Gathering, is owned in turn by the game and toy-making multinational Hasbro. In the last three decades, Hasbro has been snapping up intellectual property and subsidiaries regularly, though also in some cases failing with efforts to create media convergences through expanding into other genres of entertainment.
Hasbro ran into a significant controversy over the last week over news of a change to the next edition of Dungeons and Dragons. The change wasn’t so much about the rules of the game as it was in the rules about the game, with new proposed restrictions to the existing Open Gaming License.
The 5th edition of Dungeons and Dragons has been fairly popular with long-time players of tabletop role-playing games. A lot of them (like me!) bought the rulebooks even if they’re not active players because the new edition seemed to really understand the appeal of D&D and games like it. The previous edition (the 4th) in contrast felt like it was mostly about combat rather than role-playing and felt like it was a design document for making D&D into a computer game run by an AI rather than a shared group experience run by a human being.
Tabletop role-playing was enjoying a renaissance well before the pandemic, in terms of numbers of players, in terms of exposure in popular culture, and in terms of the variety of gaming systems in circulation. It’s a far cry from when I first played D&D in the 1970s, when it was regarded either as extreme nerdism or as Satanic ritual. (Though my first teaching gig ever was as a high school senior running a class offered by a local after-school enrichment program, showing middle schoolers how to play the game.)
The popularity of the 5th edition rules—and its pop culture visibility—were significantly a result of a commitment by Wizards of the Coast to allow third-party content developers to freely develop material using the D&D rules and name. The company has actually gone back and forth on this issue in its history—and unsurprisingly the relative unpopularity of the 4th edition rules also had something to do with a more restrictive approach to content development.
Hasbro, through its Wizards of the Coast staff, is now backpedaling furiously from the news about new restrictions to the Open Gaming License, partly in response to a significant number of subscribers cancelling their D&D Beyond subscriptions.
The cover story offered by the company about its proposed changes is thin and unconvincing. It’s fairly plain that this is part of a pattern in late 20th and early 21st Century capitalism, described fairly well by Steve Jobs, of all people, in his reflections on Xerox’s commercial struggles. What Jobs notes is a tendency over time for corporate leadership to be taken over by people in sales and marketing, especially in cases where the product lines are of necessity relatively static. The “product people”, in Jobs’ view, get stuck tending to the stewardship or maintenance of the product, and don’t have a voice in the room when the leadership tries to think strategically about the company’s future.
What this leads to in cultural businesses in particular, where their product is not at all static, is particularly notable after mergers and acquisitions. The people that Jobs is thinking about who are in charge in the big acquiring company likely know very little about the collaborations and relations that sustain the making of the product, and often know very little about the audiences for the product as well. In fact, they may actively disdain those audiences—and they tend to regard the people who make the product and the executives who superintend the making of the product as interchangeable.
Equally, as in the case of Hasbro and Dungeons & Dragons, the upper-middle management has to show “proof of life” to their C-suite bosses. Like their bosses, they don’t understand the product, they don’t understand the audiences, and especially they don’t understand how favorable conditions have been established for the product’s longevity and consumption. As, say, in allowing third-party developers to make content using the core product and thus in making it a preferred standard. Or in other cases, in being lenient towards derivative uses of other kinds.
The lowest hanging fruit way to show “proof of life” to the C-suite is not to make more product and not to make better product. Those are both out of reach for the upper-middle management who are straight out of MBA-ville. The way to show proof of life is to have a plan to recoup more revenue out of the product’s current market, essentially to aggressively collect rents via legal action or threat of same.
Time and time again, this move ends up creating ill-will and driving consumers away from the product. Fandoms will resiliently tolerate a bad product but they won’t resiliently tolerate a company that tries to claw back pennies on the dollar from fans or from content creators who are close to fandoms. The rents that a company like Hasbro can collect are small against its bottom line but often big for individuals and small businesses operating in a gig marketplace.
It’s not just that fans cancel subscriptions and move to another fandom entirely. It’s also that the visibility that generous licenses and toleration of derivative works creates is what recruits future consumers. Sure, sue every nursing school with an unauthorized wall mural of Disney characters, that’ll show them. What it won’t show is the characters to the kids in the school. Sure, make some D&D content developers fold up shop or move to Fate or GURPS or Numenera or Spire or Pathfinder, and make others cough up money that’s their livelihood until they also call it quits, and turn others against the game in the bitterness of that end. Guess who won’t know what D&D is, then? The kids who find out about it by watching The Legend of Vox Machina or listening to a podcast or otherwise encountering it due to the permissiveness of the current license.
It’s a consistent enough pattern, a repeated mistake, that it says something structural about large corporate capitalism in the current political economy. At least one of the things it says is that corporations do not in fact trend towards a sustained maximization of their profits, especially when they’re involved in the production of cultural works, but instead oscillate through cycles of profitably hands-off deference to the makers of cultural products and their immediate managers and cycles of short-sighted rent-seeking that kill or constrain the success of those products. Whether that structure is a result of corporate sociology (e.g., the need of executives in particular hierarchical layers of a company to have a strategic plan even if it’s short-sighted) or something more profoundly and deeply structural remains an interesting question—but the pattern seems unmistakeable.
Image credit: Photo by Jasmin Egger on Unsplash