Fun Fact: WotC announced the end of D&D and Magic in portuguese on the eve of BRAZILIAN NATIONAL RPG DAY In Brazil since 2018 on February 24th is celebrated THE NATIONAL RPG DAY. The date was chosen to coincide with the birthday of Douglas Quinta Reis, founders of DEVIR Publishing and fundamental figure in the introduction and popularization of Role Playing Games in Brazil. Douglas Quinta Reis and DEVIR Publishing organized the biggest RPG event in Brazil for more than 20 years. It started in 1993 and lasted until 2015. Encontro Internacional de RPG (International RPG Meeting). Douglas died in 2017. To abandon us (D&D and Magic communities) by making a few paragraphs with absurd justifications on the eve of "A sacred holiday" of the Brazilian tabletop community. it was not a very smart decision.
The D&D books were published by 'Galápagos Jogos', which is the largest board game publisher in Brazil. We really can't understand why WotC canceled its licensing rights to 'Galápagos Jogos' in 2022. WotC only said the production would turn to be made in house in U.S.A.. And when WotC republished the 3 main books, it cost almost double the price of the previous books by Galápagos. So why would us brazilians buy what we already have? And they are mainly only available through Amazon because in the last 3 years WotC closed its Brazilian office in the city of São Paulo and also closed most of its offices in South America. At first Closing the offices mostly hurt the Magic: The Gathering scene. Most of WotC's official tournaments and event presence have disappeared. Now all magic tournaments and events are run by local shops. So there is no one here from WotC to work on distribution. If local stores want to get WotC books, they will have to import them themselves. What is not ease or cheap. Same problems with Magic cards. If WotC could not achieve the unreal selling numbers was only their falt.
Not to mention.. RPG was added as an optional for learning, in schools.. If it was just printing and taxes costs, it could be seen as competition with Galapagos, or, "wanting the money they got from selling those books here, yet at no cost from them", aka, "the same BS as on the OGL scandal".. alas, it is worse, far worse.. they canceled everything, including digital, alienating a large and promissing market with one single bad decision... Yet another step down to oblivion.. all for blind immediate greed.
@@zebaklongfang9344 Magic the gathering have tax immunity in Brazil Brazilian Supreme Court has decided that magic cards are didactic material comparable to books, since they help with the development of text interpretation and mathematic knowledge for kids. And so MTG and other TCG have tax immunity as books, as provided for in the Brazilian Constitution. Of course the same goes for RPG books too. But Hasbro doesn't care! To have tax immunity WotC must properly fill out the documentation and description of products sold and exported from the U.S.A. to Brazil. If not the product the products will be stranded at customs or, as commonly happens, they will be misidentified and taxed as toys. Need i to say that Hasbro/WotC most of the time will not properly fill out the documentation?
Cara, no fim tudo gira em torno de dinheiro e ações. A Hasbro acabou com o time Latan do magic, era uma questão de tempo p fazer o mesmo com D&D. Preferem investir nos mercados gringos
Hasbro pulled the same crap with the WotC Stores. They shut down 100+ retail stores because even though they were having 10% growth, but it wasn't ENOUGH growth. 😢
That’s the nature of business. They have 50 million bucks, they can pull it out of retail and put it into design and get 12% growth. If you had 50 million bucks and didn’t care about the cultural impact, you want as much growth as possible. I just heard our host mentioned that WOTc care about growth of the hobby - it’s a lie and stop thinking that anything that they say is truthful.
It’s not about business. It’s about social engineering and social agendas related to narcissistic sociopathic social engineering networks facilitating those purposes and agendas. They are attempting to “extinguish” RPG’s and eventually table top games in favor of electronic devices and computer systems. Micro transactions and not owning anything is just the beginning... Totally willing to force down load candy crush on your system using your bandwidth and your time since you might be trying to do something else at that time... They are pirates consuming the intellectual property which they don’t care about... other than destroying the property’s. They are deliberately attempting to extinguish D&D.
In 1987 Hasbro cancelled the toy line Inhumanoids because it only made 60 million dollars in profit. Ironically the companion cartoon show was delayed and came out 6 months after the cancellation which lead to a show with merch that had been sold the previous year and no follow up. This isn’t a new thing with Hasbro.
@@Xplora213 That's the nature of corporations. Usually regular businesses are happy to be making a decent profit, as it's just pretty much printing money. When they get worried about the stock price, then they feel the need to screw up a good thing to raise profit margins and cut costs, because it's not about being a successful business, it's about being successful on Wall Street. Modern corporate thinking is just about short term stock price and basically nothing else, and it's the reason so many otherwise good products and services go to hell. Once they hit market capacity, the next step becomes "how low can we make the quality and still make a profit?"
I think that's actually a good thing. If you believe race is something that should be taken into account, that's racist. Now being greedy is also bad just not as bad as racism
@@brownboy534 Yep. Pretty tired of my race being a virtue signal for a bunch of corporations and hearing there's something wrong with me from non-minority activists if I don't think they're saving my life by celebrating the pandering. If they don't sell enough in a certain area, they're not going to sell them there. Also, just because you like a product doesn't mean you have any right to it or any control over it. The condescension and entitlement is nuts on this one.
@russellharrell2747 you don't have to rely on OSR and OGL compatible content to find a good TTRPG. D&D-likes are not the end all/be all in the market, so I'd also recommend looking towards other systems.
Fun Fact: D&D wasn't translated in japanese for a fucking long time. Therefore they made their own system after the success of the Record of Loddos War "Replay books" (were they played basic D&D ... which was only available in english) they made SWORD WORLD which is until this day the most successful fantasy RPG over there. It uses D6s since these dice were more easily available. also... it's kinda good that D&D will not get translated anymore... that will loose them players and that might help some other RPG Makers to get out new games in their language.
Yep, and I just saw a few posts that Pathfinder apparently does exist in Portuguese. Let's shout this from the highest buildings -- tchau D&D! Tudo Bem!
There was a BTS clip on one of the Japanese Record of Lodoss War Laserdiscs where someone from the production is on stage showing off his copy of the Stormbringer RPG.
Sword World seems significantly less popular in Japan than Call of Cthulu. Like, clearly Sword World is a game there, but Cthulu content is massively more common.
I thought this was going to be about the ceo's AI comments! My response is still the same: "Oh no! My money printing machine isn't printing money fast enough!"
Wizards/Hasbro has been a problem ever since I opened my RPG store back in 2009 in Berlin. And since then it has only gotten worse. I would not mind them going under completely. Back in the day they claimed there will NEVER be a German translation of D&D5 - until a company offered to do it by themselves and paying Wizards fees.... When they saw they actually make cash on that translation - they recalled the license and subsequently frakked up German D&D completely ever since. They also cut the money stores make off the books btw...
That's more or less what happened here. D&D only arrived in Portuguese after Galápagos Games acquired a license with GF9. That was in 2019. In 2022 they revoked the license and said they would take over the translation from then on. But they fired all the employees involved, including with the translation of Magic. In the end, they won't be able to say that we are pirating their products, after all they don't exist...
As a Brazilian and a physical book buyer I just interpret it as "they don't want my money". I have no problems whatsoever about reading the books in English, but I have players that are not so proficient with the language and it is more comfortable and convenient to read it I'm my mother tongue. I'm totally thinking about dropping D&D 5e entirely and moving either to Pathfinder or any other third party ttrpg. Even though I love 3.5e, again, "they don't want my money". Price was always a problem. Hasbro doesn't even care about their own product, they care about money. Salaries here in Brazil vary from $1.200 to $3.000 (obviously those are rough numbers), with people struggling with less than it in poorer States (those will never be ttrpg consumers, probably). Currently the player's handbook costs here $260. Adding up all expenses, 1 hobby book at this price is inaccessible for mort of population. Then piracy is the only answer for most of the people.
I'm suprised that OSR hasn't taken off? Most OSR games are essentially free (as PDFs). Haven't some of the OSR games been translated to Portuguese? In the U.S. you can for example download the 7th printing of Castles & Crusades for free -- just print out some of the more needed pages -- and a dice -- and you're golden. Actually, almost every OSR game has a free version or at least a free no art version available as PDFs.
@@quantus5875it mostly comes down to finding people to play with and having it in Portuguese. The majority of people that I know of here does not know where to look this up in the internet and assume that it is just piracy, and I have not seen OSR content in pt-br so far as well.
Thieves are still mad about the PC title change and having to earn the same amount of XP as all those useless part members to advance in level. P.S. if you don't understand this you are a n00b.
You guys really are determined to make the concept of racism meaningless aren't you? You're really going to try to be cute comparing the shit the Klan has done to a company cancelling a product line that wasn't selling well enough? smh
4:55 "Rising costs across the board" is true when you finish the rest of the sentence - the rising costs of the board members' salaries and the numbers on the investors' stock reports.
Plus, the current ceo fecked up some huge company deals, so he has to cut everyone else to save his job. Even though he could retire tomorrow and his whole family would never have to worry about $ for the rest of their lives
@@brownboy534 It is normal to think more often about (and care more about) regions nearby than regions elsewhere. I'm from Europe and first had to think for a few seconds where else Portuguese is spoken than in Portugal before I thought of Brazil. Therefore, it is no surprise that Americans (with their America-centric education system) do this mistake the other way round even more.
@@nriamond8010 I disagree, when I hear Portuguese, I think of Brazil, Portugal, and the Congo. I am American, our American educational system is not America centric. It's just that people are too busy not giving a duck in school.
@@brownboy534 I would argue that, alas, our hit or miss education system usually IS more miss than hit. Which is to say that there are great teachers, and some great schools too, but unfortunately, more and more people fail to have access to that shrinking resource.
@@reactionaryprinciplegaming yeah, in fact I gifted one last christmas to my brother, I have multiple friends that don't speak english and play D&D, as well as magic
@@GuiMeloBass Interesting. When I was in Brazil, everyone I knew had D&D books had them in English (but it was probably a self-slected group of people).
I do have some of my books in english and others in portuguese, I usually buy the cheapest one I can find, because a D&D book costs more than 10% of the minimum wage here
D&D books in Brazil were released in 2019. If there had been a simultaneous release, you would only see them in Portuguese. @@reactionaryprinciplegaming
What's interesting is that the streamer Pirate Software showed that by adjusting the pricing his game in certain markets, he ended piracy of his game in those markets to essentially zero. I wonder if was a similar issue for WotC, seeing that their sales weren't the best because the price of the product wasn't localized but rather standardized... Post Script: From a very quick search, a Brazilian MTG website is selling sealed product for the same MSRP as English product. So yeah, you're going to see less sales if you're selling stuff at the same cost in different markets that... hmmm idk... Aren't the US with how much buying power we have.
Reminiscing about the Dust Bowl is my part of my job as a historian studying and documenting the Great Depression. I was honestly surprised you used that event as an analogy. So few people know about it and I hope some if your viewers look it up. Great video on an unfortunate subject. I really hope they pull their heads out and un-F themselves.
What you talking about man? They shove us through like 5 years of American History in grade school, to the extent that talking about the history of compost is a relief.
@@jonathansandusky7446 I won't dispute the amount of American History you get in grade school, but the dust bowl was one of those blink-and-you-miss-it things in my textbooks. Part of why it's boring AF is because of the choices in what to focus on; it's not completely reliable, but the less time gets spent on it, the more likely it's actually interesting. (Like, you're lucky if there's even a mention of the Pig War, which was a total black comedy because basically the boots on the ground on both sides went "This is stupid" and told the politicians to stuff it when they whined about their militaries refusing to fight. Unless you count the pig, nobody died.)
Also, pretty sure they outsourced the translation, printing, and distribution to a third party based in Brazil. So . . . . they were not even the ones incurring those increased costs.
They used to, but they ended their contract with Galápagos Jogos. After which, WotC started selling the books themselves, but the bulk of PHB buyers already had their PHB, & Wizards wasn't selling other translated books.
I got into this hobby by the Danish translation of the red boxed set back in the mid 80'ies. Without it, I might never have started playing d&d and late many other RPGs.
What frustrates me the most is that they took the rights of the previous publisher in Brazil, made some overpriced books and quit. Now I see all my favorite books going out of stock and soon enough the second-hand books will be the same price or more expensive than they were before (if you can find them). As someone who DMs for beginners in the local game store, the language barrier might just kill the hobby for so many people. What's the point in DMing DnD if the player won't be able to pursue the hobby unless they resort to piracy? I might just change to Pathfinder, at least they publish more frequently in Brazil and don't ignore our market.
Funnily enough, this was the same move they did against Gale Force 9 for making the (english) spell cards sets. They were selling too well, so WOTC first tried to cancel the license 2 years early, lost in court, and now that the GF9 license expired, WOTC has not made any moves to make the same product for the market at all. Because the point is not to make money, it's to make ALL the money, and make sure nobody alse makes ANY.
Also, privateering wotc content has been a long lasting custom around here due to wotc sometimes taking 7+ years to translate game modules for d&d and mtg. When they finally get here, prices are not localized, so we pay much more for the same product be it in English or portuguese. They haven't managed the market, just suckled on it until it stopped giving and are now flaunting away.
@@bluester7177Interesting how game companies like SEGA don't seem to have an issue with the "low spending power" of the Brazilian market and absolutely thrive there. Maybe the problem is that WOtC aren't willing to spend money on growing the brand in the region and not the people who live there. Mind you, MtG and D&D absolutely were profitable in the market. WOtC is actively sabotaging any chances of taking advantage of how underserved and devalued Brazil often is as a market. I have a sneaking suspicion that Lorcana is going to explode there in MtG's place. The same thing happened with Cardfight Vanguard in Southeast Asia back in the day too 🤷♂️
@@bluester7177 Still though... it's also about market saturation. If the market only supports making 200 units of a product? ok make 200 units... don't just.. decide it's not good enough to be worth the effort. 'cause now those are going to get a different product.
I work with someone in Brazil who has produced a rpg based on Brazilian myth and folklore. It is available in both Portuguese and English - The Elephant and Macaw Banner (A Bandeira do Elefante e da Arara in Portuguese). English version from Porcupine Games, it won an Ennie award. Discourse, I know you like some indy games, you should check it out. It's also great as a sourcebook on the monsters and society. The author has used it with schools as a way to explore their local heritage and has been well received. There is a big roleplaying market in Brazil, and if Hasbro/Wizards don't fill it, others will step up (although having the big name involved helps introduce more people).
LOL at 8 min in I got a spontaneous add for D&D with a guy opening up by saying “did you know you can play dnd anywhere in the world”. Well apparently not ANYwhere
I just want to point out that the Hadozee were not problematic before 3rd Edition, and that the problematic material about them was invented entirely by WotC.
I'd argue that they weren't even problematic in 3e. The only people who see anything "problematic" in the hadozee are people who are actively looking to be offended by everything.
One of my last phone conversations with Dave Arneson in 2008 was about keeping our product line out of the hands of the big toy-maker corporations. He believed they would ruin it, because at bottom, they did not care about it. It was a piece of their pie which we ate for too long. That after all was done, we would go back to playing Battleship, Scrabble, and Candyland. We could all forget about rpgs. 😅
Your titles and thumbnails are clickbaity as hell (as you know) but that belies the outstanding content underneath. This is great info, and a well made video, thanks so much!
Thanks abyssal!! I think this is a really important topic that a lot of people won't think is that important and might just pass by, so I wanted to make sure folk would click :)
If you had added "in portuguese" to the end of the title, it would cease to be click-baity and lose little-to-no appeal. I almost didn't click as is because I knew it was more nuanced than that. Glad I did watch, but I would appreciate the addition.
I have to agree. I always have to remind myself that your titles are _the name of the discourse you're referencing,_ not what you're actually going to say about the topic There are a lot of RU-vidrs who just take any opportunity to bash D&D because it's popular. You are definitely not one of them -- hitting WotC for their failures is aiming true, so call it as you see it -- so it might be a good idea to consider video titles that don't make it sound like you're one of the rage-baiters. Which, I emphasize, you aren't. A lot of folks will avoid these kinds of titles, even clicking the "Don't recommend this channel" option, based solely on the titles. Bear it in mind, because I'd like to see your channel rise.
@@dungeonsanddiscourse Yes, great video! I loved youe comments about if you didn't speak English -- then why are you watching this video. Super entertaining! Thanks for fighting the fight to try and keep WotC honest!😂
You are so awesome I subscribed. No wasted breath or air time. Rapid fire information that is clear and concise. You cadence and humour are fantastic. Keep up the good work.
I agree. It is hypocritical and racist of Hasbro / Wizards of the Coast abandoning Brazil and Portuguese speakers by ditching support for Portuguese despite it making net income. While they could reinvest the money in an even more profitable opportunity it betrays their stated values and is bad for the market as a whole.
Tell me you don't know how the market works without telling me you don't know how the market works. They don't care about DIE. They care about that sweet ESG investment money. Unfortunately that tap has been turned off as those companies and funds are hunkering down for a global conflict. So now you see major companies trying to insulate themselves as best you can. Also, the only racism here is you thinking this is racist. It's about profit margin not melanin content.
No this is the fundamental misunderstanding. WotC we want to sell a product at a profit margin that increases are overall profit to generate a bump in Hasbro stock price because that's where the market capitalization comes from.
10 million actually. Not counting the coastal areas of Finland and the state of Minnesota. :) But it was not released by Chaosium, rather by a local Swedish game publisher with a love for Call of Cthulhu. Just like TSR never published D&D in Swedish, we did. So no risk is actually taken by the owner of the IP.
Same! I mentioned to my gf that there was a new Dungeons & Discourse video out and she went "Oh God, NOW what have they done?" 'They' being Hasbro/WotC, obviously.
Impressive clickbait title, you are probably the best one at this skill I've seen yet. Btw, Pro Tip: anyone can play a half-species character of any mix by using the Custom Origin from Tasha's Cauldron of Everything. And yeah I am Brazilian and I think turning their back to my country that has been playing D&D since at least the 80s is effing bullshit.
There's no way Hasbro executives aren't killing the company on purpose. They, like Disney, are making TOO many bad decisions to brush off as mere incompetence any longer.
The problem here in Brasil is that they take too long to translate books. Some books took 3 to four yearts to translate. So most players do learn english or go for fan translations of the mechanics (class feats) kind of stuff.
Look into ai translators. You can even drop pdfs into them now and they'll just auto translate them. Honestly don't think the translation thing is that big of a deal unless you're wanting hardcovers.
Nah, man. Most ppl in Brazil don’t speak English, when they do, they kinda suck. They can’t even afford to learn it properly, it’s way overpriced. Yes, you’ll see many Brazilians playing D&D in English, but it’s obviously because it’s a game that 1 middle class plays the most 2 a minority that’s poor and actually made an effort to learn English sometimes even paying. That’s why so few people play it and now we’re gonna have even less. Thanks to the translations, I teached my mom D&D, how would I do that in English?
Also, everything is so damn expensive. One of the factors why I didn't got into tabletop D&D when I was a teenager was the handbooks (3rd ED at the time) were too costly, and I contented myself with pirated PDFs; nowadays, the situation is even worse there - but thank God for MTGA...
Imagine the kind of ghoulishness that looks at a part of your company's market, sees that it's only not making _as much_ profit as everywhere else, and deciding the only solution is to destroy that market. Like a person looking at their hands, seeing the pinkie fingers do the least work, and cutting them off to save the calories. The ruthless pursuit of not merely profit, but _ever increasing profit_ at any cost, is a blight on our world. A force that emmiserates us all, and will eventually kill us.
This could be a window for a Portuguese company to make an attempt to work out a deal for publication of these products. Otherwise, a 5 finger discount publication could be produced locally. But I'm going to bet that Pathfinder will be selling product in that language and be willing to take on those customers needs with less drama.
@@rmaiabr Great -- we have to advertise that! Let people know -- get everyone in Brazil and Portugal and other Portuguese speaking countries to jump on the train and screw WotC.
So, on the one hand, while I understand that in general, as long as you're covering your variable costs and eating into your fixed costs, you're better off than you were if you produced nothing at all, so it still behooves a company to produce a product even if it's making no profit AT ALL sometimes, let alone if it's making a certain level of profit, I also understand opportunity cost, where if a company has limited money to invest, it makes sense to invest it in the products and services that net them the best return. So if Peppa Pig dolls make Hasbro 20% ROI and DnD makes them 15%, they're better off making dolls. The concept that they should just make anything that turns profit ignores that money is a finite resource and that they only have so much to invest. To insist that they use some of these resources in one area presupposes that they cut resources from another and now you have the exact same "scandal" only now we don't see it because it's the Peppa Pig fandom that's up in arms, not the DnD fandom. Also, to say that Hasbro is racist or problematic for cutting their Portuguese DnD line ignores any more profitable lines they may be making or would make in Portuguese with their, again, limited resources. Your "Rank and Yank" allegory is also a little off because it's not like cutting the bard and then going into the dungeon a member short. That would be pointless. It's like cutting the bard and picking up an additional cleric because again, you have finite resources and you want to invest them in the best performing team you can. So eventually you end up with an entire team of clerics, because clerics are OP (so says the internet anyway). I DO think there's a lot of merit to your argument for accounting for and predicting for growth of your lines before you axe them, but again you have to look at growth potential of ALL your lines, and then you're back to fattening up Peppa for market if her growth potential exceeds DnD.
I don't think you're familiar with this channel -- it's lighthearted entertainment -- and a riot. She's just poking fun at the idiots that are in upper management at WotC. This channel is a blast to watch!
Fun fact: Hasbro CAN'T end dungeons and dragons. Even if they stopped selling EVERYTHING D&D TODAY, we wouldn't care. We'd still have mountains of books, dice, figurines and PDFs that we can enjoy for as long as we damn well please. We can take the trash they try to print and make it work how WE want. We also have (get this) OTHER GAMES. D&D is a cultural building block. It's not going anywhere. Players will keep it alive long after ASSBRO has buried it six feet deep. The only thing Hasbro can "end" is their own profit model. Let them.
"..maybe one of these Portuguese speakers will eventually go on to be a desperately needed Dungeon Master in an online international game." Haven't you heard Dis, we don't need human DM's any more, Hasbro/Wizards are making AI DM's to run our games. That's going to be so much more fun than a real human, eh. They only reason WotC haven't made AI players is they won't buy the product... they're too smart. Besides, no one is going to want to play once they new "edition" comes out so those unrepresented by a locally translated version can just use the old 5e books... like the rest of us are going to. 🤨
Honestly I think this is hte least obvious part of their blatant progressive as a 'image' thing. A lot of their 'fixes' are fixing their own recent issues and then blaming people who are dead, gone, or who frankly didn't do anything particularly wrong in the first part or at worst were using language shifting. Gonna be honest, this may be a weird trans woman issue but, D&D was a lot more progressive before they tried to grip me personally. I mean, *GESTURES TO TIEFLINGS* Used to be a go-to Transwoman species, because it spoke to Dysmorphia, mental issues, and felt very personal. Then they became humans with butt-head looking giant horns who are literally descendents of Devils, rather than a general diverse corruption. Obliterated clear representation. Frankly the LGBT loss to half elves wasn't too different as it was the go-to queer race who gripped on the 'never quite fitting into either world' narrative.
For those who don't know beyond the Hentai joke, DnD in Japanese is the one of the main reason why Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest exist as games. MtG in Japanese is known to be one the favorite old pass times of Myazaki, the lead behind the Dark Souls games.
I don't even know if its much of a loss. The books already took years to come out and when they did the prices were always absurd (specially compared to our purchasing power). As a Brazilian DM with players that can't read in english (which is like>90% of our population), I always relied on... external means to get the rules.
Funny thing is that first they revoke third party rights to translate (in Italy there was Asmodee that made egregious translations) then they replace them doing horrible translation themselves. Then stop translate at all. No words.
Porque o público alvo do canal não são jogadores de RPG falantes de português, eu suponho. E está levando o tópico que aqui no Brasil estamos enfrentando há algumas semanas. Este vídeo só faz sentido se estiver em inglês mesmo (ou outra língua senão o português). Se você teve dificuldade de entender esse comentário, agora pode ser empático com os jogadores de Magic e D&D falantes de português.
As a translator (not for portuguese though) I can tell you, that rising cost is a total BS argument. If anything, rates for game related translations that we translators are being paid have gone down for years now.
@@mbg4681 Oh take off eh you hoser! Go get your bunnyhug and a Toonie get some Poutine with yer name on it eh! Oh come on now you know the Canadian Tuxedo is at home as Hockey and Beer.
The move to cut off a part of your business that is bringing in profit makes about as much sense as expecting your business to only ever grow to ifinity. Like after a record growth caused by a pandemic to expect your business to keep growing more than ever before.
corp being corp, thankfully we have more options to play rpg besides D&D, Tormenta, Old Dragon, as well as translations of other games. After years of dealing with our Brazilian market, they finally abandoned what they never cared about.
Not familiar with that market -- but from a few other posts it sounds like Pathfinder is available in Portuguese as well. If I were you all, I'd just move on and play Pathfinder or one of the games you mentioned.
@@quantus5875 There is no shortage of options, we have a national d20 version, which I actually believe gives more access to TTRPGs, we have a cool production. The losers are a portion of content producers and another portion of collectors.
Same thing happened to City of Heroes back in 2012. Literally over night, the company fired the entire department assigned to the game. The crew got no warning. They were never warned that the game was on the chopping block. They weren’t even given the dignity of being told in a meeting. They were told in an email that they didn’t have jobs any more. The players were told a few hours later. The game was still profitable, just not profitable enough. The bulk of their players were in Japan, South Korea, and other east Asian nations. City Of Heroes didn’t have the same level of following as those games, and was primarily played in the US. Again, it was still profitable, still making money, just not enough.
I don't understand how "corporation cares about money" is such a shocking and outrageous revelation to people. This is not worth getting upset about. Why would you expect Hasbro to behave differently?
If Hasbro/ect. is a publicly traded company with shareholders, then you suddenly realize why a lot of things keep happening. The need to do infinite exponential growth to satisfy shareholders who will literally never be satisfied unless they get infinite money is what destroys/ruins way too many companies. And it's why some who own businesses tell you to NEVER go public, because you can never satisfy/appease shareholders when you do a million in sales and they want a billion in sales next time because HAHA STONKS GO UP, so they can get enough to retire in 2-3 months/years and then leave the sinking ship after.
Ah, it's a good time to play pathfinder. I've gone to level 20, I've got my 20 books, so now I get to use all my three actions to not have to deal with Hasbro's.
Is anyone really surprised that diversity and inclusion weren't more than just marketing schemes? Maybe I'm too cynical. Maybe you're not cynical enough?
More seriously, if D&D never had an attempt at Japan (to lose out to Call of Cthulhu, ultimately, as far as TTRPGs originating from the English market go in Japan iirc) we'd be in a world without Dragon Quest, and that would have had seismic impact on video games. Speaking to your comment about the international nature of the TTRPG community - The first GM I played in voice with online was Brazilian.
Okay so there is something about profit that most people don't understand. If you create a business and your profits are less than what you can get from a government bond currently around 4% to 5% depending on which government bond you buy you are in effect losing money. If you would get more money investing the money in a government bond than running your business, then your business isn't profitable even if technically you made money. So if with the rising cost of materials and labour due to inflation you dip below a certain point in terms of profit you are "losing money." Your investment in a business has to be significant enough that it doesn't just enter the black but enter the black enough that you wont get a better return if you invested the money else where. This isn't a case of they are too greedy but the fact that a return on investment has to be worth the effort, given that you can get 4% return by doing fuck all and buying a bond putting in the effort of running a business has to be better than the passive example. And I am just giving you the weakest example of a passive investment to show the principle at play. i don't know the Portuguese language profitability but businesses are in the business of making money, so hasbro are not just going to cancel this for no reason but they are going to only do so when the profits dip to such a low level that other passive investments would be more profitable and the reason for this is because there is a cost to shutting down something like this in terms of contracts so this isn't as simple as people want to make it out to be. Also it is better to shut down a part of your business when it is STILL profitable but you see a negative trajectory and little hope to change it. The reason for this is because you will lose money if you wait until the inevitable fall and better to have some profits to pay for the expense of shutting down that part of the business. Too many people are ignorant of basic economics and money management so all this is new to them.
1) Rank 'n Yank was good, but I had no idea the visual gag of Buckcake existed, so thank you for that! 2) This...I kinda 'get' it, but it's also really fucking dumb. Outside of Japan, the Portuguese speaking market is where I see a _lot_ of stuff coming from in terms of not only D&D but other RPGs too. You were spot on in regards to how many indie designers get their start with D&D, and a not insignificant number of OSR, artpunk-y, and general indie RPGs have very South American names attached to them. Did printing costs really jump so much that they decided to cut off those markets? Not even going to do PDFs for them? Fucking hell.
As far as I know they never bothered to translate ANY of their products to catalan.There are 10 million catalan speakers who are regularly ignored in all gaming platforms.
Old school animes like Record of Lodoss Wars and The Slayers definitely had been influenced by D&D, so you can't deny the benefits of spreading out internationally. Dropping their plans to translate in Portuguese is also like leaving money on the table. Also what was the title of the hentai manga you used for that comic panel? Asking for a friend ;-P
Peter Venkman: [to jailbirds] Everyone getting this so far? So what? I guess they just don't make them like they used to. Stantz: [slaps Venkman up the head] No! Nobody ever made them like this! The architect was either a certified genius or an authentic wacko!
Lots of people here in Florida that came from Brazil. They speak Portuguese and not a lick of English. So this affects people in the US too. How expensive is it to hire a guy to translate a book?
(not defending wizards in the slightest) but there is more than goes into it if you take into account, editing the translated copy, printing a second version, distribution, storage etc. but it is still just a shitty move to appease blood sucking share holders rather than the actual customers, because the shareholders take priority over staff, business partners or customers.
Getting rid of the concept of race in D&D is a fascinating demonstration of not understanding rl race problems. Not surprising that they continue on that course of privilege and spiting itself.
What I don't understand, is WHY anyone gives a damn what WotC does anymore? There are so many excellent other games out there that truly care about growing their audience.
I don't give a fuck about "inclusion" or whatever other political nonsense you want to see injected I to anything. I just want the game to be fun when I play it. Because if it's not fun, then I'm not playing it, and politics of any kind is the fastest way to completely eviscerate the fun right out of your game.
If a company says their priority is customers, employee or some moral initiative, know they are lying. All companies number one priority is maximizing profits this quater for their c-suite and call A shareholders. That's it.
Also, didn’t/ doesn’t GW do exactly the same thing? Guess the answer is to not float your company on the share market, and answer to a CEO who loves his product, and wants it to go global, as opposed to a bunch of morally bankrupt shareholders…
Digital platforms have a one time cost for language internationalization. And that cost would be Google Translate, followed up by fan corrections. Not so easy with physical books, and we all know if it's not quick & easy cash, companies don't want to do it.
