July is "Independence from Hasbro" Month

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So far, every month of my life has been without Hasbro, WotC, and D&D. Should I purchase something from the company on 30 June so then a boycott of them could be more legitimate in July? :tongue:
 
Fenris-77 said:
2023 has already been the Year of No Hasbro for me. Might be closer to 2 years, I don't remember the last time I bought a 5E supplement for my kids.
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Same here. I’m weaning my kids and their friends off of Hasbro. They can make their OWN D&D from so much material out there from non mega Corpos.
 
Necrozius said:
Same here. I’m weaning my kids and their friends off of Hasbro. They can make their OWN D&D from so much material out there from non mega Corpos.
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I'm not too concerned. My one teenager has some very committed 5E friends and that's ok, and the other teen who plays has already moved on to testing out the deeper waters with stuff like CoC, so mission accomplished there.
 
JAMUMU said:
It really is amazing how much one company can burn so much good will in such a short space of time.
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I hear the current CEO is proud of never having played one of his company's games. So it's a 'ship of Theseus' question. If you start replacing boards with planks of hammered shit, at what point is it no longer the ship of Theseus?
 
spittingimage said:
I hear the current CEO is proud of never having played one of his company's games. So it's a 'ship of Theseus' question. If you start replacing boards with planks of hammered shit, at what point is it no longer the ship of Theseus?
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Replacing boards is one thing, nuking 20 years of goodwill from orbit is something else.
 
I buy vanishingly little from them, mostly because of their own decisions rather than mine. I'm interested in Eberron and Planescape, and they don't visit those. I did buy Xanathar's and Tasha's... but those were my last two products. I have bought Eberron stuff on DM's Guild....
 
chuckdee said:
I buy vanishingly little from them, mostly because of their own decisions rather than mine. I'm interested in Eberron and Planescape, and they don't visit those. I did buy Xanathar's and Tasha's... but those were my last two products. I have bought Eberron stuff on DM's Guild....
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I was done after Curse of Strahd. I think that was the high-point of 5e output, and everything else just re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Of course, since then they've not only smashed into the iceberg, but they've humped it all the way down to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean.
 
I have never been a big Hasbro fan, with the exception of the occasional classic board game. Everything under their banner I tend to buy used or on clearance, as these are games I collect for completeness rather than to use. Since they don't see money from the secondary market, I feel okay about this.
 
MoonHunter said:
I have never been a big Hasbro fan, with the exception of the occasional classic board game. Everything under their banner I tend to buy used or on clearance, as these are games I collect for completeness rather than to use. Since they don't see money from the secondary market, I feel okay about this.
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We have a 35ish year old variation of not!Monopoly (older than Hasbro owning the game), that was, at the time, definitely not licensed nor endorsed and obtained from a secondary market, but I have more recently seen officially-sanctioned version for sale at obscene prices. Maybe in July, we will play another round of it as part of this Fuck Hasbro Independence from Hasbro movement. :shade:
 
I haven't played a WotC game in, well, ever. The last time I played D&D it was still owned by TSR. I do remember when my brother and sister-in-law got heavily into MtG. I took one look and said, "Well, I'm glad you're having fun." So, I think I have this one covered.
 
I have been a semi regular purchaser of WotC stuff. Never had any hate for them although I thought 4e was a colossal screw up. The cancel the OGL thing pushed me to negative opinion. I haven't bought anything since then.
 
Going forward I will endeavor to pay even less attention to WOTC than the zero attention I do now.

But what's with everone plumping for fucking Cairn?!!! I bought it, and I feel like I was scammed... there's no THERE there. It's a tiny pamphlet riffing off of ITTO... but with barely any content... yet I continue to see near-frothing support for it.
 
Simlasa said:
Going forward I will endeavor to pay even less attention to WOTC than the zero attention I do now.

But what's with everone plumping for fucking Cairn?!!! I bought it, and I feel like I was scammed... there's no THERE there. It's a tiny pamphlet riffing off of ITTO... but with barely any content... yet I continue to see near-frothing support for it.
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Welcome to the internet of things. Would you like a small bag of stale peanuts while you wait for soft-core reality to right itself?
 
I don’t know if I’ll boycott Hasbro but the only WotC stuff I’ve bought in recent memory are TSR era products and I’m ok not buying any more of those as I have pretty much everything I want now.
 
Fenris-77 said:
Replacing boards is one thing, nuking 20 years of goodwill from orbit is something else.
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Current corporate thinking perceives ‘goodwill’ as something they can manufacture, as opposed to an organic quality that exists outside their power to control. So I would argue the board does not believe in the same things we, as drones, believe in.
 
Burgonet said:
Current corporate thinking perceives ‘goodwill’ as something they can manufacture, as opposed to an organic quality that exists outside their power to control. So I would argue the board does not believe in the same things we, as drones, believe in.
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By 'the board' to whom do you refer? If you mean the Hasbro board, then the continued massive, inbred, and astonishing misreading of the hobby continues unfettered.
 
I've said it before, but I simply don't think a corporation of Hasbro's size can ever support a hobby game like D&D over the long term. It's survived this long purely on the dying embers of culture from when WotC was a real game company. Once those embers go out, Hasbro is never going to be able to re-ignite them.

Hasbro is the analogue version of Electronic Arts. Once they truly run the actual game of D&D into the game, they'll just keep looking for other ways to make money off the name, maybe crossing it over with another brand they own: Axis and Allies: D&D-Day.
 
TheSaint said:
I haven't played a WotC game in, well, ever. The last time I played D&D it was still owned by TSR. I do remember when my brother and sister-in-law got heavily into MtG. I took one look and said, "Well, I'm glad you're having fun." So, I think I have this one covered.
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The first time I saw MtG, I watched two people who owned the comic store thinking of purchasing the game, play it.
At the end of this, there was a discussion of their sales model. “Ah,” I said. “The old baseball card model.”

Afterwards, I was asked my own opinion. I believe I said something along the lines of -
“It will make a lot of money. But it is essentially the gaming equivalent of crack. It’ll be very popular, but attract and create gaming addicts.”
And, at risk of offending? That is exactly the game has done since. Their sales model consistently remodels their wheel, and relies upon a mature-and-addicted audience (as in as big as it will get, not necessarily age), to continually consume their product with regular and frequent payments.

This is what One D&D is looking to lean towards, you cannot ‘monetize’ a product line without using addiction modelling.
I haven’t bought D&D since mid 4.0 days, and I shall not ever again. It is because of the above observations.
 
Fenris-77 said:
By 'the board' to whom do you refer? If you mean the Hasbro board, then the continued massive, inbred, and astonishing misreading of the hobby continues unfettered.
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The Board is the King and his Court Of the corporate sector.
 
I have the three 5e core books so I can play a bit of D&D with one friend, but I mostly buy third-party adventures and supplements for it.

I think I've given most of my money over the last couple of years to Free League and Chaosium.
 
Burgonet said:
The first time I saw MtG, I watched two people who owned the comic store thinking of purchasing the game, play it.
At the end of this, there was a discussion of their sales model. “Ah,” I said. “The old baseball card model.”

Afterwards, I was asked my own opinion. I believe I said something along the lines of -
“It will make a lot of money. But it is essentially the gaming equivalent of crack. It’ll be very popular, but attract and create gaming addicts.”
And, at risk of offending? That is exactly the game has done since. Their sales model consistently remodels their wheel, and relies upon a mature-and-addicted audience (as in as big as it will get, not necessarily age), to continually consume their product with regular and frequent payments.

This is what One D&D is looking to lean towards, you cannot ‘monetize’ a product line without using addiction modelling.
I haven’t bought D&D since mid 4.0 days, and I shall not ever again. It is because of the above observations.
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Oh, yeah, that was my brother and SIL to the hilt. They, at one point, had several large storage boxes filled with MtG cards, sleeved and indexed. They were in for multiple tens of thousands of dollars. They talked as if it was an investment they were going to retire off of. Needless to say, that didn't happen.
 
TBH, that strategy has worked out for M:tG. If it's at all doable with RPGs, you can expect Wotc/Hasbro to do it.

My shitty, cynical take is that if gamers couldn't quit WotC when its actions threatened damn near everyone in the entire RPG hobby, they're not going to quit WotC for threatening one YouTuber. The furor over this won't last nearly as long, and Magic players are even more entrenched than D&D players. Hell, there are way more viable alternatives - damn near reproductions, in fact - to D&D than there are to Magic, and people still begged WotC to stay. What are Magic players gonna do? Play Yu-Gi-Oh instead? Please.

Magic's market dominance makes D&D look like a medium-sized fish in a very small pond. But WotC should take heart. While their recent shenanigans may have cost them some "goodwill," they've also shown that there is a very hard core of fans willing to go down with the ship.

And to be even shittier and more cynical, a month-long boycott is a dumb idea. WotC knows full well that in this case, "boycott" just means "buy next month." It will have a negligible effect on their bottom line this year. At least compared to OGLgate.
 
Of course, the combined insult of both things could turn the tide against WotC. Maybe I'm just a negative creep.
 
Gringnr said:
TBH, that strategy has worked out for M:tG. If it's at all doable with RPGs, you can expect Wotc/Hasbro to do it.

My shitty, cynical take is that if gamers couldn't quit WotC when its actions threatened damn near everyone in the entire RPG hobby, they're not going to quit WotC for threatening one YouTuber. The furor over this won't last nearly as long, and Magic players are even more entrenched than D&D players. Hell, there are way more viable alternatives - damn near reproductions, in fact - to D&D than there are to Magic, and people still begged WotC to stay. What are Magic players gonna do? Play Yu-Gi-Oh instead? Please.

Magic's market dominance makes D&D look like a medium-sized fish in a very small pond. But WotC should take heart. While their recent shenanigans may have cost them some "goodwill," they've also shown that there is a very hard core of fans willing to go down with the ship.

And to be even shittier and more cynical, a month-long boycott is a dumb idea. WotC knows full well that in this case, "boycott" just means "buy next month." It will have a negligible effect on their bottom line this year. At least compared to OGLgate.
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If a month long boycott isn't compensated with 2 months worth of buying the company loses one Junes worth of revenue. June is likely to be a lower revenue month just due to summer though.
 
Gringnr said:
And to be even shittier and more cynical, a month-long boycott is a dumb idea. WotC knows full well that in this case, "boycott" just means "buy next month." It will have a negligible effect on their bottom line this year. At least compared to OGLgate.
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Well, the good news, in the cynical sense, is that the only people in the world more short-sighted than gamers are corporate executives. If WotC has a crappy July then Hasbro may just can a bunch of middle managers before they even see the August numbers. Just look at what happened with Bud Light.
 
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