@returd's comment on 'Wizards of the Coast Employee breaks silence, says WotC "see consumers as obstacles between them and their money" and slams the company on the OGL'

Honestly, they were going about this the wrong way. The real way to take the money from the bastard is selling painted miniatures, customized action figures, and releasing multiple adventures in different formats. Eat GWS lunch. Start selling figures at their scale and style them so they'll fit into the WH40K aesthetic. You have the factories already with your other companies. Why not use them? Also an official MLP Dungeons and Dragons setting might be worth releasing in PDF form or even kickstarting it. If the suckers are dumb enough to give you their money why not do it? What other IP does Hasbro out and out own? GI JOE? You probably can't make it work in 5th edition but d20 modern is still a thing. A stupid thing. Release it in that. There are still weirdos out there playing that game. You should be trying to sell them new and better merchandise. Does Duel Masters have anything cool you can plunder? There are dozens of worlds in in Magic The Gathering you can sell as settings. You don't even have to commission new art for those.

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MARFAN_EATS_DOODOO doo/doo 🤣😂🤣 1yr ago #3408139

IMO, it's not something unique to WotC, it's the mindset of every major corporation these days.

I think it's because with the internet and global markets, the competition between firms isn't about fighting for customers - the customer base is essentially infinite, or at least much bigger than the firms need, so the goal isn't to serve your customers better so they come to you instead of your competitors. What's scarce is investment capital - more and more of the equity markets are consolidated into fewer and fewer players, and since the modern share market is much more speculative (i.e. investors buy not on the expected value of the share of the profits they get as dividends, but on the ability to flip their shares to someone else at a higher price later, who in turn is only buying because they anticipate flipping the shares, there's no regard to the fundamentals of the business), the goal is to compete with other firms by showing the capital investors that you can offer the best return on investment.

Under this mindset, you don't have customers to serve, you have assets to monetise, you've gotta show the moneymen that you're getting faster and faster growth with lots of new revenue streams - you don't actually need for these to pan out, because noone cares about whether you're actually making profits so much as whether you look like you're growing so you can be flipped to another speculator. And in that mindset, customers are an obstacle - they're preventing you from monetising your assets by standing between you and their money.

Huh this is a pretty good explanation for a phenomenon that's been happening a lot recently.