From: <[Thomas Granvold] at [Eng.Sun.COM]> Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.announce Subject: [NEWS] Statement from Wizards of the Coast Date: Fri, 08 Dec 95 04:51:26 GMT From: <[Thomas Granvold] at [Eng.Sun.COM]> Here is a statement from the president of Wizards of the Coast as posted on their Everway mailing list. If you wish to make comments about this please address them to WoTC at: [l--i--n] at [wizards.com] or at: Wizards of the Coast P.O. Box 707 Renton, WA 98055 Take care, Tom Granvold <[thomas granvold] at [eng.sun.com]> ------------ Begin Statement ---------------- Greetings. I thought it would be appropriate to describe personally some of the events transpiring at Wizards of the Coast (WotC). The rumor mill is exploding and it's important you hear directly from me what the heck we're up to. First of all, 1995 was an outstanding year for WotC and the adventure gaming industry. Our sales are at an all-time high. Magic is doing better than ever. Sales and profits this year have doubled over last year and we are expecting further growth in the future. Our research indicates there is still a vast untapped market for Magic and other trading card games. (Note, I use the term "trading card game" instead of "collectable card game" because I believe the emphasis should be on social interaction and trading rather than speculation). We will be investing the majority of our energies in this direction. We will continue to focus most on the game play, tournament, event, and international dimensions to these games. We will be using the profits from our trading card games to fund our new Events business. We see the future possibilities for this area as more than simply a marketing and customer service tool. We believe there are great opportunities for innovation here. This area will be a major focus for our game design and development staff, including Richard Garfield, who plans to spend a significant amount of time in this area. We will also be pursuing new opportunities in the world of electronic games. Unfortunately not all of our current lines of business are as promising. We have taken a good hard look at ourselves and we have decided to cut loose some of these areas. I'll discuss each of these in turn. We are pretty much saying good bye to the roleplaying genre, at least for now. This is very hard for us, particularly for me specifically. I founded Wizards of the Coast with the dream of building a great roleplaying game company that would discover the RPG that would break out of the RPG industry and bring more gamers to roleplaying. The company's first book was The Primal Order, a book that I authored and am immensely proud of. But I have come to the conclusion that if anyone is going to do something great and innovative with RPGs, it'll probably be someone else. I bow from the field. My overriding priority in the area of RPGs is to make sure that our existing lines find good homes. All of our RPG lines are for sale; we will entertain any proposal (but make it quick). If you wish to inquire about these lines as a possible acquisition, please contact Lisa Stevens here at WotC. Our main priority will not be how much money we can make from the divestiture, but whether or not the company making taking over the line will give them the love and attention they deserve. David Allsop, the original designer of SLA Industries, will have final say on where SLA Industries ends up, for example. Note that I do not look at this as a disservice to RPGs. I think we WERE doing a disservice to RPGs by not giving them adequate support. We simply do not seem to be able to do a great job in the RPG business. We have never admited this before, but we have lost money on every single RPG product we've published, from The Primal Order and Talislanta all the way up until now with Ars Magica and Everway. But no matter how much you love an industry, if you can't make money at it eventually you have to walk away from it and let others carry the torch. Table Games are something that's just going to be low key for us for awhile. We're not dropping our interest in them, but we don't have the R&D resources to build them right now. Richard and his crew are more interested in working on Deckmaster games, Events, and other stuff. We will continue to provide support to Great Dalmuti and Robo Rally, and I'm sure you'll probably catch me playing one or the other at a convention from time to time, but for now we're going to slow down in this area. One of the reasons we have to slow down in the Table Games area is that most sales of these games are in the "mass market" distribution channel through stores like Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Target, and other discount chains. Since we really don't want to grow in that direction right now, it doesn't make sense to put R&D resources there. But stay tuned; if I know Richard he'll continue to design these sorts of games, and when we have a sufficient backlog of material we'll probably dive back into the fray. Another business we are dropping is book publishing. While we've built an excellent team for publishing books, we think we can better support our game lines by working with major book publishing companies that focus on this business and understand it better than we do. This leaves us with the following primary areas of focus: Magic, other trading card games, events, international, and research. We will continue to increase our investments in customer service, employees, sales, marketing, and internal support systems. We predict that 1996 will be our strongest year to date and the greatest year ever for the adventure gaming industry. If you are a retailer or distributor who is wondering how to respond, here are my words of advice. I would encourage you to do what we did--examine your business carefully and focus on the products that have done well for you in the past, and that you think have the quality and play value to do well for you in the future. We believe strongly in Magic and our other trading card games, and we're putting our money where our mouth is by focusing on them. You can count on our support in these areas. We will try our best to put our divested RPGs within companies we think will focus on them. Every product line you support deserves to have a publisher behind it who believes in it and is willing to do everything they can to help you promote it. In the end it's the customer who demands and deserves high quality well-supported games. We need to concentrate on providing our customers with this service, and grow our lines and services at a sustainable rate. Mavra (Peter D. Adkison) Janitor, Wizards of the Coast, Inc. ------------ End Statement -------------- ******************************************************************* * Moderator: Coyt D. Watters [watters 10] at [osu.edu] * * - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - * * Access problems (modems always busy) expect delays on posts * *******************************************************************