Despite Being Up $200+ Million, WotC Employees Hit By Hasbro Layoffs
WotC employees, particularly those on the D&D team, were among the 1,100 fired from Hasbro for the “health of the company” yesterday.
It took less than a day of folks wondering if Hasbro would indeed look at their goose that lays their golden eggs and decide “you know, those eggs aren’t necessarily as big as we’d like.” One day after announcing that the company would be laying off roughly one fifth of their workforce, it has become apparent that WotC employees are among those who have been let go, with a few posting that yesterday (just under two weeks before Christmas) was their last day at Wizards of the Coast.
This, despite WotC being the “breadwinner” at Hasbro. Per their earnings report, Wizards of the Coast is up 40%, per their third quarter financial results. Here’s a direct quote from the earnings report (emphasis ours):
“Wizards of the Coast and Digital Gaming delivered a standout performance across strength in Magic: the Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons, particularly the blockbuster August release of Baldur’s Gate III.”
A standout performance. And yet, later the very day that Hasbro planned to announce folks would be gone, the news started breaking on social media. A number of now-former WotC employees, on both the Magic: the Gathering and D&D teams posted about having been fired.
Well. Today was my last day at Wizards. Not sure what's next.
— Dan Dillon (@Dan_Dillon_1) December 12, 2023
Advertisement
As part of the recent Hasbro headcount reductions, I have been let go from Wizards of the Coast, effective today. I cannot tell you how honored it has been to work with the wonderful and talented people at WOTC. (1/2_
— Larry Frum (@lfrum) December 12, 2023
These are folks who had been there for years, and often in more senior positions. Larry Frum was Senior Communications Manager at WotC. They have contributed to the incredible run of years that led to Wizards of the Coast being valued at more than $1 billion. And, as others hinted, the cuts run deeper than some of the more public-facing employees. As Eytan Bernstein, a former senior development editor posted on Facebook:
“I was one of the people laid off during the Hasbro layoff this week. I know of four other people on the D&D team who confirmed they were affected, but I’ll leave it to them if they want to post about it. This includes folks on the art, design, editorial, and product management depts., and that’s just who I’ve heard about.”
And it’s not just the people fired who are hit by this. As teams are pared down, that means extra work for fewer people. And all right before the holidays.
Hasbro Hacks Away At Their Goose That Laid The Golden Egg
It is easy to decry Chris Cocks, the CEO of Hasbro, who consciously made the decision to fire 1,100 employees two weeks before Christmas, wondering what sort of an idiot would fire people when the numbers are going up. Because isn’t that what the numbers are supposed to do?
Indeed, earlier, before the posts about the firings started trickling in, that was the sentiment on social media. Hasbro might be laying folks off, but WotC is doing better than ever, so people there should be safe. As legendary designer Owen K.C. Stephens put it in yet another tweet about the layoffs:
“Hasbro’s overall revenue declined 10%. But WotC revenue is up 40% to $423.6 million, netting a $203.4 million operating profit. So if Hasbro lays off a *single* WotC employee, they are idiots.”
Now, it’s hard to know who exactly decided which employees should be laid off. All we do know is that in the memo detailing the firing, which was shared with various news outlets, Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks said it was a hard but necessary decision, made only “as a last resort” to ensure the “health” of the company.
And if you’re wondering right now, how is it healthy to let go of employees who are, by the most objectively available metric, overperforming, you would be right to do so. After all, WotC remains the most (if not only) profitable part of Hasbro. They are succeeding where the rest of the company is mired in flagging toy sales, the Toy division, specifically is the one bleeding profits, so why touch the other parts of the company?
No one would blame you for thinking that the CEO, who took home a $9.4 million compensation package in the last year, was perhaps being short sighted. In the same way that Scrooge was perhaps being a little miserly.
But the problem isn’t the CEO. After all, Cocks didn’t get the job by being stupid. And the health of the company isn’t measured in the overall culture of its employees or their well-being. If it was, a markedly different announcement would have gone out.
Cocks is making all the “right” decisions. Once you realize that the job of the CEO of a publicly traded company like Hasbro isn’t to ensure that the company makes good products. That’s just a thing that they happen to do. The main function of Hasbro is to funnel as much money as possible to the executives and shareholders thereof.
The $9.4 million compensation and layoffs in the face of record profits is the system functioning as intended. We can safely say this, because layoffs like those happening right now at WotC aren’t isolated.
2023 – Record Profits, Record Layoffs
As Aftermath puts it, extremely eloquently, “nothing has defined 2023 more than people losing their jobs.” You only need look at the video game industry, a billions-dollar industry that has seen, this year alone, the release of some of the best games in years, if not ever. This is a year when we saw Baldur’s Gate 3, Phantom Liberty, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and then some.
But despite studios boasting record sales, and massive profits, the games industry has been gutted over the last year. Layoffs abound at pretty much every major studio, from Ubisoft to Epic Games, and Firaxis, companies that are all doing well.
And it’s the same in almost every industry, right now. People are cutting costs even when the numbers go up. It’s all about the short term gain. Because if the company tanks, well, that’s what golden parachutes are for.
The problem isn’t that people like Chris Cocks or the executives at EA, or any other major corporation are greedy or even especially venal. It’s that this is what the system is meant to do. The machine is working completely as intended. The money is going to the right places, it’s flowing upwards. What else is it supposed to do?
If this wasn’t the case, then, working hard to help your company make record profits that keep your parent company looking good on paper would be enough to keep you from getting laid off. When hard work doesn’t even guarantee you’ll get to keep your job, what is even the point?
What Can Any Of Us Do?
The most disheartening thing about this is, that this is probably not going to be the only wave of layoffs. There’s bound to be more coming. Even when your product is successful, people still get laid off. It’s creating a crisis, as Polygon writes:
“This has been one of the worst years for workers in a long, long time. (Polygon interviewed more than a dozen game developers for this story.) Unofficial trackers suggest more than 7,000 video game workers have been laid off in 2023; for comparison, another community-driven list suggested there were roughly 1,000 in 2022. The nearby tech industry has seen a 716% increase in layoffs announced year over year, too, according to research firm Challenger Gray & Christmas.”
And again, this all just companies working as intended. The greed is the point. It’s all about greed. But eventually this kind of short-term gain, long-term postponement is going to come due. And the people creating this situation will never be impacted by this. No one’s going to take away Chris Cocks’ multimillions. What does any CEO care?
Everyone still holds up the one time Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata and the rest of the executive took massive pay cuts (Iwata took a 50% pay cut) instead of firing people, as a really cool thing. And that was back in 2014. When Nintendo was doing poorly because of the Wii U underperforming.
A few other companies are doing this, as the CEOs of major companies like Apple and Google took paycuts (don’t worry though, Google still laid off 12,000 employees earlier this year, and then laid off even more people later).
But in the face of all this, it’s easy to feel powerless. What can anyone do? Hard work isn’t the answer, so what is?
Maybe the answer lies in supporting communities. It takes extra work, but you can find people out there who are making stuff to make stuff (and also make a living) not to make money for some nebulous shareholders and executives. A notable, recent example of this is MCDM studios, who are making a fairly big splash in the tabletop scene with their Kickstarter.
But you don’t have to have a big sexy project that makes millions to make a difference. There are people out there who do good work. Find a podcast you like or a creator’s Patreon. It’s a start. Even then, it’s only a start. I don’t know how you fix greed and capitalism without some kind of serious intervention.
But hey, if you have any answers, let us know. In the meantime, best of luck to those facing layoffs, especially right now.
