Comment by echohack5 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by echohack5 | Hacker News Reader

This is straight up gaslighting. The original language says NOTHING about NFTs and barely anything about acceptance use or community guidelines.

Hasbro is down 40% YoY. It's very, very plain that the entire goal of this was to drive players into DnDBeyond and then charge them a subscription fee because DnD's primary customer is DMs and not players. The entire point is to delete their competitors like Roll20, Foundry, or 3rd party sellers in the digital space.

This blog post is a smokescreen under the guise of "feedback". They were asking folks to SIGN the OGL 1.1. There wasn't a feedback period or words about how this was an early early draft that would change based on feedback. SHESH.

Hasbro tried this with 4th edition by making the rules of the game more wargame-like to force regular players to buy minis (there were even rules initially that for official dnd events that you could only use OFFICIAL minis) but they backed down on this even too. Same thing, different go to market.

The fools in Hasbro's executive suite are NOT decades-old players of DnD and they have no idea what they're doing. They have no commitment to players: Hasbro shareholders is where their loyalties lie.

I've played TTRPGs for 25+ years and this behavior is also completely unsurprising from Hasbro/WoTC.

> The fools in Hasbro's executive suite are NOT decades-old players of DnD and they have no idea what they're doing.

This is nearly every single corporation in America. We are veritably infested with a caste of the "business class" who are completely unqualified to run anything, and indeed don't even care about running these companies. Instead they hop from company to company, ripping out the internals of whatever made that company great in the first place, laying off talented people, randomly closing down "cost centers", and doing everything they can to get an immediate stock price bump now, even if it literally destroys the company down the road. They don't care; by then they will have jumped to a different company. That's the game, and it's played an entire echelon of C-level Harvard Business School grads whose daddies helped them get admitted. The dystopia where corporations are ruthless profit-seeking entities would be better than what we have now, which is that corporations are the playthings of a caste of modern-day corporate raiders. The rest of us look at the decisions made by giant corporations and ask "how can they be so stupid?" They're not being stupid, they're being viruses, and viruses can still be successful even when they sometimes kill their hosts.

The question then becomes: Why does the market keep rewarding these decisions with short-term stock price increases, if they are obviously bad decisions for the long-term health of the company?

Because the phrase "make hay while the sun shines" can convince people it's good even when they could've otherwise kept the sun out longer.

The market is only about as intelligent as a dog?

Because Hasbro is in the S&P 500. There’s a constant bid wall from 401ks purchasing it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com