Hasbro lays off nearly 20% of its workers
polygon.com
polygon.com
There was a big investor push recently (led by Alta Fox) to get Hasbro to spin WotC out into an independent company [0], which failed. The big concern being that forcing growth on those properties (Magic: the Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons) to continue to support failed strategies with legacy properties could risk ruining those properties through mismanagement for short-term gains.
I really don't know where Hasbro goes from here. I don't think the toy market will ever recover, and the board game world has completely passed by properties like Monopoly. Chris Cocks, the CEO is the former head of WotC, so I'm hoping there is some level of understanding of stewardship of the WotC properties, but I'm really not confident. Even the recent D&D movie was disappointing from a business perspective (although surprisingly wonderful for fans). They also have a huge success in Baldur's Gate 3, although it is also disappointing from a monetization perspective. Even those recent lukewarm wins are within the WotC umbrella.
[0] - https://www.wargamer.com/dnd/hasbro-wins-wizards-of-the-coas...
So much potential, such a large world, and nothing. Blizzard spun up large business around basically 1% of what they're sitting on top off. Toys can be their sideshow. Alas..
It's hard to describe the effect. Essentially this is what happened with LOTR.
Also take for instance the recent D&D movie which was just ok/slightly good. The movie cheapens the D&D IP, while something like Baldurs Gate builds on it.
Maybe from a business perspective it's the most profitable move but for the original subject the IP was centered around, whether it was books, games loses the charm if the movie sucks and Hollywood churns out shit movies for a quick buck really fast.
It's not always bad though. While Marvel did well, DC did not.
It's weirdly irrational but that's just how people behave.
I think the other D&D game that came out recently (Dark Alliance) is probably a better example of devaluing the brand.
Only the D&D universe allows for games like the BG series or Torment. It's all about the lore.
Let's make no mistake, D&D is all about the lore. The RPG mechanics are pretty generic. You have thousands of cookie cutter rpgs out there (especially jrpgs) with complex and interesting game play mechanics that are largely forgettable. D&D is still relevant not because of the game play mechanics, but because of the lore. And this lore was not really used very well in Honor among thieves.
Maybe you're right though. The D&D universe is specifically designed to support complex narratives and generic ones as well. Though for honor among thieves with the D&D name featured so prominently in the title I'm sure most people unfamiliar with D&D walked away thinking that D&D was some generic fantasy universe. D&D Lore is better, deeper and more complex than GOT or LOTR by a huge margin. It's barely comparable it's like comparing GOT with the Harry Potter universe.
I think the thing I enjoyed the most about Honor Among Thieves was how the different characters were manifestations of player archetypes. You have the master planner, the strong and silent, the high-level lawful good guest player who the DM sets up an extra-hard challenge for, and so on.
Season 8 of Game of Thrones.
The spin off was alright but I didn't really care enough to keep it up, and I get a lot of people didn't. LOTR comes to mind too, ditto for a lot of the "slop" that Disney has been pushing for Star Wars.
There is a lot more stuff out there, and most of it isn't great, so Ima tune it out until the test of time determines if it's worth it.
For some reason, call it mid-pandemic boredom, my wife and I saw Hasbro's GI Joe film "Snake Eyes" in theaters. That was pretty awful.
According to most people, the one from 2023 is the good one.
The next two were a bit less inspiring.
Imagine if they made good games, they could have locked down the most lucrative market for a company of its size and type.
My four year old son found a "search and find" D&D book for kids at the store, and it is now one of his favorite books. He loves the kid friendly D&D products, and will presumably continue to be a fan.
Unlike other huge IP franchises that are spear headed by a single set of characters or story, D&D has an enormous world with no single focus that makes it easily adaptable to various media and spin offs.
My son is now enthralled with the various dragons, monsters, and the idea of heroes looking for treasure. I hope they continue to make toys, games, minis and media for all age groups!
Also people are having less kids these days -- for better or worse (I think worse) -- so people have less need for toys. Also kids love just paying video games on tablets and PCs, so also less need for physical toys.
I am not sure Chris Cocks will preserve wotc.
First an interesting fact: one of the people pushing Alta Fox to meddle with Hasbro is a guy that was MTG player in the 90s.
Now about Chris Cocks: after he became CEO of WotC, the company did grow but making lots of short term focused things, like ditching the Pro scene, spamming Commander and Modern products (and I am a heavy Commander player...) spamming foils and other collectible crap, and reducing good promotional prizes.
Also they ditched some good products to offer complete crap after he became CEO, for example the holiday boxes were wildly useful and today they are crazy expensive because how useful and cool they are, if you find them. But lots and lots of stores has the Chris era gift products stuck on shelves collecting dust.
Then after he became Hasbro CEO things got somehow worse, like the OGL stupidity, 35th anniversary product that is ludicrously expensive, selling pre-sale products on Amazon official WotC store so cheap it undercut stores so badly they lost money.
My group also all had the same visceral reaction to the OGL kerfuffle early this year and moved to Pathfinder 2e. I had a lot of fun with 5e, but it had already grown stale for me before all of the madness and short sighted decisions anyway.
They should make WotC’s management in charge of the overall company. I had a chance to work with them extensively on MTG internet properties and they are a cut above most management teams.
Chris is an interesting mix and as long as he makes long-term choices instead of them plethora of short term profit driven choices he’s been criticized for he is capable and thoughtful. I don’t think we’ve seen what he can do as he has always been beholden to the parent corporation’s culture.
With the exception of DnD, everything else Hasbro-owned has failed to capture such an audience I think.
Their toys are generally priced ~$25 or less. Higher-end variants of their toys are not by Hasbro, but rather by other companies. Want a high-end nerf gun? You're going to Dart Zone, not Hasbro.
On Amazon their toys are competing on the same footing with the cheaper (often better) knock-off brands.
Their board games are dated and haven't really evolved. Monopoly is $15 while Catan is $100, /r/HotWheels collectors want old cars not the cheap new ones, etc.
By comparison, brands like Lego have evolved, are insanely expensive (>$100) and I constantly see adults with disposable income purchasing them en-mass while they're not really affordable as kids toys anymore.
Isn't Pulse/HasLab that? For example they have a $300 Ghost Trap and P.K.E. Meter.
[1] https://hasbropulse.com/collections/haslab/products/ghostbus...
Lego was pretty famous for doing branded partnerships and still struggling [1]. This lead them to come up with more of their own IP like Bionicle and Ninjago.
I thought that Lego prices had remained pretty steady over time.
https://realityprose.com/what-happened-with-lego/
OK, that study was published 10 years ago, but I haven't noticed any huge price hikes in the last decade for comparable sets. Yes, there are some bigger sets now than there used to be, but the small sets haven't gone away and are still there too, at what seem like reasonable (to me) prices. And while sets based on licensing deals (e.g. Marvel/Disney) are a bit more pricey than their own in-house ranges (City, Creator, Friends, Ninjago, etc...), again it doesn't seem like a huge gap?
I can't come up with something I would buy from Hasbro in that range and having something to do with it though.
And there is Lego master tv show which also makes a lot of sense.
They have expanded their product range upwards, but they still have tons of inexpensive, non-3rd-party-brand Lego sets.
Maybe they thought it would have sold like a Divinity 3 and as such gave Larian a better deal on the IP licensing than they think they could have got if they'd known in advance how well it would sell.
I would buy the heck out of another DnD game like BG. Shame anyone would look at that and say meh, more battlefield.
* hasbro board games * enjoyable board games
In fact, I would say that hasbro, and especially monopoly, are responsible for a huge chunk of people thinking all board games are terrible. When I was younger, I never understood why they didn't use their large corporate resources to either purchase or create some better games.. But nowadays I realise they are more like a toy and branding company - it's just not how they work.
Hasbro stuff is just garbage quality. I'm sure there is a problem with my adult taste expecting more, but the plastic they use is horrible at touch.
That's about it, I just don't buy garbage stuff.
We live in a parallel toy world where every toy I had was substantially better quality then my children. Really annoying. I often have to buy model stuff to give them decent toys (and those break!).
I don't mean that to be hyperbolic - like, literally, that's the sort of thing that was culturally cast as villainous behavior a generation or two ago.
Even a recent re-watch of "Tommy Boy" really drove home how much of a toll Reagonomics took on the industrial midwest. I never really understood why the man was so revered, but I guess he put on a good act that people bought into.
So, yes, those positions existed back then but they weren’t culturally ascendent the way they were by the turn of the century.
(1) lay off people right before the biggest American holiday, and
(2) lay off people right after they helped a toy company crunch through the lead-up to Christmas.
Since this is like the 4th toplevel comment with this point and each one generates huge threads of people pretty much saying the same thing over and over again, I'm curious whether anyone has actually read any other information about this or if everyone is just reacting to the Polygon article by making the same comment.
[1]: https://www.ign.com/articles/dungeons-dragons-owner-hasbro-l...
[2]: https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/hasbro-layoffs-toy-compa...
Now we are paid bonus yearly and I see firings in December. I think it does align to expenditures like bonus, for sure.
I wonder what kind of social change would occur if each company was randomly assigned a quarter in which their taxes were due instead of everyone defaulting to the same exact time.
other countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiscal_year#Chart_of_various_f...
Their singular goal becomes making stockholders (more accurately market analysts) look favorably at them. I hate it so much.
The biggest drawback is stock investors are too short sighted, and value things that are good for 1 quarter and bad for 10 years.
Whatever happened with Valve, it should be repeated
That shareholders and execs accept a few quarters of low/no growth? Infinite growth quarter-over-quarter is madness.
This is one of the rare cases in the layoff discussions where the exec salaries do seem quite excessive.
Hasbro had been averaging profits of around ~$250M for the last several years.
Paying ~5 people >10% of your profits is INSANE. Continuing to reward them handsomely as your profits drop from ~$250M to -$500M is REALLY INSANE.
Fire them. The new hires should be making 1/5th that or less.
And, yes, you can get someone competent to run Hasbro for $1M.
It's not a fusion reactor...
It's costing the investors who they work for that much money.
It might not be impacting the balance sheet.
> Paying ~5 people >10% of your profits is INSANE.
Wouldn't profits be determined after wages are paid?
Thing is, laying people off in January would be even worse, for pretty much the same reason. As much as getting laid off during the holidays is a gut punch, it's probably ultimately better to go on the job market right before the January hiring season than to get laid off right after it wraps up.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SERE01
That's got to come straight out of Hasbro's bottom line.
A good example would be cable TV, and the introduction of videogames and streaming services. While the latter both are technically competing with cable TV, prices didn't change for the better.
Cable TV didn't come down in price or go up in quality, and so it is losing subscribers in droves.
Supply and demand at work.
That's a bit like saying that dildos aren't so popular because people chose to watch porn online.
The "entertainment market", expressed as "anything to do in your free time", is unquantifiable, because it would include anything, from drinking alcohol to traveling to the Philippines, to driving around in circles. And if you cannot define its boundaries, the movement of goods and services cannot be calculated either.
In this case, physical toys aren't that popular anymore, because a change in societal preferences in a certain age range. People "in the market" for physical toys are "less". Hasbro wouldn't be competing with videogames, because people buying videogames would have no interest at all in physical toys.
Competition to Hasbro toy products is coming mostly from generic manufacturers. Go to a Target store, and take a look at how many parents choose random crap, instead of branded toys.
With young kids' toys given as gifts, you're a little stuck, if they really want, say, specific Transformers.
But for entertainment that teens and adults buy for ourselves, there's more choice...
I can see how MtG lifestyle players who use genuine cards might be locked into continuing to give money to a Hasbro brand.
But maybe not for some of the other brands. For example, (speaking as a former DM who wrote some modules), do D&D players really need much more than d20 dice, graph paper, and an imagination?
Or do others disagree?
Of course details vary country to country.
One fairly common thing is you can opt to take it as an lump sum now, or take it as a monthly salary - but with the proviso that if you take a new job you stop getting it. This is often the way benefit extensions work also. Sometimes the monthly option is larger.
So financially you are often better off with the lump sum, but it can be a tax hit.
Otherwise, management and shareholders are just going to keep operating in this manner and treating workers poorly and nothing will change.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
> "As you know people, as you learn about things, you realize that these generalizations we have are, virtually to a generalization, false. Well, except for this one, as it turns out. What you think of Oracle, is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle. And I gotta say, as someone who has seen that complexity for my entire life, it's very hard to get used to that idea. It's like, 'surely this is more complicated!' but it's like: Wow, this is really simple! This company is very straightforward, in its defense. This company is about one man, his alter-ego, and what he wants to inflict upon humanity -- that's it! ...Ship mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers, and make a whole shitload of money. Yeah... you talk to Oracle, it's like, 'no, we don't fucking make dreams happen -- we make money!' ...You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle."
Labor should try being the lawnmower instead of the lawn; "the beatings will continue until morale improves."
Note that GM cried in public they could not afford the UAW's demands, and once they agreed to said demands, they still did a $10B share buyback. Boo hoo. I'm simply tired of psychopaths in positions of power in the labor market.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/29/business/gm-lavishes-sharehol...
Factory workers also are not going to be getting the kind of severance packages software devs get.
We get severance packages?
Obviously, local laws will vary greatly.
(b) Even for the <1 year employed, 60 days of factory pay (or instruction manual writer pay, or box artist pay, etc.) is less than 2 months of tech worker pay.
Pay and compensation for the value of employee-provided benefits to which they would have been entitled had they been employed, if the layoff meets the size, etc., requirement for WARN Act coverage.
Yes this is one area where it is all over the map, and you have to check your employment jurisdiction.
Now consider what that does to a job search.
edit: nooo don’t downvote me I wasn’t saying to fire them
I think Charles Dickens wrote a Christmas themed book on the topic of a heartless businessman, who acted much the same to his employees.
Most of the people impacted by this aren't high-paid tech workers.
But I think it makes more sense if you look at it like this: some people feel like the holidays are already stressful enough, others feel like it's a time to be able to relax and refocus away from work. Having layoffs right at this point in time makes things even more stressful for the first group, and ruins the holiday for the second group. And in both cases, if you have layoffs in January, those affected can hit the ground running immediately rather than waiting for the New Year.
And it’s not like finding a job while everyone else is off is easy either.
That means you can essentially only start the process in early January, so you're already a few weeks/a month into your severance
Wild revenue swings, declining profit, high leverage of 70% (although that's in line with competitors Funko and Jakks who are at 62% and 73%). And through it all, they're paying a 5.7% dividend yield. They simply don't have the business to support that. [https://valustox.com/HAS, https://valustox.com/FNKO, https://valustox.com/JAKK]
Even Mattel is barely breaking even on a wild upward swing in revenue [https://valustox.com/MAT]
I know this isn't directly related to the article at hand or anything either, but I feel like I'm seeing a real uptick in November / December layoffs. Is it just me or was it really not a thing companies did with such frequency around the holidays?
I feel like its as much a shedding of costs as it is a flex of big business trying to show strength because they all hate any inch of worker gains in the past 3 years that were made.
In other news: It appears that Hasbro is shifting to become a trading card and video game company, per the article:
>Meanwhile, Hasbro subsidiary Wizards of the Coast, which publishes both Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering, is experiencing all-time highs for both revenue earned and the number of players engaged in those brands
>One area of investment for Hasbro appears to be the video game sector. Its latest project, Exodus, made a big splash last week at The Game Awards.
Seems like they're trying to gear up those divisions while winding down their toy division at least somewhat. Its unclear if their stragetic growth with WOTC will also include investments in table top games there or if they will be primarily focused on the core money makers around Magic: The Gathering.
If they can hit big in video games that will certainly bolster revenue though. We shall see if Hasbro is about to be an unexpected giant entrant into that industry
Some stats in an index goes down, companies forecast annual sales downfall, starts cutting workforce in every industry, consumption tanks, makes the sales downfall a reality.
Also, really ? Being laid of at Christmas time ?, to save a few bucks, its not like hasbro’s going bankrupt or anything.
Humans do trade to improve each other’s quality of life, and not do things just for profit. It’s a means to an end, not the end. Too many companies are making their eyes into excel sheets, and ending up causing the very downfall by preparing for the downfall that they “anticipate”.
Just noticeable because we're in a downturn, so more layoffs
Spotify and Hasbro seem like they just made bad investments and focused on the wrong areas for their business and now they (or rather their employees) are paying for it. With Hasbro specifically laying people off right now, I bet it's a way to cut down the numbers of payroll ahead of the Christmas sales rush, which I think probably inflates their overall profit margin.
For instance, if the VPs and SVPs in charge of the toy division were guaranteed to be part of the layoff, do you think the calculus would have changed? You rarely hear about it actually having reprocusssions on the C-Suite or their immediate peers (VP / SVP).
Look at it from another angle: if the layoff has to happen due to poor planning or lack of direction etc. Thats set from the top but only the bottom layers of your company is affected by the layoff. Shouldn't actually be in the reverse, where executives, SVPs and VPs should be booted as a matter of course, as they are the ones that set the direction after all and supposedly "bare the responsibility" of the company.
This reminds me of a book I was reading, The Hard Things About Hard Things. Its an interesting book, full of alot of useful information, but one thing that grinded my gears is how he talked about layoffs vs removing executives (defined as VP and up)
With layoffs, he says to do it successfully, you need to train you managers to do the following:
- Be able toexplain briefly about what happend, and that it is a company rather than a personal [employee] failure
- Be clear how the employee is impacted and that the decision is non-negotiable
- Be fully prepared about the benefits and support the company plans to provide.
Okay, on the surface, this seems good, but the first two bullets are extremely specific and targeted, while the last one uses more lax language regarding benefits and support the company plans to provide. Which is to say, it does not say serverance, it does not say what good support should look like.
Follow so far? Okay, so its pretty open ended, particularly that last part.
Then, in the exact next chapter, he talks about firing an executive, and it is suppose to work as follows:
- Be clear on the reasons
- Use decisive language
- Have the severange package approved and ready
As you can see, clearly, to fire an executive, you must clearly provide a serverance package and make sure its approved and ready
In a nutshell, this is how they see it. The executive class does not play by our rules, and never has to take the same ownership the rest of us do, period. Its explicitly spelled out that the executive must have a severance package, approved and ready where as supporting frontline employees in a layoff is left to the readers imagination as to what you should be doing for benefits and support.
I want everyone to remember this. Ben Horowitz has said outloud that what we're all thinking is true. Executives see themselves as above non executives, and expect to be treated as such.
This is in a nutshell is why the average worker should never trust the executive class and should unionize
I believe it had something to do with the yearly reporting and the people doing the reporting being on holy day between Christmas and new year.
Particularly the mention of video game licensing rather than development just screams execs amazed at how well that did, but I think they're overestimating how much they can make that repeatable. What with Pathfinder and Divinity games having laid the foundation for a CRPG comeback, Baldur's Gate 2 being one of those games still talked about nearly 25 years later, the wave of growth TTRPGs and derivatives got over the pandemic (see also the critical role amazon shows), there was a lot weighing in favour of BG3 that I don't think is repeatable on a more frequent basis. Not to mention Hasbro being relatively hands off and probably having forgotten they licensed it out.
I think Hasbro think they're going to knock out Baldur Gate 3's and that it was their brand that provided all the value so they can charge the next people more, and maybe stuff it full of microtransactions. But I think much more likely is an outcome like the opening of Warhammer, a bunch of "ehh, it did ok I guess" mid tier games, and if they try to extract too much value from it they'll crush it.
I don't know why, but when toy companies and retailers fail (FAO Schwartz, Kaybee, Toys 'R Us) I always feel sad.
Vs as a kid, I saw so so so many commercials for GI Joe, etc.
Downvote mfs.
With magic it's just an addictive game and the "lore" though slim makes it feel adultish.
D&D has been around forever. It has always been super niche. Then it somehow jumped into mainstream?