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Comment by apstats | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think it’s possible to determine if a decision like this is a good one without working at the company. News articles like this are useless.

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I'm not so sure. Whether this article is good or not is a moot point. Hasbro is publicly traded so there is verifiable information about the company available. As others have pointed out, we can see them rapidly selling off assets and IP and cutting staff. I'm not a professional analyst, but surely one could substantiate an argument for or against this decision.

Edit: Also, this decision isn't a single data point. We can look at the track record and business trajectory to make an informed decision. I am not particularly well informed about Hasbro, but based on historical stock price, industry trends and comments here, it really seems like they are fucking up

MTG and D&D both grew by like 20% last year. If they’re fucking up with managing them it’s not showing in the numbers yet.

Also it would be hard to know from numbers anyway. Maybe if they managed it better it would be up 30% Neither product has significant competition so you couldn’t even really guess by comparing to an overall market.

Broader Hasbro numbers might be a little more comparable (there is an overall toy and games industry) but still tough.

It’s often hard to tell from the numbers that a company is being ruined until it is too late.

Yeah, MTG twitter is really mad about it, but people at WoTC often have fairly narrow skillsets, so I would not be surprised that at some point they want to rebalance the set of skills that they have access to to do something different.

I found out they fired a community manager... and I had no idea who that person was without a bunch of googling, which tells you a bit about how effective that spending was for wotc.

Not to say that I think wotc corporate is at all infallible, they are clearly not very good at doing anything besides designing the cards themselves, and even then, they have largely inherited a very good game rather than really doing anything amazing.

Wotc could really use a shake up that raises the standards of what they produce to the level of eg riot games, but that's unlikely to happen any time soon.

How does the board of directors evaluate management performance then?

I think it's fair to consider a board of directors as people who "work at the company".

I don’t. Further it’s common for all stockholders to be asked to vote on decisions with 1 vote per share. While it’s true most people have only a trivial number of shares and are therefore largely irrelevant they also don’t have access to non public information.

Most Boards of Directors contain a bunch of representatives of the largest institutional holders and some members hand picked by the CEO.

In Hasbro's case, the Chair of the Board is listed as an employee of the company and was their interim CEO. The rest of board follows what you would expect.

If history is any guide, "work" might be a stretch but "employed by the company", sure. Only half joking.

Have you ever read a news article about something you have insider knowledge of?

Simple. Did the management meet the various internal targets outlined by the board.. Those could be anything from profitability, to total cost structure, to anything really

Good and bad itself depends on the perspective. Good for Hasbro? Can be argued I guess, depends also on its current economic situation and a lot of things other people may indeed not have the best knowledge about. Good for the players and fans of DnD? Good for those who actually work in the company and got laid off, or the remaining staff there? Almost surely not. This decision is not taken on their behalf and does not serve them in any way. And considering the popularity of DnD there is no surprise that the issue is going to be approached from an employee or player perspective rather than an investor or manager one.

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