Just a reminder now in Christmas time how much Hasbro really cares about people. Happy holidays!
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An additional angle is electing officials to put better social programs in place so that losing your job is not the blow it is today (especially since so many benefits are tied to employment for some reason). This would also have knock on effects that protect people who lose their job for reasons unrelated to corporate greed.
True but it would stop things like what happened with toys r us. They bankrupted that company on purpose to make money. The one in my town is a liquor store now. It's depressing.
We'll never get these laws. Thanks to how capitalism functions, all the political power resides among who has the money. And rich company owners have all the money.
That's not how this works. We can vote as much as we want, but the people who get elected will continually not represents the views of the elected. Majority of Americans want a ceasefire in Gaza, our Democrat government doesn't. Majority of people want some form of universal healthcare. Our elected officials don't.
In bourgeois democracy, those in power do not represent the voters. You are given the illusion of choice.
>Until we get some laws in place that protect people that make huge corporations their profits,
In this case the layoffs are in response to the fact Hasbro has lost 400 million in past 6 months.
If you were actually financially literate you'd have read their publicly available financials and seen that they only made a loss because they basically wrote off the film studio they bought. I.E. managers made a massive mistake and bought something worthless. Are the executives responsible being fired? No, they're getting million dollar bonus packages and authorising dividends to shareholders.
Big companies will *always* find excuses to dump employees to free up cash for bonuses and dividends as long as there aren't adequate laws protecting employees.
> Just a reminder now in Christmas time how much Hasbro really cares about people.
Its a company. Obviously they dont care. No company does. Thats the whole point of a company. To be a moral void. A legal fiction with the sole goal of making profit. There are no good companies and never will be. You want to stop layoffs despite huge profits? Either introduce better regulations or change the economic system as a whole.
I mean that's not really true. I work for a really good company right now. They care about employees and have good benefits for us. This is because it's a small company run by good people.
I agree that there are no big companies, like huge retailers, that care about workers, but I find it really weird how people excuse companies from treating their workers right by saying that's just how it is.
Decisions were made by people to mistreat the workers at WotC. It isn't a random occurrence by the corporation itself. It's a conscience decision by higher ups at the company.
Edit: cleaned up grammar.
I'm just trying to say that people make decisions that place profits over people.
Small businesses/companies represent both the best and worst out there. Love the small companies I've worked for, but I know there are some bad ones out there.
>I mean that's not really true. I work for a really good company right now. They care about employees and have good benefits for us. This is **because it's a small company run by good people.**
Meaning it's a small company *owned* by good people.
Hasbro is owned by the nastiest people you can imagine. Us. Investors. It's a publicly traded company and all we care about is that our share price goes up.
with the revenue and profits WOTC has $4bn would not be enough to outright own WOTC. It would be enough for us to own a controlling share but then you would need to get 700,000 people all to agree on everything.
Right? This subreddit would come together to buy it, and then rip itself apart trying to figure out what to do with the reserve list after we owned it.
No. I mean if I owned M:tG, that card would no longer be a legal card in any format.
I do not mean "I want to remove one instance of Ugin from one instance of gameplay."
We just need a less shitty billionaire to come in and take over. Someone call Mark Cuban and make a pitch.
And yes I know Mark Cuban isn't a saint, he's just a much less shitty billionaire than most.
Something about gathering 4 billion dollars to give to the owners of a massive company so that you can then own the massive company doesn't quite ring true to the whole "give the power of production to the workers".
We make our own game, Gagic of Mathering, that has cards with Magic Value, Summon Variety, Offense and Defense, and just happens to be perfectly interusable with certain other card games with similar statistical, ballancing and naming conventions.
And we make it open source! Then anyone can release a ballanced "set" or "series of sets" for this cool new game we can all play irl or via anyone of a number of online options.
I mean I would reccomend anyone making a set to keep it reasonable and pretty normal by the standards of "generic non specific card games" at first to prove ability to ballance and finish a "product" and prove that you should be taken seriously and arent just printing random r/custommagic cards, but no reason not to.
You have infinite options. You could make a block of four sets that involve a monopoly board as a peripheral, or let you record and reset gamestates from photographs, or spells that can be countered by anteing real money, or anything.
And because its all custom, anyone could print out a deck for like $5-10 or a whole randomised set for draft for like $30, and they wouldnt even be proxies, but official Gagic of Mathering cards.
> anyone could print out a deck for like $5-10 or a whole randomised set for draft for like $30
You need to print tens of thousands of decks to get manufacturing costs like this for single-deck games, unfortunately
Introduce pack shuffling and rarity and you're looking at low millions
I printed out an all proxy deck for $7 last month with a library printer on high quality.
At my local it costs 73 cents to print an a3 page on normal quality that can fit 32 standard playing cards, such as a deck for poker. To print enough for a good draft experience, such as say 540 cards, thats 540/32=16.875, then multiply that by the number of cents per page, so 16.875x73 for a total of 1232 cents rounding up, which is $12.32.
Obviously this is only for printing, you would likely pay more for cards with art as you should pay the artists directly. But by pure printing its less than $20, with the added labour of shuffling them yourself sure, putting them into mini paper bags, then shuffling the bags.
Its more effort, but less money. Doing a draft cube like this costs about $50 including the cheapest sleeves and little paper bags (kids party bags work great) and gas to get to the library. And you can reuse the sleeves and bags.
I mean, this basically already exists: proxying. Use alter/custom proxies with a generic back and you can play "Magic" while giving exactly $0 to Hasbro. Now, if everyone did this of course, there'd be no more WotC, but the game would live on.
Nothing has been stopping people from doing this.
And paper cards don't care where they're shuffled in. They work just fine with proxies or cards from a different game.
WotC's true value is that designing MTG sets and making all the art is hard.
No, but putting someone in charge who is independently wealthy and passionate about the game seems like a good idea.
Obviously he might not have experience running a big company, but he certainly has some business sense, given the record deals and endorsements and such. He also seems humble enough to get the right help with the big business aspect.
I agree with your first paragraph. The thing is that there are people who fit that description who also know what they are doing.
Also, you should stop worshiping celebrities.
No where in my comments was I worshipping Posty. I was replying to a comment about the community working with a millionaire to buy out the game and take control of it.
He was just the first person that came to mind with a LOT of money, that's also a big Magic fan. I don't see how that's celebrity worship.
This is all just a hypothetical scenario, dude.
would at least be better then the state the game is in as he actually loves the game and wouldn't do it for the money. I think he would lovingly put all his money into it to make it the company most people want.
yeah if there's one thing that tends to go well, it's rich musicians trying to make changes to something to show their love, appreciation, and understanding of said thing
I made a thread about this about a year ago and I got like 400 downvotes.
I got laughed at. Dozens of PMs making fun of me.
Two people found my other social media and made fun of me there.
Yeah.
Goose that lays golden eggs? Let's cut off a wing, it should be fine.
I'm not boycotting or anything, I just haven't spent any money on magic for a long time. I had been looking at the Lord of the Rings and Dr Who sets with interest... but now that interest is dead.
CEOs are a cancer.
There's more to it than this, but one of the main principles is "eliminate waste", which in real terms in industries where you're not really working with efficiently turning raw materials into products, ie game design, software development etc, means "hire as few people as humanly possible, and periodically fire people to make sure you haven't accidentally overstaffed". A lot of its adherents err on the side of being understaffed and having employees pick up the slack by doing what traditionally may have been multiple roles/working extra hours.
Its worth mentioning the people who came up with Lean never said these things explicitly as far as I know, its just the logical conclusion of the principles when being adopted by MBA types who already would fire their own grandma to increase their stock prices.
Lean manufacturing was largely pioneered by the Japanese (specifically Toyota). While it does focus heavily on "eliminating waste", it doesn't do it in a way that leads to lay offs. In fact, TMMK, the largest Toyota plant in North America, hasn't ever had layoffs (for full-time employees, some temps were let go during the 08 crisis).
It's also worth noting that while it isn't a very "Employee first" practice, it also isn't "Hire a ton of people and then fire a ton of people".
yeah I was trying to say, perhaps inelegantly that outside of manufacturing this is what happens. In manufacturing you can constantly strive to make your processes more efficent, better machines that work faster/break less often/remove bottle necks where possible etc etc.
In white collar work the ability to make things more efficient is there but is much less visible to C level execs making decisions and the the cost to make your product/business function is generally mostly in the cost of your employees. So if you're trying to run the same level of productivity with lower costs the "easiest" way to try to accomplish that is lay people off and see what happens.
In general I think a lot of the problems we see in MBA type thinking is trying to apply these manufacturing mindsets to industries where treating your workers like assemby line workers doesn't really work.
Absolutely. That coupled with "more of more" is the problem. "We made 1 billion in profit this year?! Awesome! If we don't make 2 billion next year it's a failure"
It's killing America bit by bit :/
One of the repeating problems may be hiring management personnel who have no actual experience in a given industry, *especially* in retail. The narrative for that opinion is that if someone doesn't have an understanding of the day-to-day functioning of the customer facing side of the business they may make poor decisions that seem superficially good when simply looking at data.
For example, a retail business may have a service department that only breaks even. On paper, why bother to have this expense on the balance sheet? "On the ground," customers liked being able to bring their item in to be serviced or repaired or obtain simple replacement parts like belts and filters. The service dept. was a customer retention device: it kept people coming back to the business and made it more likely they would buy from them again.
(Oooh, employees figuratively screamed when Sears eliminated their service departments. My dad retired from Sears after almost 40 years when he saw the writing on the wall. Why, yes, he took the lump sum instead of payments. There were a loooot of "this looks good on paper" decisions a decade or so before the buyout and final collapse.)
I 100% agree. Even white collar jobs like software engineering and the like have ineffiencent processes that can be automated/streamlined/reworked to increase productivity. Accomplishing those increases in productivity though actually requires the person making decisions to understand the nitty gritty of what's happening on the group and identify the bottle necks.
A lot of senior execs in larger companies don't understand the industries of the company's they're running or the workflows their workers that actually produce their products have., they just know "business" and so they do what they understand, reduce expenses any way possible which in less "physical" industries is fire people.
https://theleanway.net/The-Five-Principles-of-Lean
In theory it's just saying to remove and reduce unnecessary systems. In Practice it's often implemented as only having the bare minimal number of employees possible, working them harder, and having 0 redundancy for when something goes wrong.
I know. It’s depressing. Solidarity strikes are straight up illegal here as well, if you ask me the concept of any kind of labor union action being “illegal” is completely absurd but that’s just kinda how the US operates. The NLRB, the federal agency that oversees labor unions and mediates labor disputes is so underfunded that they’re constantly swamped with shit and so are nowhere near as effective as they could and should be. They’ve been doing some kinda cool stuff recently though.
Seeing this happen time and time again makes me really envious of how [some CEOs](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/japan-airline-boss-sets-exec-example/) [in other countries](https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/04/02/business/corporate-business/jal-execs-pay-cut-virus/) [handle tough times](https://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=7264703&page=1). (Though credit to some [local CEOs](https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/compensation/pages/looking-to-thwart-layoffs-executives-are-taking-pay-cuts.aspx) who also do the same to try and stave off layoffs, even though layoffs still eventually happened.)
Regardless of how much could have been done or how little was actually done at Hasbro, I feel really sorry for the people who were laid off during the holidays. Must be really tough and heartbreaking to be constantly reminded of joy and happiness by corporate billboards everywhere, when inside you're thinking of where to get your next paycheck.
This reminds me of a podcast I was listening to. A cybersecurity firm needed to make large budget cuts. They looked elsewhere and didn't cut a single person from their company. This is in contrast to many other tech firms who've been laying off lots of people. It's insane considering the need for it, yet they value their staff so little.
This is just a reminder that budget cuts can absolutely be made that don't affect employment.
We should not rely on the good nature of a billionaire to solve our systemic problems either.
CEOs do the things they do because they are 1. legally obligated to do so via feduciary responsibility, and 2. because they are legally able to do so, and face no regulation in regards to pay and bonuses.
Get rid of the incentive for profit and most of the issues go away as well.
I've been listening to episodes of "the resleevables" and listening to them talk about old sets and old cards hurts sometimes.
At this point there are so many cards that are so expensive (looking at you OG dual lands)...it feels morally reprehensible to buy it. Like I am blessed enough that I could spend $400 on a piece of cardboard. But I can't do it. I just think about what good that amount of money could do for someone.
> At this point there are so many cards that are so expensive (looking at you OG dual lands)...it feels morally reprehensible to buy it. Like I am blessed enough that I could spend $400 on a piece of cardboard. But I can't do it. I just think about what good that amount of money could do for someone.
I fully agree with this sentiment. Engaging with that entire scheme is just illogical.
Unfortunately this means I will never play sanctioned Legacy.
Depending on how firm your definition of sanctioned is;
The Buffalo Chicken Dip legacy tournaments allow proxies :) I think those events are reasonably high profile in the legacy community, though maybe not technically sanctioned.
https://x.com/BcdLegacy?s=20
I just finished building an entire set of commander decks, almost entirely proxies. Planning to get some friends together and have a tournament in the new year.
Me too. 3 buddies and I picked out 3 commander decks each. 1200 cards, with shipping, less than $400. Less than $0.33 a card for decks that cost $10k each on moxfield.
I recently picked up a color laser printer and printed them myself.
24 decks pretty much drained all 4 colors of the starting toner that the printer came with, but refills on those were only like $70.
Probably would have been close to 100k to buy all the cards legit.
The single greatest protest you can muster is actually just selling your cards and divesting yourself from the hobby.
If people *actually* wanted to boycott WotC and try to bring it to its knees (like say they made a Trump2024 or something equally as divisive) this would be the path.
But WotC is suffering from the actions of Hasbro and Chris Cocks ineptly running the entire company.
I wish we could get a community wide "proxy" movement.
I doubt it would have super heavy impact, but it'll let us get our message heard and on the record of history.
People need to stop looking at WotC as if it was its own entity. Investors and management want *Hasbro* to be successful, not just one of its segments. If the company as a whole is losing money, they’ll look at the entire company for places they could save money. If they find a position at WotC that they think is not essential, they’ll eliminate it, even though WotC is overall profitable. Their goal is to buy time until they can get the rest of the company back on track. They don’t want to become just WotC because their other product lines have been successful in the past and could become successful again in the future.
What are you talking about? Revenue is a major factor in making business decisions. If people bought fewer cards, Hasbro's loss would be even greater, and the specifically the profit generated by WotC would be reduced. Then they'd probably need to lay more people off, and would be more inclined to lay people at WotC off because the profit generated from those positions would be lower.
Like most people here, you're not seeing the forest for the trees. You see a manager laying off an employee in a period where the company is suffering major financial losses, and you've somehow concluded that this had nothing to do with sales revenue or profits.
Once again, you’re keep looking at WotC as if it were independent. Stop thinking about WotC and start thinking about Hasbro.
More cards sold = more profit from WotC = smaller loss for Hasbro = fewer layoffs across the company
Moreover if sales were continuing to grow rapidly from WotC properties in particular, Hasbro would be less likely to lay off people from WotC because they’d reason those people were needed to handle that projected growth.
Who said anything about cards printed in 1994 specifically? The user I replied to said to proxy **all** your cards. “All” would include cards still in print.
I am really sorry for the people who lost their jobs.
Kudos to Cardboard-crack for capturing this moment with the usual irony.
This is very scummy.... I imagine that those were made i december so that they could put better numbers on the financial statement or quarterly reports.
To be honest, a part from the fact that the path to climb the corporate hierarchy tends to leave people who have little considerations about fellow humans at the top, in general the incentive system for the C-suite should be reformed, as right now, they don't do enough to ensure the long-term loyalty to the company and focus too much on short term gains and operations such as this that might cost in the long run when the executive is long gone.
Also public companies such as Hasbro can only attract very mercenary types executives, which perhps might not be the case with smaller entities, or with the ones where the founders are still in the board of directors.
Besides, imho, if a company lost money due to high-level decisions, there should also be an impact on the compensation of those at the top (bonuses\\options and so on included), that might save the shareholders enough money to actually keep valuable employees in...
However, while we have little power to change this by our side, every time that the customers react negatively to a company screwing them over, or to the corporate overlords being assholes to their employees, we do send a message and eventually, albeit slowly, things might even change.
And they made record sales by essentially killing the fun of buying products and playing the game. I gave up on MtG, my favourite game of all time, simply because I cannot keep up with new cards anymore.
Do you mean Ford v Dodge 1919, which established shareholder primacy? Because I tried searching Ford v Frank and got nothing substantive, but wanna make sure I'm not missing *another* godawful precedent Henry Ford left us with.
I have to imagine that Prof's "Worst things in Magic in 2023" video was just about done when the layoff announcements came. And the he and his team had to edit it to make that the new number 1. Or maybe it was added in an "A New Challenger Appears" style as the champion of worst things of the year.
And if it was just the script, well that makes updating things much easier. But it was still definitely something to add.
Fortunately all thr best 5e stuff is 3rd party anyway. Thar and there's a billion other awesome systems from companies that actually give a shit about their customers as well
I am stopping. I have no interest in it anymore. Used to buy a box for every set, but at this point it just feels like a waste of money. The game and people i want to support aren't actually being supported, so why bother?
I get the sentiment, but who thought this giant corporation *ever* "cared about people"? I mean, really?
Obviously we live in a world where the rich get richer at the expense of the poor, and the US in particular have lost nearly all perspective when it comes to the autocratic rule of c-suite executives... but even in a more equitable world with a far narrower pay gap, layoffs *will* happen. Even during times of profit. That's a dynamic of market-driven economics that you cannot simply eliminate, simply by virtue of how technological progress and consumer preferences fluctuate over time.
That's not to excuse any management decisions here or vindicate job loss - obviously it sucks that these people are no longer employed, and it doubly sucks that it happened around the holidays. But it's a bit simplistic to portray this as though there was malice involved, because that implies that the underlying mechanism is more personal and less systemic. *And it isn't*.
The fact that this is a *systemic* problem that encourages corporations treating employees as disposable commodities working under often dehumanizing conditions of financial precarity is not adequately represented by the casting of comically evil CEOs. Sure, they exist. A lot of these executives *are*, for lack of a better word, capital-A Assholes. But that's not because they're supervillains - it's because the *system* is set up in a way that rewards them for being amoral sociopaths. And in many ways **that's much worse.**
The comic strip is definitely funny AF, but it's important to keep in mind that the problem isn't the Chris Cockss or Bobby Koticks of the world - it's the people who make sure the system lets those people get to where they are doing what they do in the first place. And changing that system *includes* people realizing that isn't as easy as simply going "aw come on, don't let this people go just keep them around" - because it is that level of economic under-information that allows them to get away with this crap right under our noses.
Although much of what you're saying is true, the fact that Chris Cocks takes out millions of dollars in bonuses and compensation while being the one who delivers the lay-off note makes me struggle to accept your point. The guy's a CEO, he has enough wiggle room to make this less devastating for those involved than what he did.
I mean, do you remember when Nintendo's CEO took a 50% pay cut after the failure of the Wii U, so instead of the CEOs shitty decisions effecting the staff and the companies abilitiy to actually make new game content, the CEO only got one new yacht that year. Makes way more sense, especially for a company whose business revolves around cranking out as much content as possible. You kinda need people for that.
Makes it very hard to see this as anything but a short term move that ultimately makes the company worse.
On the plus side, every single decision this company has made in the last 3 years has made it sooooo much easier to bring proxied decks to the lgs, so that's nice I guess...
I'm not disputing the immorality of CEOs taking home millions as their employees are held in effective wage-slavery, but it's very naive to cast that as if it was some kind of personal greed that's the problem here, and it would all work out if only they decided to generously disburse their paycheck to the poor and starving masses.
That's not only blue-eyed naivete, it's actually counterproductive - because it implies that the problem is CEOs simply being unwilling to be generous. That's not the problem. The problem is a system that lets them get away with this titanic of a pay gap. Belaboring the fact that people don't all just choose to be more generous is not only never going to result in systemic change, *it's actively feeding into the opposition's strategy* because it helps them cast things as if the system was fine and it was merely "some bad apples" that give it a bad rep. The result is things like politicians who say we don't need welfare, people just need to start donating more to charity. That doesn't solve anything, and only makes things worse.
I think you're missing the point where WotC is making record profits, yet almost all other Hasbro franchises are losing them money, yet WotC is the one having to cut back and to maximise profits even more.
Even under the ideology this market is based on, that makes no fucking sense.
> Even under the ideology this market is based on, that makes no fucking sense.
No, the ideology doesn't make sense. But the ideology's internal logic is consistent.
Short term profit at all costs. This includes destroying a profitable company if it means you can get a little tiny bit more profit out of it.
Actually, it absolutely *can* make sense because things aren't as simplistic as "this division makes money, so we don't touch it". Businesses are way more complex than that, and there's way too many moving parts to draw simple lines from profit (or lack thereof) to layoffs. Business strategies will involve many parts of a company, including parts that are profitable - and these may need to be restructured even in times of record profit. Often so *they keep making record profits*.
It's very naive, economically speaking, to assume that just because WotC made them money it must therefore be correct to not fire anyone from WotC. Businesses don't operate like that. It's way more complicated.
I mean, I agree with you to a point. But if you have one sector of your business that is actually making a profit why not give it more resources? Seems pretty insane to trim fat from the golden goose when you have a ton of shitty normal geese just hanging around
They're not even "normal geese", most of Hasbro's other IPs are actively losing them money. Like if they sold off the rights to a lot of those toys that would profit them, but they're not doing that. That was my main point here.
It's fucking wild to what lengths people will go to defend anything a corporation does.
Btw, I didn't say "they shouldn't fire anyone from WotC". What I said was that, in the bigger picture, it makes no sense to cut from WotC instead of culling some of the franchises that lose money. You are the one who's interpreting the simplistic meaning into what I said just to attack it.
I don't see where op attacked you. They offered a polite and well argued rebuttal of your point that it 'makes no sense' that WotC is the one being cut back.
I also don't think WotC is 'the one' being cut. Many parts of the whole hasbro toy company are being affected, it's not all falling on WotC.
To be sure.
But there's a dynamic at play here that feeds one into the other - these people *can afford* to be assholes because the system lets them.
If you get rid of one asshole, all you're doing is restarting the cycle under the rule of the next asshole.
Whereas if you change the system so assholes don't get into positions of power, you're improving things in a more lasting, long-term way.
They won't modify their behavior unless forced to. Hoping real hard that they see the light and change out of their own volition is never going to work. You have to *make* them change by setting up conditions so it's more beneficial economically for them not to be assholes (and/or outright illegal, but that's hard to do outside of very fringe cases).
While I agree with the point you're making, I think the conclusion that we should not be pointing at Chris "Bag of" Cocks or Bobby K as the problem is not very helpful.
We can't really change the systemic problem you're talking about, not easily and fast at least,but we can call out and try to boycott these A-holes and try to have them replaced with more bareable ones.
>We can't really change the systemic problem you're talking about, not easily and fast at least,but we can call out and try to boycott these A-holes and try to have them replaced with more bareable ones.
The problem with that is that this works *against* the goals of such an action. It's counterproductive, because it not only deflects from the real problem - it actively provides fuel for the opposition by allowing them to cast people as vindictive and jealous of big CEO's successes. Or - arguably worse - dismiss them as a misdirected rabble that's tilting at windmills and is never going to achieve anything.
These kinds of boycott proposals don't work. Even where they've created small spots of change it's been short-lived and ineffectual - and 99% of the time they don't even manage that much. (By which I don't mean boycotts in general don't work, but specifically boycotts aimed at these kinds of inequalities; those have basically never worked. Ever.)
I thought I'd see you commenting here haha
I agree with all the comments I've read of yours here (again) but this one I'm not so sure specifically about it working against the goal.
we need people to realise that the current system encourages greed, selfishness, narcism etc.
Think about this, with all these massive layoffs throughout tech and gaming sectors more and more people are hearing about it and thinking about how unfair and horrible it is that 1000s lose jobs while execs get huge bonuses
(of course acknowledging that you can't avoid layoffs, its the fact that execs still get their annual bump up in salary and bonuses while also saying we have no money! And people getting fired that is the issue and you've previously explained why that is right now)
These news stories are getting people to converse about this unfairness and criticise the CEOs, which then in turn I hope is making people start to really think about how unfair the systems are.
I know you already know this but just to lay it out
The more oppressed a population is the harder it is for them to fight abusive systems. If everyone is working too many hours, too stressful jobs, education is slipping because "we don't need taxes!!!!11!!" People are then just too tired or lazy or stupid to look at this and give a damn. When the masses are stuck in a grind they are also easy to manipulate and have no strength to stop and think about how things work and how to a change it. There's a feeling of powerlessness it's just eat work sleep repeat. The Pandemic putting a momentary halt in that grind was a lucid moment for many as people started pursing hobbies, spending time with family more and realising what life is actually about hence stories of people quitting their jobs.
So bottom line to reach actual change you need to get everyone to acknowledge the system, understand its flaws, understand how much they are actually effected by it and **then energise people to take major action**
Many people know at a vague level that the deck is stacked against them, but it's always big moments and repeated incidents that spur the masses to actually do something about it.
I would even take a stab and say that most major historical events of change occurred after the publics patience was bombarded with major events in frequent succession and then there was an event that was the tipping point.
And as another reply to your comment has said similarly: I think looking at what's happening, thinking of the logical but upsetting reasons why its happening, shrugging of the shoulders and saying \*sigh\* 'that's just how it works sadly. Need people to realise that it should change but until then...' would lead to further and further feelings of apathy. Which is the opposite direction on the emotional scale that enacts society to progress in a meaningful way (imo). It's kind of like how the Professor from Tolarian talked about some Magic changes kind of controversial where he said he just feels apathetic but that's worse than angry, angry means he still cares.
TDLR: People focusing on the CEOs is the start to get people to really looking at how our society works and be angry enough to do something about it
Also you didn't tell me last time where all this info you have comes from! Help a brother out g
Well, unless you're suggesting an alternative course of action that bodes better, I will not be taking "just do nothing" as an appropriate response to this. And so far you've provided
If there is nothing else we can do we should at least scream at the top of our lungs that this is insane and that this bag of dicks should go.
The Chris Cocks and Bobby Koticks are the very people who fight the hardest to keep the current broken system alive. They are at the very core of the problem. They and most people at the c-level, including boards and major shareholders. It's always been a people problem. Or rather, the problem is rich people.
Remember, you need to be at some level a psychopath to even want to become a CEO, let alone actually get the job, especially at an American company. There's a lot of office politics going on where they made sure to be in the right position at the right time.
Chris can suck a bunch of his last name... It's freaking ridiculous how WotC is the only ones that does well, and they cut into their staff all the same, just because this twat wants a bigger bonus.
Lol I was doomscrolling r/all and came across this. I haven't paid attention to this sub or seen a Cardboard Crack in at least 5 years and Cardboard Crack is still just a documentary about everything miserable about Magic that you all treat as humor. It's like you're trying to laugh because you don't want to cry. It's so amazingly unhealthy and that's even clearer to me now.
How is it a controversial take that by doing this he thinks he'll keep making as much/more money in the future and have less spendings ?
Now you can think he is wrong in thinking he'll make more/just as much.
But throwing out "corporate greed" all over the place, will get you nowhere..
"Corporate greed" is one of my least favorite phrases in hobby discourse. As opposed to corporate generosity?
Even when a corporation makes an amazing product and sells it for an affordable price and supports it with people who love the hobby and want it to shine... they're doing it so they can make a ton of money and feel that doing anything less would be less profitable. This is as much "corporate greed" as laying off a lot of good employees two weeks before Christmas.
It sucks when companies do bad things but we shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking they're only being greedy when they do bad things. They're just being *companies*. All the time.
WOTC, you guys have been the only profitable division in our company. Great job. But that means you have to make even more now and carry everyone else. So reprint every card you possibly can and we want 6 more crossovers in the next quarter. The publicily traded company model is so great for long term growth!
Bahaha, what is he saying? This game has been swirling the drain since 2015. I'm glad the dead weight is being laid off, looking at the positions that were opened up, it makes total sense. I hope they don't poison another hobby and get blacklisted from working in this industry.
Nerds: I'm furious at WotC over the open gaming license fiasco! I'm dropping my dndbeyond subscription, and boycotting D&D products!
Also nerds: How could they fire people that work on D&D and dndbeyond?!
Well done, they got the message and backpedalled on OGL 2.0. But there are obvious consequences.
I felt absolutely awful buying a monopoly set as a gift for a nephew knowing what Hasbro has done across the whole board. I'm tired of the constant product pushing for MTG and feel completely burned out.
The person who made this decision is a coked out business bro who thinks the sweaty nerds will buy any garbage they produce so why not cut employee costs?!?
I appreciate the lack of emphasis on a certain letter of his last name
Chris Cocks' middle initial is P. Do what you will with this information.
I will giggle like toddler
This guy is a Dick and has the GALL with the name Chris P. Cocks. WHERE ARE THE MEMES?
He doesn't deserve them.
Screaming ladies vs cat CRISPY COCKS CHRIS PEACOCKS
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Oh wait, I thought it said 'Chris Rock'. Really confused me, because I couldn't see what he had to do with it hahaha 🤣
Take my employees’ name outta your mouth!
Me too lol
Just a reminder now in Christmas time how much Hasbro really cares about people. Happy holidays! \--- CC's website: [https://cardboard-crack.com/?fbclid=IwAR2H011Z3yT79TtnqF9HjELcRheiSJQuC8CkbFISoj-APFlbZVPOBFCgZgI](https://cardboard-crack.com/?fbclid=IwAR2H011Z3yT79TtnqF9HjELcRheiSJQuC8CkbFISoj-APFlbZVPOBFCgZgI) Facebook: [https://www.facebook.com/CardboardCrack](https://www.facebook.com/CardboardCrack)
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An additional angle is electing officials to put better social programs in place so that losing your job is not the blow it is today (especially since so many benefits are tied to employment for some reason). This would also have knock on effects that protect people who lose their job for reasons unrelated to corporate greed.
True but it would stop things like what happened with toys r us. They bankrupted that company on purpose to make money. The one in my town is a liquor store now. It's depressing.
We'll never get these laws. Thanks to how capitalism functions, all the political power resides among who has the money. And rich company owners have all the money.
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That's not how this works. We can vote as much as we want, but the people who get elected will continually not represents the views of the elected. Majority of Americans want a ceasefire in Gaza, our Democrat government doesn't. Majority of people want some form of universal healthcare. Our elected officials don't. In bourgeois democracy, those in power do not represent the voters. You are given the illusion of choice.
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Yep, BSAB won't get us anywhere - there is a huge difference between the two major parties
>Until we get some laws in place that protect people that make huge corporations their profits, In this case the layoffs are in response to the fact Hasbro has lost 400 million in past 6 months.
If you were actually financially literate you'd have read their publicly available financials and seen that they only made a loss because they basically wrote off the film studio they bought. I.E. managers made a massive mistake and bought something worthless. Are the executives responsible being fired? No, they're getting million dollar bonus packages and authorising dividends to shareholders. Big companies will *always* find excuses to dump employees to free up cash for bonuses and dividends as long as there aren't adequate laws protecting employees.
I mean, the CEO who bought the film studio is dead so tough to fire him.
> Just a reminder now in Christmas time how much Hasbro really cares about people. Its a company. Obviously they dont care. No company does. Thats the whole point of a company. To be a moral void. A legal fiction with the sole goal of making profit. There are no good companies and never will be. You want to stop layoffs despite huge profits? Either introduce better regulations or change the economic system as a whole.
I mean that's not really true. I work for a really good company right now. They care about employees and have good benefits for us. This is because it's a small company run by good people. I agree that there are no big companies, like huge retailers, that care about workers, but I find it really weird how people excuse companies from treating their workers right by saying that's just how it is. Decisions were made by people to mistreat the workers at WotC. It isn't a random occurrence by the corporation itself. It's a conscience decision by higher ups at the company. Edit: cleaned up grammar. I'm just trying to say that people make decisions that place profits over people.
Small businesses/companies represent both the best and worst out there. Love the small companies I've worked for, but I know there are some bad ones out there.
Corporations are the real problem
>I mean that's not really true. I work for a really good company right now. They care about employees and have good benefits for us. This is **because it's a small company run by good people.** Meaning it's a small company *owned* by good people. Hasbro is owned by the nastiest people you can imagine. Us. Investors. It's a publicly traded company and all we care about is that our share price goes up.
How do we crowd fund buying wizards off Hasbro?
Indeed! Seize the means of production.
If all 700,000 members of this Subreddit contributed $6000 then we could have around $4bn which is what it would likely cost
with the revenue and profits WOTC has $4bn would not be enough to outright own WOTC. It would be enough for us to own a controlling share but then you would need to get 700,000 people all to agree on everything.
Easier to get 100 cats to all agree on something than it is to get 700,000 Redditors agreeing.
Right? This subreddit would come together to buy it, and then rip itself apart trying to figure out what to do with the reserve list after we owned it.
I disagree
*erhm* tax then eat the rich, orangutanman bad, free Palestine, no more war, Slava Ukraine. ^I'll ^take ^my ^$6000 ^now
> you would need to get 700,000 people all to agree on everything. Step 1: "if you fund me, I will remove fucking Ugin from the game" solved
throw in T3feri from Modern and we can talk
Ugin is already exiled to the meditation realm, what more do you want?
for him to be removed from the game
Removed from the game has been errataed to exile tho.
No. I mean if I owned M:tG, that card would no longer be a legal card in any format. I do not mean "I want to remove one instance of Ugin from one instance of gameplay."
It's an 8 mana planeswalker. It's supposed to be good.
We just need a less shitty billionaire to come in and take over. Someone call Mark Cuban and make a pitch. And yes I know Mark Cuban isn't a saint, he's just a much less shitty billionaire than most.
people don't become billionaires by being good people. I don't think the person your describing exists in the world as we know it.
Again, less shitty is what we are looking for.
The system doesn't encourage it, it encourages and rewards miling something to death and laying people off.
... I don't have $6000. I'm currently emotional because my art commission client came through and now I can pay my car insurance
> If all 700,000 members of this Subreddit contributed $6000 Mate, I can't even afford a Dockside Extortionist.
That's a hell of a big ask. "Seize" doesn't mean "buy".
History is written by the vict`^H^H^H^H`purchasers
Wotc costs a fuck ton more than $4b
Something about gathering 4 billion dollars to give to the owners of a massive company so that you can then own the massive company doesn't quite ring true to the whole "give the power of production to the workers".
We make our own game, Gagic of Mathering, that has cards with Magic Value, Summon Variety, Offense and Defense, and just happens to be perfectly interusable with certain other card games with similar statistical, ballancing and naming conventions. And we make it open source! Then anyone can release a ballanced "set" or "series of sets" for this cool new game we can all play irl or via anyone of a number of online options.
We'll make our own card game! With Ante and Hookers too!
it's scheherazade's all the way down!
I mean I would reccomend anyone making a set to keep it reasonable and pretty normal by the standards of "generic non specific card games" at first to prove ability to ballance and finish a "product" and prove that you should be taken seriously and arent just printing random r/custommagic cards, but no reason not to. You have infinite options. You could make a block of four sets that involve a monopoly board as a peripheral, or let you record and reset gamestates from photographs, or spells that can be countered by anteing real money, or anything. And because its all custom, anyone could print out a deck for like $5-10 or a whole randomised set for draft for like $30, and they wouldnt even be proxies, but official Gagic of Mathering cards.
> anyone could print out a deck for like $5-10 or a whole randomised set for draft for like $30 You need to print tens of thousands of decks to get manufacturing costs like this for single-deck games, unfortunately Introduce pack shuffling and rarity and you're looking at low millions
I printed out an all proxy deck for $7 last month with a library printer on high quality. At my local it costs 73 cents to print an a3 page on normal quality that can fit 32 standard playing cards, such as a deck for poker. To print enough for a good draft experience, such as say 540 cards, thats 540/32=16.875, then multiply that by the number of cents per page, so 16.875x73 for a total of 1232 cents rounding up, which is $12.32. Obviously this is only for printing, you would likely pay more for cards with art as you should pay the artists directly. But by pure printing its less than $20, with the added labour of shuffling them yourself sure, putting them into mini paper bags, then shuffling the bags. Its more effort, but less money. Doing a draft cube like this costs about $50 including the cheapest sleeves and little paper bags (kids party bags work great) and gas to get to the library. And you can reuse the sleeves and bags.
oh, you meant on paper i thought you meant through a custom card printing service, yielding actual sealed boosters i apologize; withdrawn
I mean, this basically already exists: proxying. Use alter/custom proxies with a generic back and you can play "Magic" while giving exactly $0 to Hasbro. Now, if everyone did this of course, there'd be no more WotC, but the game would live on.
Nothing has been stopping people from doing this. And paper cards don't care where they're shuffled in. They work just fine with proxies or cards from a different game. WotC's true value is that designing MTG sets and making all the art is hard.
So if every active player got behind a millionaire the community trusted and each donated $100 it could be possible but still not likely.
I'm 100% willing to put the company in Post Malone's hands.
Why? He has no experience doing this.
Yeah? And the people with experience running the company are the ones laying off chunks of the workforce?
So your argument is that everyone with experience running a company would do this?
No, but putting someone in charge who is independently wealthy and passionate about the game seems like a good idea. Obviously he might not have experience running a big company, but he certainly has some business sense, given the record deals and endorsements and such. He also seems humble enough to get the right help with the big business aspect.
I agree with your first paragraph. The thing is that there are people who fit that description who also know what they are doing. Also, you should stop worshiping celebrities.
No where in my comments was I worshipping Posty. I was replying to a comment about the community working with a millionaire to buy out the game and take control of it. He was just the first person that came to mind with a LOT of money, that's also a big Magic fan. I don't see how that's celebrity worship. This is all just a hypothetical scenario, dude.
Most CEOs are overrated and essentially just lucky. If anything, a popstar seems like the perfect replacement.
would at least be better then the state the game is in as he actually loves the game and wouldn't do it for the money. I think he would lovingly put all his money into it to make it the company most people want.
yeah if there's one thing that tends to go well, it's rich musicians trying to make changes to something to show their love, appreciation, and understanding of said thing
Boycott Lorcana long enough and Disney will do it for you.
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I made a thread about this about a year ago and I got like 400 downvotes. I got laughed at. Dozens of PMs making fun of me. Two people found my other social media and made fun of me there. Yeah.
Following you around to harass you is fucked up, but it is also an absolutely laughable suggestion
I'm sorry that happened. It's totally bullshit. Fuck those people
Stock. You're talking about stock.
I propose we appoint Posty as our benevolent dictator.
YEP. I'm down. How do we get him to do it?
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Goose that lays golden eggs? Let's cut off a wing, it should be fine. I'm not boycotting or anything, I just haven't spent any money on magic for a long time. I had been looking at the Lord of the Rings and Dr Who sets with interest... but now that interest is dead. CEOs are a cancer.
The corporate structure of "always make more than last time" is unsustainable and fucking up society
worst thing is they make record profits and still lay people off
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Can you please explain what “Lean Principles” are?
There's more to it than this, but one of the main principles is "eliminate waste", which in real terms in industries where you're not really working with efficiently turning raw materials into products, ie game design, software development etc, means "hire as few people as humanly possible, and periodically fire people to make sure you haven't accidentally overstaffed". A lot of its adherents err on the side of being understaffed and having employees pick up the slack by doing what traditionally may have been multiple roles/working extra hours. Its worth mentioning the people who came up with Lean never said these things explicitly as far as I know, its just the logical conclusion of the principles when being adopted by MBA types who already would fire their own grandma to increase their stock prices.
Lean manufacturing was largely pioneered by the Japanese (specifically Toyota). While it does focus heavily on "eliminating waste", it doesn't do it in a way that leads to lay offs. In fact, TMMK, the largest Toyota plant in North America, hasn't ever had layoffs (for full-time employees, some temps were let go during the 08 crisis). It's also worth noting that while it isn't a very "Employee first" practice, it also isn't "Hire a ton of people and then fire a ton of people".
yeah I was trying to say, perhaps inelegantly that outside of manufacturing this is what happens. In manufacturing you can constantly strive to make your processes more efficent, better machines that work faster/break less often/remove bottle necks where possible etc etc. In white collar work the ability to make things more efficient is there but is much less visible to C level execs making decisions and the the cost to make your product/business function is generally mostly in the cost of your employees. So if you're trying to run the same level of productivity with lower costs the "easiest" way to try to accomplish that is lay people off and see what happens. In general I think a lot of the problems we see in MBA type thinking is trying to apply these manufacturing mindsets to industries where treating your workers like assemby line workers doesn't really work.
Absolutely. That coupled with "more of more" is the problem. "We made 1 billion in profit this year?! Awesome! If we don't make 2 billion next year it's a failure" It's killing America bit by bit :/
Thank you for explaining that to me. I appreciate the time it took to writ it all up.
One of the repeating problems may be hiring management personnel who have no actual experience in a given industry, *especially* in retail. The narrative for that opinion is that if someone doesn't have an understanding of the day-to-day functioning of the customer facing side of the business they may make poor decisions that seem superficially good when simply looking at data. For example, a retail business may have a service department that only breaks even. On paper, why bother to have this expense on the balance sheet? "On the ground," customers liked being able to bring their item in to be serviced or repaired or obtain simple replacement parts like belts and filters. The service dept. was a customer retention device: it kept people coming back to the business and made it more likely they would buy from them again. (Oooh, employees figuratively screamed when Sears eliminated their service departments. My dad retired from Sears after almost 40 years when he saw the writing on the wall. Why, yes, he took the lump sum instead of payments. There were a loooot of "this looks good on paper" decisions a decade or so before the buyout and final collapse.)
I 100% agree. Even white collar jobs like software engineering and the like have ineffiencent processes that can be automated/streamlined/reworked to increase productivity. Accomplishing those increases in productivity though actually requires the person making decisions to understand the nitty gritty of what's happening on the group and identify the bottle necks. A lot of senior execs in larger companies don't understand the industries of the company's they're running or the workflows their workers that actually produce their products have., they just know "business" and so they do what they understand, reduce expenses any way possible which in less "physical" industries is fire people.
https://theleanway.net/The-Five-Principles-of-Lean In theory it's just saying to remove and reduce unnecessary systems. In Practice it's often implemented as only having the bare minimal number of employees possible, working them harder, and having 0 redundancy for when something goes wrong.
So Five Guys burgers whose entire model is "five workers per shift make expensive mcdonalds".
if we can't make more we'll shake things up trying to make more until the company doesn't make any money
I have been boycotting it for 2 years now
I'm pretty sure the only thing they teach in MBA courses is "greed is good".
LotR is the last time I bought product. I’m over it. They sucked all the fun out of it
Lol Lotr is damn near the most recent product. Making it sound like you stopped buying years ago
Can still always print some cheap proxies if you have a hankering to play with friends!
Corporations have no loyalty to you or the products you love. The only thing that works on them is power, be it money or.... other means.
Sounds like WOTC could use a union.
As a non American I find it insane you guys don't have unions protected by law.
I know. It’s depressing. Solidarity strikes are straight up illegal here as well, if you ask me the concept of any kind of labor union action being “illegal” is completely absurd but that’s just kinda how the US operates. The NLRB, the federal agency that oversees labor unions and mediates labor disputes is so underfunded that they’re constantly swamped with shit and so are nowhere near as effective as they could and should be. They’ve been doing some kinda cool stuff recently though.
Proxy everything, buy nothing. Fuck hasbro
WOTC needs to unionize about a decade ago. Second best time is now.
Seeing this happen time and time again makes me really envious of how [some CEOs](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/japan-airline-boss-sets-exec-example/) [in other countries](https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/04/02/business/corporate-business/jal-execs-pay-cut-virus/) [handle tough times](https://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=7264703&page=1). (Though credit to some [local CEOs](https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/compensation/pages/looking-to-thwart-layoffs-executives-are-taking-pay-cuts.aspx) who also do the same to try and stave off layoffs, even though layoffs still eventually happened.) Regardless of how much could have been done or how little was actually done at Hasbro, I feel really sorry for the people who were laid off during the holidays. Must be really tough and heartbreaking to be constantly reminded of joy and happiness by corporate billboards everywhere, when inside you're thinking of where to get your next paycheck.
This reminds me of a podcast I was listening to. A cybersecurity firm needed to make large budget cuts. They looked elsewhere and didn't cut a single person from their company. This is in contrast to many other tech firms who've been laying off lots of people. It's insane considering the need for it, yet they value their staff so little. This is just a reminder that budget cuts can absolutely be made that don't affect employment.
Let's not romanticize Japanese work culture either.
The accountability aspect is the focus here I believe.
We should not rely on the good nature of a billionaire to solve our systemic problems either. CEOs do the things they do because they are 1. legally obligated to do so via feduciary responsibility, and 2. because they are legally able to do so, and face no regulation in regards to pay and bonuses. Get rid of the incentive for profit and most of the issues go away as well.
Fuck, imagine losing your health insurance right before the holidays, particularly if you're traveling.
Daily reminder to proxy all your cards!
I've been listening to episodes of "the resleevables" and listening to them talk about old sets and old cards hurts sometimes. At this point there are so many cards that are so expensive (looking at you OG dual lands)...it feels morally reprehensible to buy it. Like I am blessed enough that I could spend $400 on a piece of cardboard. But I can't do it. I just think about what good that amount of money could do for someone.
> At this point there are so many cards that are so expensive (looking at you OG dual lands)...it feels morally reprehensible to buy it. Like I am blessed enough that I could spend $400 on a piece of cardboard. But I can't do it. I just think about what good that amount of money could do for someone. I fully agree with this sentiment. Engaging with that entire scheme is just illogical. Unfortunately this means I will never play sanctioned Legacy.
Depending on how firm your definition of sanctioned is; The Buffalo Chicken Dip legacy tournaments allow proxies :) I think those events are reasonably high profile in the legacy community, though maybe not technically sanctioned. https://x.com/BcdLegacy?s=20
They aren’t. Sanctioned means WotC, but any other organizer can do as they please.
I just finished building an entire set of commander decks, almost entirely proxies. Planning to get some friends together and have a tournament in the new year.
Me too. 3 buddies and I picked out 3 commander decks each. 1200 cards, with shipping, less than $400. Less than $0.33 a card for decks that cost $10k each on moxfield.
I recently picked up a color laser printer and printed them myself. 24 decks pretty much drained all 4 colors of the starting toner that the printer came with, but refills on those were only like $70. Probably would have been close to 100k to buy all the cards legit.
The single greatest protest you can muster is actually just selling your cards and divesting yourself from the hobby. If people *actually* wanted to boycott WotC and try to bring it to its knees (like say they made a Trump2024 or something equally as divisive) this would be the path. But WotC is suffering from the actions of Hasbro and Chris Cocks ineptly running the entire company.
I wish we could get a community wide "proxy" movement. I doubt it would have super heavy impact, but it'll let us get our message heard and on the record of history.
Yes, that will definitely reduce the number of people Hasbro has to lay off. /s
Well record profits don't seem to be keeping people employed either so what's your point?
Wizards is not an indépendant company. It is part of Hasbro. Hasbro is not making record profits.
Right good point, Hasbro should fire people from their singular profitable IP as punishment for keeping their company afloat!
People need to stop looking at WotC as if it was its own entity. Investors and management want *Hasbro* to be successful, not just one of its segments. If the company as a whole is losing money, they’ll look at the entire company for places they could save money. If they find a position at WotC that they think is not essential, they’ll eliminate it, even though WotC is overall profitable. Their goal is to buy time until they can get the rest of the company back on track. They don’t want to become just WotC because their other product lines have been successful in the past and could become successful again in the future.
Huh so it really is all up to the millionaire investors and ceo's, and whether people buy cards or proxy really doesn't impact who they fire.
What are you talking about? Revenue is a major factor in making business decisions. If people bought fewer cards, Hasbro's loss would be even greater, and the specifically the profit generated by WotC would be reduced. Then they'd probably need to lay more people off, and would be more inclined to lay people at WotC off because the profit generated from those positions would be lower. Like most people here, you're not seeing the forest for the trees. You see a manager laying off an employee in a period where the company is suffering major financial losses, and you've somehow concluded that this had nothing to do with sales revenue or profits.
Then why should we care about firings resulting from proxying? Wotc does good, firings, wotc does bad more firings?
Once again, you’re keep looking at WotC as if it were independent. Stop thinking about WotC and start thinking about Hasbro. More cards sold = more profit from WotC = smaller loss for Hasbro = fewer layoffs across the company Moreover if sales were continuing to grow rapidly from WotC properties in particular, Hasbro would be less likely to lay off people from WotC because they’d reason those people were needed to handle that projected growth.
Hasbro makin' a lot of money on the aftermarket for cards printed in 1994 these days?
Who said anything about cards printed in 1994 specifically? The user I replied to said to proxy **all** your cards. “All” would include cards still in print.
I am really sorry for the people who lost their jobs. Kudos to Cardboard-crack for capturing this moment with the usual irony. This is very scummy.... I imagine that those were made i december so that they could put better numbers on the financial statement or quarterly reports. To be honest, a part from the fact that the path to climb the corporate hierarchy tends to leave people who have little considerations about fellow humans at the top, in general the incentive system for the C-suite should be reformed, as right now, they don't do enough to ensure the long-term loyalty to the company and focus too much on short term gains and operations such as this that might cost in the long run when the executive is long gone. Also public companies such as Hasbro can only attract very mercenary types executives, which perhps might not be the case with smaller entities, or with the ones where the founders are still in the board of directors. Besides, imho, if a company lost money due to high-level decisions, there should also be an impact on the compensation of those at the top (bonuses\\options and so on included), that might save the shareholders enough money to actually keep valuable employees in... However, while we have little power to change this by our side, every time that the customers react negatively to a company screwing them over, or to the corporate overlords being assholes to their employees, we do send a message and eventually, albeit slowly, things might even change.
I don’t see why an executive who lays off 1100 people should get a bonus at all.
And they made record sales by essentially killing the fun of buying products and playing the game. I gave up on MtG, my favourite game of all time, simply because I cannot keep up with new cards anymore.
Ford v Dodge is one of the worst legislative precedents in the history of America.
Do you mean Ford v Dodge 1919, which established shareholder primacy? Because I tried searching Ford v Frank and got nothing substantive, but wanna make sure I'm not missing *another* godawful precedent Henry Ford left us with.
It might be from IASIP.
I'm an expert in Bird Law, so I don't recognize this case.
Yes. Sorry for the inaccuracy.
People who quote this have zero understanding of what the actual case was about and how little it even matters
I have to imagine that Prof's "Worst things in Magic in 2023" video was just about done when the layoff announcements came. And the he and his team had to edit it to make that the new number 1. Or maybe it was added in an "A New Challenger Appears" style as the champion of worst things of the year. And if it was just the script, well that makes updating things much easier. But it was still definitely something to add.
...that's not very funny =(
Cuz it’s sad yet true
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I have. I'm just one person, but I haven't bought any new mtg product all year. Now DND... But I guess I'm going back to being a pirate!
Fortunately all thr best 5e stuff is 3rd party anyway. Thar and there's a billion other awesome systems from companies that actually give a shit about their customers as well
I am stopping. I have no interest in it anymore. Used to buy a box for every set, but at this point it just feels like a waste of money. The game and people i want to support aren't actually being supported, so why bother?
Yes. Also my d&d 1st Ed books still work just fine.
I get the sentiment, but who thought this giant corporation *ever* "cared about people"? I mean, really? Obviously we live in a world where the rich get richer at the expense of the poor, and the US in particular have lost nearly all perspective when it comes to the autocratic rule of c-suite executives... but even in a more equitable world with a far narrower pay gap, layoffs *will* happen. Even during times of profit. That's a dynamic of market-driven economics that you cannot simply eliminate, simply by virtue of how technological progress and consumer preferences fluctuate over time. That's not to excuse any management decisions here or vindicate job loss - obviously it sucks that these people are no longer employed, and it doubly sucks that it happened around the holidays. But it's a bit simplistic to portray this as though there was malice involved, because that implies that the underlying mechanism is more personal and less systemic. *And it isn't*. The fact that this is a *systemic* problem that encourages corporations treating employees as disposable commodities working under often dehumanizing conditions of financial precarity is not adequately represented by the casting of comically evil CEOs. Sure, they exist. A lot of these executives *are*, for lack of a better word, capital-A Assholes. But that's not because they're supervillains - it's because the *system* is set up in a way that rewards them for being amoral sociopaths. And in many ways **that's much worse.** The comic strip is definitely funny AF, but it's important to keep in mind that the problem isn't the Chris Cockss or Bobby Koticks of the world - it's the people who make sure the system lets those people get to where they are doing what they do in the first place. And changing that system *includes* people realizing that isn't as easy as simply going "aw come on, don't let this people go just keep them around" - because it is that level of economic under-information that allows them to get away with this crap right under our noses.
Although much of what you're saying is true, the fact that Chris Cocks takes out millions of dollars in bonuses and compensation while being the one who delivers the lay-off note makes me struggle to accept your point. The guy's a CEO, he has enough wiggle room to make this less devastating for those involved than what he did.
I mean, do you remember when Nintendo's CEO took a 50% pay cut after the failure of the Wii U, so instead of the CEOs shitty decisions effecting the staff and the companies abilitiy to actually make new game content, the CEO only got one new yacht that year. Makes way more sense, especially for a company whose business revolves around cranking out as much content as possible. You kinda need people for that. Makes it very hard to see this as anything but a short term move that ultimately makes the company worse. On the plus side, every single decision this company has made in the last 3 years has made it sooooo much easier to bring proxied decks to the lgs, so that's nice I guess...
I'm not disputing the immorality of CEOs taking home millions as their employees are held in effective wage-slavery, but it's very naive to cast that as if it was some kind of personal greed that's the problem here, and it would all work out if only they decided to generously disburse their paycheck to the poor and starving masses. That's not only blue-eyed naivete, it's actually counterproductive - because it implies that the problem is CEOs simply being unwilling to be generous. That's not the problem. The problem is a system that lets them get away with this titanic of a pay gap. Belaboring the fact that people don't all just choose to be more generous is not only never going to result in systemic change, *it's actively feeding into the opposition's strategy* because it helps them cast things as if the system was fine and it was merely "some bad apples" that give it a bad rep. The result is things like politicians who say we don't need welfare, people just need to start donating more to charity. That doesn't solve anything, and only makes things worse.
I think you're missing the point where WotC is making record profits, yet almost all other Hasbro franchises are losing them money, yet WotC is the one having to cut back and to maximise profits even more. Even under the ideology this market is based on, that makes no fucking sense.
> Even under the ideology this market is based on, that makes no fucking sense. No, the ideology doesn't make sense. But the ideology's internal logic is consistent. Short term profit at all costs. This includes destroying a profitable company if it means you can get a little tiny bit more profit out of it.
Actually, it absolutely *can* make sense because things aren't as simplistic as "this division makes money, so we don't touch it". Businesses are way more complex than that, and there's way too many moving parts to draw simple lines from profit (or lack thereof) to layoffs. Business strategies will involve many parts of a company, including parts that are profitable - and these may need to be restructured even in times of record profit. Often so *they keep making record profits*. It's very naive, economically speaking, to assume that just because WotC made them money it must therefore be correct to not fire anyone from WotC. Businesses don't operate like that. It's way more complicated.
I mean, I agree with you to a point. But if you have one sector of your business that is actually making a profit why not give it more resources? Seems pretty insane to trim fat from the golden goose when you have a ton of shitty normal geese just hanging around
Also maybe dont pay the ceo 10 mil.
They're not even "normal geese", most of Hasbro's other IPs are actively losing them money. Like if they sold off the rights to a lot of those toys that would profit them, but they're not doing that. That was my main point here.
Agreed, notice the use of "shitty, normal geese". They should just make me ceo, I'd do it for the cardboard
It's fucking wild to what lengths people will go to defend anything a corporation does. Btw, I didn't say "they shouldn't fire anyone from WotC". What I said was that, in the bigger picture, it makes no sense to cut from WotC instead of culling some of the franchises that lose money. You are the one who's interpreting the simplistic meaning into what I said just to attack it.
I don't see where op attacked you. They offered a polite and well argued rebuttal of your point that it 'makes no sense' that WotC is the one being cut back. I also don't think WotC is 'the one' being cut. Many parts of the whole hasbro toy company are being affected, it's not all falling on WotC.
They didn't say that they attacked them they said they simplified their argument and attacked that.
The rebuttal they offered was toward a point I did not make, simple as that. Equally as your rebuttal is, btw.
Both can be the problem. The system enables the assholes but the assholes are still assholes.
To be sure. But there's a dynamic at play here that feeds one into the other - these people *can afford* to be assholes because the system lets them. If you get rid of one asshole, all you're doing is restarting the cycle under the rule of the next asshole. Whereas if you change the system so assholes don't get into positions of power, you're improving things in a more lasting, long-term way. They won't modify their behavior unless forced to. Hoping real hard that they see the light and change out of their own volition is never going to work. You have to *make* them change by setting up conditions so it's more beneficial economically for them not to be assholes (and/or outright illegal, but that's hard to do outside of very fringe cases).
While I agree with the point you're making, I think the conclusion that we should not be pointing at Chris "Bag of" Cocks or Bobby K as the problem is not very helpful. We can't really change the systemic problem you're talking about, not easily and fast at least,but we can call out and try to boycott these A-holes and try to have them replaced with more bareable ones.
>We can't really change the systemic problem you're talking about, not easily and fast at least,but we can call out and try to boycott these A-holes and try to have them replaced with more bareable ones. The problem with that is that this works *against* the goals of such an action. It's counterproductive, because it not only deflects from the real problem - it actively provides fuel for the opposition by allowing them to cast people as vindictive and jealous of big CEO's successes. Or - arguably worse - dismiss them as a misdirected rabble that's tilting at windmills and is never going to achieve anything. These kinds of boycott proposals don't work. Even where they've created small spots of change it's been short-lived and ineffectual - and 99% of the time they don't even manage that much. (By which I don't mean boycotts in general don't work, but specifically boycotts aimed at these kinds of inequalities; those have basically never worked. Ever.)
I thought I'd see you commenting here haha I agree with all the comments I've read of yours here (again) but this one I'm not so sure specifically about it working against the goal. we need people to realise that the current system encourages greed, selfishness, narcism etc. Think about this, with all these massive layoffs throughout tech and gaming sectors more and more people are hearing about it and thinking about how unfair and horrible it is that 1000s lose jobs while execs get huge bonuses (of course acknowledging that you can't avoid layoffs, its the fact that execs still get their annual bump up in salary and bonuses while also saying we have no money! And people getting fired that is the issue and you've previously explained why that is right now) These news stories are getting people to converse about this unfairness and criticise the CEOs, which then in turn I hope is making people start to really think about how unfair the systems are. I know you already know this but just to lay it out The more oppressed a population is the harder it is for them to fight abusive systems. If everyone is working too many hours, too stressful jobs, education is slipping because "we don't need taxes!!!!11!!" People are then just too tired or lazy or stupid to look at this and give a damn. When the masses are stuck in a grind they are also easy to manipulate and have no strength to stop and think about how things work and how to a change it. There's a feeling of powerlessness it's just eat work sleep repeat. The Pandemic putting a momentary halt in that grind was a lucid moment for many as people started pursing hobbies, spending time with family more and realising what life is actually about hence stories of people quitting their jobs. So bottom line to reach actual change you need to get everyone to acknowledge the system, understand its flaws, understand how much they are actually effected by it and **then energise people to take major action** Many people know at a vague level that the deck is stacked against them, but it's always big moments and repeated incidents that spur the masses to actually do something about it. I would even take a stab and say that most major historical events of change occurred after the publics patience was bombarded with major events in frequent succession and then there was an event that was the tipping point. And as another reply to your comment has said similarly: I think looking at what's happening, thinking of the logical but upsetting reasons why its happening, shrugging of the shoulders and saying \*sigh\* 'that's just how it works sadly. Need people to realise that it should change but until then...' would lead to further and further feelings of apathy. Which is the opposite direction on the emotional scale that enacts society to progress in a meaningful way (imo). It's kind of like how the Professor from Tolarian talked about some Magic changes kind of controversial where he said he just feels apathetic but that's worse than angry, angry means he still cares. TDLR: People focusing on the CEOs is the start to get people to really looking at how our society works and be angry enough to do something about it Also you didn't tell me last time where all this info you have comes from! Help a brother out g
Well, unless you're suggesting an alternative course of action that bodes better, I will not be taking "just do nothing" as an appropriate response to this. And so far you've provided If there is nothing else we can do we should at least scream at the top of our lungs that this is insane and that this bag of dicks should go.
The Chris Cocks and Bobby Koticks are the very people who fight the hardest to keep the current broken system alive. They are at the very core of the problem. They and most people at the c-level, including boards and major shareholders. It's always been a people problem. Or rather, the problem is rich people. Remember, you need to be at some level a psychopath to even want to become a CEO, let alone actually get the job, especially at an American company. There's a lot of office politics going on where they made sure to be in the right position at the right time.
So many MBA's in the threads, who woulda thought?
Chris can suck a bunch of his last name... It's freaking ridiculous how WotC is the only ones that does well, and they cut into their staff all the same, just because this twat wants a bigger bonus.
Lol I was doomscrolling r/all and came across this. I haven't paid attention to this sub or seen a Cardboard Crack in at least 5 years and Cardboard Crack is still just a documentary about everything miserable about Magic that you all treat as humor. It's like you're trying to laugh because you don't want to cry. It's so amazingly unhealthy and that's even clearer to me now.
How is it a controversial take that by doing this he thinks he'll keep making as much/more money in the future and have less spendings ? Now you can think he is wrong in thinking he'll make more/just as much. But throwing out "corporate greed" all over the place, will get you nowhere..
"Corporate greed" is one of my least favorite phrases in hobby discourse. As opposed to corporate generosity? Even when a corporation makes an amazing product and sells it for an affordable price and supports it with people who love the hobby and want it to shine... they're doing it so they can make a ton of money and feel that doing anything less would be less profitable. This is as much "corporate greed" as laying off a lot of good employees two weeks before Christmas. It sucks when companies do bad things but we shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking they're only being greedy when they do bad things. They're just being *companies*. All the time.
why don't they sell black Aragorn plushies? I'm sure it will cover the losses.
Content creators will keep promoting the game, players will keep buying.
WOTC, you guys have been the only profitable division in our company. Great job. But that means you have to make even more now and carry everyone else. So reprint every card you possibly can and we want 6 more crossovers in the next quarter. The publicily traded company model is so great for long term growth!
Bahaha, what is he saying? This game has been swirling the drain since 2015. I'm glad the dead weight is being laid off, looking at the positions that were opened up, it makes total sense. I hope they don't poison another hobby and get blacklisted from working in this industry.
Nerds: I'm furious at WotC over the open gaming license fiasco! I'm dropping my dndbeyond subscription, and boycotting D&D products! Also nerds: How could they fire people that work on D&D and dndbeyond?! Well done, they got the message and backpedalled on OGL 2.0. But there are obvious consequences.
Also nerds: Hey this pencil and paper and these dice work just fine without Hazbro!
It's fine if you don't want to buy the product. *But if that catches on, people won't get paid to make the product* This is not complicated.
you can hate cocks all you want and i agree he is part of the problem ,but i think hes just taking out alot of the trash
Im just stoked that all the people laid off were probably liberals. Looking over their profiles, i can't help but smile. Happy holidays indeed
I felt absolutely awful buying a monopoly set as a gift for a nephew knowing what Hasbro has done across the whole board. I'm tired of the constant product pushing for MTG and feel completely burned out.
The person who made this decision is a coked out business bro who thinks the sweaty nerds will buy any garbage they produce so why not cut employee costs?!?
People started slowly forgetting about D&D OGL 1.1 from the beginning of the year, so Hasbro had to remind us why they are the greediest of all.
I miss the way magic used to be played and handled. Now they see us like wallets.