Penny Arcade - Comic - Gargaxxelon

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Penny Arcade - Comic - Gargaxxelon

Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.

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Overkillengine

Given how Hasbro has acted recently....sounds like not much will change.

Valerois

I divined the reasons behind his buyout "threat" before even reading about it. Of course he's trying to "rescue D&D from the woke mind virus" in the name of the sacred old days, that's on brand. "Make orcs evil again, freedom of expression". It's the slop he decided to ingest in order to grow to gargantuan size and devour the countryside, and it worked for him, sadly.

Hevach

Overkillengine wrote: »

Given how Hasbro has acted recently....sounds like not much will change.

Everything it's doing will remain but also:

1. D&D will be filled with a bunch of hate speech (source: he said so)
2. Grok AI will replace all the creative workers (source: he said so)
3. Hasbro will be saddled with all the debt of him paying five times its actual value in the buyout. (Source: he did this with Twitter)
4. Staff will be reduced to whoever has no options due to visa restrictions so that when they miss multiple paychecks and lose their homes they still can't quit. (Source: he did this with Twitter)

Tl;Dr: we will all be nostalgic for the days that they send armed thugs to people's homes to steal their property due to their own shipping errors.

Grendus

And then he will sue content creators who switch away from creating D&D content on the basis of a conspiracy against free speech (source: he did this with Twitter).

V1m

The good thing about tabletop RPGs is that the barrier to basically open-sourcing your own ruleset is very low. The bad thing is that coming up with good, balanced, coherent adventure ideas is difficult and it's really OK to expect to pay money for that.

But good, balance, coherent adventure ideas don't have to be bound to any tightly specified ruleset.

Overkillengine

V1m wrote: »

The good thing about tabletop RPGs is that the barrier to basically open-sourcing your own ruleset is very low.

Yeah this is why my give a shit meter isn't pegging very hard. He has no power to dictate content at any home table unless one is completely unwilling to homebrew at all. Granted I guess it could suck for anyone wanting to only play at officially sanctioned events...but there is not a lack of competing products that can be immediately moved to either.

It's not like he can remotely rewrite all your rulebooks unless you were literally unwise enough to only buy digital products hosted on a server you do not control. Everyone else can continue to use what local copies they already they have and just ignore him into irrelevance. He screws around too much with the brand and it's just going to create more Paizos.

Vontre

Yes but Hasbro also owns Magic the Gathering. And probably other stuff? Sorry not sorry, but maybe Sorry, and definitely Monopoly.

Lttlefoot

I wanna see Elon Musk's take on My Little Pony

V1m

I do not.

Solysp

Unlike Twitter, Hasbro is an actual massive corporation with real products, I don't think even Musk can afford to just outright buy the world's largest toy company. Maybe he could convince them to just sell him Wizards of the Coast except Magic the Gathering prints money so they'd probably want to keep that.

Grendus

They might sell him D&D, but even that's questionable as it's printing money right now. In fact, it's basically the only part of Hasbro that was profitable for a while, to the point that there were talks of spinning it off into its own company so the rest of the company wouldn't drag it down.

My understanding is the D&D and Barbie movies basically resolved that, as Hasbro is now pivoting to IP management of their very culturally-rich lines of toys. But the toys were not doing so well.

dennis

Grendus wrote: »

They might sell him D&D, but even that's questionable as it's printing money right now. In fact, it's basically the only part of Hasbro that was profitable for a while, to the point that there were talks of spinning it off into its own company so the rest of the company wouldn't drag it down.

My understanding is the D&D and Barbie movies basically resolved that, as Hasbro is now pivoting to IP management of their very culturally-rich lines of toys. But the toys were not doing so well.

Unfortunately, the excellent D&D movie was a financial flop. It barely cracked $200 million worldwide, and its budget was around $150 million. That doesn't include marketing and distribution, so it probably lost money. Usual consensus is that a movie like this needs to make 2.5x its production budget to make a profit.

Barbie was definitely a different story. Its budget was $125-150 million, but it made a whopping $1.4 billion worldwide. Hasbro will see very little of that money, though, as Barbie is a Mattel property.

Armored Chocobo

I'm for this, just because people will take all their 3rd party stuff and form a splinter "similar but different" TTRPG.

Like how Pathfinder splintered off because 3.5e guys didn't like the choices in 4e, folks will take 5e/5.5e D&D and run with that too.

Elric4985

Hasbro also owns Power Rangers and I shudder to think what that would be like

Overkillengine

Lttlefoot wrote: »

I wanna see Elon Musk's take on My Little Pony

MLP: Friendship is Profit

Armored Chocobo

Overkillengine wrote: »

Lttlefoot wrote: »

I wanna see Elon Musk's take on My Little Pony

MLP: Friendship is Profit

MLP: Friendship is Woke

All the episodes just talk about how to exploit people to better yourself.

Hevach

Some years back I took a photo of a motorcycle with swastikas on the gas tank and an MLP character on the fender. At the time I thought this was a bizarre juxtaposition and some kind of unfathomable anomaly in the universe.

I posted it somewhere, maybe here, and was told that at the time the Brony community was so lousy with white supremacists that many forums had shorthand code for whether it was tolerated or not.

I also learned that many other communities you wouldn't think have the same problem, furries were especially bad at the time. I have recently learned furries have aggressively cleaned up their community but I can't speak for many of the others. Marvel and Star Trek are still bad.

Nazis ruin *everything.*

V1m

There were nazi furries almost from the get-go.

I'm not saying that the far right is utterly riddled with toxically repressed sexualities or anything but actually yeah I am.

Steel Angel

Grendus wrote: »

They might sell him D&D, but even that's questionable as it's printing money right now. In fact, it's basically the only part of Hasbro that was profitable for a while, to the point that there were talks of spinning it off into its own company so the rest of the company wouldn't drag it down.

My understanding is the D&D and Barbie movies basically resolved that, as Hasbro is now pivoting to IP management of their very culturally-rich lines of toys. But the toys were not doing so well.

How recent is your data on D&D? Because everything I've read suggests the opposite: https://www.tabletopgamingnews.com/hasbros-q3-report-shows-decline-in-dd-revenue-despite-2024-launch/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=hasbros-q3-report-shows-decline-in-dd-revenue-despite-2024-launch

The boost from their share of BG3's sales have been a nice boost but that's not a consistent revenue stream. D&D as a whole is an oddity in Hasbro's stable given that any given playgroup only needs one copy of any given rulebook whereas every Magic: The Gathering player needs their own cards and every kid playing with G.I. Joes wants their own figures. Though as a whole, Hasbro hasn't been doing great between their IPs not being the most culturally relevant (as @dennis stated, Barbie is a Mattel IP. Hasbro mostly has stuff that used to rely on cartoons to sell new toys that no longer gets new shows) and inflation and rising costs in general mean parents are choosing to prioritize food and housing for their kids over new plastic.

Steel Angel

Hevach wrote: »

Some years back I took a photo of a motorcycle with swastikas on the gas tank and an MLP character on the fender. At the time I thought this was a bizarre juxtaposition and some kind of unfathomable anomaly in the universe.

I posted it somewhere, maybe here, and was told that at the time the Brony community was so lousy with white supremacists that many forums had shorthand code for whether it was tolerated or not.

I also learned that many other communities you wouldn't think have the same problem, furries were especially bad at the time. I have recently learned furries have aggressively cleaned up their community but I can't speak for many of the others. Marvel and Star Trek are still bad.

Nazis ruin *everything.*

Extremist and criminal groups have long had great success recruiting from subsets of the population that feel excluded or outcast from the mainstream. In that light, it's not really surprising that they'd find purchase in more niche subcultures like furries, bronies, and some other fandoms.

Armored Chocobo

Steel Angel wrote: »

Hevach wrote: »

Some years back I took a photo of a motorcycle with swastikas on the gas tank and an MLP character on the fender. At the time I thought this was a bizarre juxtaposition and some kind of unfathomable anomaly in the universe.

I posted it somewhere, maybe here, and was told that at the time the Brony community was so lousy with white supremacists that many forums had shorthand code for whether it was tolerated or not.

I also learned that many other communities you wouldn't think have the same problem, furries were especially bad at the time. I have recently learned furries have aggressively cleaned up their community but I can't speak for many of the others. Marvel and Star Trek are still bad.

Nazis ruin *everything.*

Extremist and criminal groups have long had great success recruiting from subsets of the population that feel excluded or outcast from the mainstream. In that light, it's not really surprising that they'd find purchase in more niche subcultures like furries, bronies, and some other fandoms.

I never understood Far-Right Furries.

"I see myself as a wolf, but Black People existing? EW!"

Dude you're like Target #3 right under LGBT and non-whites, the Leopards are yearning for your face.

MichaelLC

But see, they're going to roll the nat 20 and it's another group who gets the boot. It's never them.

V1m

Armored Chocobo wrote: »

Steel Angel wrote: »

Hevach wrote: »

Some years back I took a photo of a motorcycle with swastikas on the gas tank and an MLP character on the fender. At the time I thought this was a bizarre juxtaposition and some kind of unfathomable anomaly in the universe.

I posted it somewhere, maybe here, and was told that at the time the Brony community was so lousy with white supremacists that many forums had shorthand code for whether it was tolerated or not.

I also learned that many other communities you wouldn't think have the same problem, furries were especially bad at the time. I have recently learned furries have aggressively cleaned up their community but I can't speak for many of the others. Marvel and Star Trek are still bad.

Nazis ruin *everything.*

Extremist and criminal groups have long had great success recruiting from subsets of the population that feel excluded or outcast from the mainstream. In that light, it's not really surprising that they'd find purchase in more niche subcultures like furries, bronies, and some other fandoms.

I never understood Far-Right Furries.

"I see myself as a wolf, but Black People existing? EW!"

Dude you're like Target #3 right under LGBT and non-whites, the Leopards are yearning for your face.

You might want to choose a metaphor less likely to arouse them