tylerja-blog asked:
“That’s the nature of Magic. It adapts to the needs of the collective whole. It used to upset me, but I came to realize it is one of the game’s greatest strengths. It becomes the game its players need/want it to be.” Is to me, a market-friendly way to say “sloughs emotionally invested players in pursuit of the unremarkable, but widely palatable middle”
Many players like to assume the core of the people making the changes aren’t enfranchised players, but it’s exactly the opposite. Why, for example, is Universes Beyond so popular? Because the people who play the most Magic really adore it.
We’re not ignoring the hard-core Magic players, we’re doing what they say they most want through their actions and in market research.
Magic is a business. Ignoring our core customers would just be bad business.
We make changes because Magic players, and especially our hard-core enfranchised players, want it. Maybe in this particular case it’s not you in particular (or maybe it is, I don’t know), but it’s not us ignoring “emotionally invested players”.
Maro says the same thing in all of these so it shouldn’t really be a surprise anymore, doesn’t make it less frustrating for me. Perhaps the most frustrating thing though is how he always avoids the actual substance of this recurring player complaint.
Things everyone already understands yet MaRo keeps distracting with: that WotC is a business and needs to focus on profit, that WotC will inherently cater to the market segments that spend the most, and that the UB sets to date are popular.
There are so many nuances that he ignores or blanket “data” that he won’t share that take these from useless to disingenuous and I think thats why his corporate explanations always feel bad to me.
I have two main issues that I feel never get properly addressed in these, and won’t get properly addressed:
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Chasing profits or short term profit maximization does not need to be assumed to be correct. It’s a valid criticism to say that chasing near term UB sales may not actually be the best business decision in the long term! To just hand wave that away every time as “well people buy UB so we are going to cater to that” is very unfair. What if barely any of these new players convert to longer term players or what if none buy another UB or MTG product? What if by chasing short term profits, WotC wakes up in 3 years with no core player base and new/UB player base interested? MaRo never addresses this point (obviously) and it really takes away from his credibility here.
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The marketing research they do is also highly suspect and another related thing he just hand waves. “Research” indicates UB=good so they’re doing it. I think the fact that Hasbro has otherwise failed to succeed in its other product lines should weigh heavily in whether they conduct accurate product research.
It’s very easy for them to say successful UBs are successful because UB=good. But bad ones, like Transformers, are ignored or because of other variables. Not all UBs are equal. LotR, the wildly successful one, cannot be lumped together with Spongebob such that all UB sets are treated equally. They’re wildly different fanbases and have totally different impacts on the lore, nostalgia, and game feel.
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