Toys R Us recently announced that they're going to be closing ALL U.S. stores. They're $5 billion in debt, so yeah Toys R Us was very much a part of my generation's childhood. There's some implications that this may potentially have on MTG and other Trading Card Games/Collectible Card Games going forward and that's because most of Hasbro's revenue originally came from Toys R Us and they're not getting it anymore. Now you have to understand the way WotC and Hasbro works is that they sell their products to distributors and that they don't perceive us as a customer for buying their products because we're not WotC customers.
The distribution company that buys the sealed product from Hasbro or WotC are the customer and we're the distributor's customers or the stores' customers that they're being distributed to. That's ultimately the supply chain, but you know our sales obviously impact the entire supply chain so there's a cause and effect relationship there. If the customers aren't buying it and the stores aren't ordering it then the distributors aren't ordering it etc. But with the power that Hasbro had they could strong arm distributors into taking X amount of products based on certain deals that they would work out and whatever. Basically If you want to order Star Wars action figures they're going to shackle you with a bunch of other action figures you don't want.
In relation to MTG If you want the Atraxa, Praetors' Voice Commander pre-con that's okay you're gonna have to get the Breya, Etherium Shaper pre-con which is good and then the other two pre-cons as well. It's just how it's gonna have to go and yes even though you'd like to order just 50 Atraxa, Praetors' Voice online that's not how this is going to work so they have the power to do that but that power will be waning with their influence because of what happened with Toys R Us. There was a phenomenon from a YouTuber: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hNAji3lIGE who would go to his local Toys R Us and different Toy stores to show all the Star Wars toys literally just rotting on the shelves collecting dust.
These toys were made by Hasbro, the same company that owns WotC and they weren't even selling. With The Last Jedi being as bad as it was, Star Wars is a dying brand as far as toy sales go which was a huge part of Hasbro's business and now it's either all gone or slowly drying up. Toys in general just aren't what they used to be anymore. The reality is you go into a mall or a store and you see what all of today's kids have, they have the latest smartphone or tablet device to stream TV shows, movies, and play games, the reality is when you get a shell case like that on an iPad that probably costs $400-500 by handing it to a kid then you don't have to buy them anything else again.
You could give them a new app every once in a while, you know kids nowadays download apps since a lot of them are for free anyway. That's a lot cheaper than buying new DLC for video game consoles/handhelds, new video game software that costs $50-60 a piece, action figures which are now $12-14 a piece and it's like, "Wow... You're really gonna give your kid just one action figure?" Kids from my generation were into that kind of stuff but not today's generation. So let's say you buy a kid 6 action figures, well you're looking at almost $100 there after tax and then depending on the type of child If they don't open the toys they're just gonna go on a shelf and look at them and that's that but If you give the kid an iPad you're done. Congratulations you've literally just bought yourself a babysitter.
Now we can debate the morals and ethics of that later and how involved parents should be in raising their own children which obviously I'm gonna take the stance that they should be more involved in raising their own kids down the line but that's a conversation for another day. The reality is that parents in America are spending less time with their children and as an end result they're not buying toys for them anymore. They're buying one or two pieces of electronic equipment and that's their new mom and dad stereotype. So that's bad news for Hasbro and table top games in general not just MTG and other Trading Card Games/Collectible Card Games.
Most of their products are going the way of the dodo and that means Hasbro's going to need to find money elsewhere. They're gonna start squeezing MTG hard, we've already started seeing this with the increased flow of Masters sets and I think a lot of that had to do with Hasbro making up for poor sales of Star Wars toys. I wouldn't be surprised If this motivates Hasbro into looking at other ways to shake down WotC for more money and one of those would be rescinding the Reserve List. Hasbro bought WotC after WotC created the Reserve List, ergo Hasbro can say:
"Yeah we didn't write this policy. WotC has altered this policy repeatedly throughout the years but by not following it, they removed stuff from it, they added stuff to it. We're Hasbro we don't care we're just gonna do whatever we want. It's our company and we're not WotC since they're a part of us now and they're young." They could chuck it and start reprinting Reserve List cards again which would be a huge boom for sales. I'm just saying that it's a possibility. As far as the culture war stuff and everything that we seem to be dealing with and again hopefully Hasbro as a company learned their lesson from Star Wars but then again both Hasbro and Mattel bought into this regressive PC Marxist culture that we live in.
Ya know put Barbie dolls in the boys toys section, so this whole push for just basically disrupting and destroying the traditional and biologically driven notion of gender and sexuality, they just went full on postmodern feminist on it and we've seen the results. You have Rose action figures sitting on dollar store shelves because they couldn't sell them at Toys R Us and they either needed to fire or sell them to someone else. Toy stores are going out of business because they're unable to move this crappy merchandise. In one of the videos of the YouTuber I previously mentioned, Toys R Us had Rey cosplay in the boys department and of course it wasn't selling.
Hopefully Hasbro learned a painful financial lesson because of it and maybe they'll start to take a look into the complaints about WotC and say, "Ya know, we've already lost a huge portion of our toy business to this stuff and we're not gonna lose another with a multi million dollar franchise. You guys got to pull it together, over half the people in the United States are Conservative, not everyone is Liberal, you need to pull it together." So we'll see. I just know that just like Blockbuster now we've lost Toys R Us and If WotC doesn't pull it together then we're going to be losing most of our local game stores. If no one wants to buy the products, If nobody's showing up to play Standard, then these stores aren't going to be able to stay open forever and we're going to continue to move into a digital space.
If we've learned anything over the past year it's that WotC doesn't know how to properly manage a digital space, you look at the disaster with MTGO and it's only going to continue to get worse with MTG Arena. All of the sudden they turn into George Orwell's nightmare as soon as you give anyone who works there a little bit of power. You can't keep a customer base especially an online one with that kind of attitude. So anyway sad day for America, sad day for a lot of jobs from Toys R Us with 33,000 employees displaced and looking for new jobs. This is really depressing for people who were born in the early 80's since Toys R Us was definitely a part of their life, myself included.
Hopefully one day a phoenix will rise from the ashes where something good comes out of this and maybe these manufacturers will learn their lesson about the type of products that people want to buy, that men and women have different tastes, and that they need to stop trying to pretend otherwise. Don't get the wrong idea I'm not trying to come off as being sexist here but it is what it is. The statistics you pointed out Hermes_ seem to showcase the continuing lack of communication between the company and consumer because they're stuck in their own social media bubbles of who they choose to listen and ignore. The fact of the matter is that they need to start listening to the consumer outside of social media.
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Cancel Culture is the real reason why everyone's not allowed to have nice things anymore." - Anonymous
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" - Mark 8:36
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta
”Toys R Us recently announced” ... blah blah... random rant... Richard Garfield tries to run my dog over .... I don’t brush and floss... “they need to start listening to the consumer outside of social media.”
”Toys R Us recently announced” ... blah blah... random rant... Richard Garfield tries to run my dog over .... I don’t brush and floss... “they need to start listening to the consumer outside of social media.”
Huh? You lost us there.
Whatever...don't say I didn't warn you.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
America Bless Christ Jesus
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Cancel Culture is the real reason why everyone's not allowed to have nice things anymore." - Anonymous
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" - Mark 8:36
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta
Fair enough. But really what is your deal here? Your rants - and they can only be called as such at this point - are only tangentially related to the OP. Hasbro owns Wizards and they have a right to run it into the ground or not. Are you trying to rally support for an action, or just soapboxing to vent?
-Grumpy old man rant- The statistics you pointed out Hermes_ seem to showcase the continuing lack of communication between the company and consumer because they're stuck in their own social media bubbles of who they choose to listen and ignore. The fact of the matter is that they need to start listening to the consumer outside of social media.
I have no idea how you came to that conclusion from the investor presentations, which I posted to point out that you were and still are flat out wrong that Hasbro is upset over how WotC is doing and in particular handling MTG.
As far as the culture war stuff and everything that we seem to be dealing with and again hopefully Hasbro as a company learned their lesson from Star Wars but then again both Hasbro and Mattel bought into this regressive PC Marxist culture that we live in.
...And this is the point where card slinger J stopped making cogent arguments and went into full-on deranged rant mode.
I find it baffling that you can first make totally reasonable arguments about why toys R us went out of business and why toys in general are declining as a market - namely the increase in personal technology that outclasses anything sold at a toy store - and then somehow turn around and say that it's because of...liberals?
I mean, first of all, toys r us is (or was) a business, and it would be asinine to think that they're organizing their stores based on political motivations over economic ones. Second, I think you'd have a hard time proving that more than half the US is conservative - polls I've seen show both liberal and conservative significantly short of half given the number of people in the middle. Third, and not to totally derail this conversation by actually talking about wotc, but wotc's liberal leanings have pretty close to zero impact on the casual magic player. I mean what's seriously at stake here? A few twitter posts? A few obnoxious loudmouths being banned from tournament play? That's what going to bring down wotc? right.
Hopefully one day a phoenix will rise from the ashes where something good comes out of this and maybe these manufacturers will learn their lesson about the type of products that people want to buy, that men and women have different tastes, and that they need to stop trying to pretend otherwise.
I really have no idea what your point is with this constant reiteration that "men and wimmin be difrent". What does this have to do with wotc? They make a product. If men want that product, great. If women want that product, great. This sounds like it has a lot more to do with your sexual hangups than anything wotc is involved in.
Also, sidebar, but man am I tired of people throwing around the term "regressive" as it relates to liberals without any understanding of why the term exists. "Regressive left" is a term coined by other liberals (principally sam harris, who is great) to describe the attitudes of liberals who are excessively tolerant of extremely conservative ideologies (principally within islam) that have extremely regressive - backwards looking - attitudes towards women, homosexuals, atheism, etc. Hence "regressive". There's nothing regressive about putting dolls with the boys toys or whatever crap you're whinging about. Even if you think it's wrongheaded, it's still not regressive because it doesn't correspond to anything in the past. You know...regress...move backwards...do you get it? Do you get why it doesn't make any sense the way you're using it? Are you going to stop? Or are you going to keep using it anyway because it sounds cool and words don't matter unless they help you win arguments on the internet?
If you're wondering why no one takes your arguments seriously, it's probably because shoehorning your political ideologies into conversations where they have little, if any, relevance is tiresome in the extreme.
The distribution company that buys the sealed product from Hasbro or WotC are the customer and we're the distributor's customers or the stores' customers that they're being distributed to. That's ultimately the supply chain, but you know our sales obviously impact the entire supply chain so there's a cause and effect relationship there. If the customers aren't buying it and the stores aren't ordering it then the distributors aren't ordering it etc. But with the power that Hasbro had they could strong arm distributors into taking X amount of products based on certain deals that they would work out and whatever. Basically If you want to order Star Wars action figures they're going to shackle you with a bunch of other action figures you don't want.
In relation to MTG If you want the Atraxa, Praetors' Voice Commander pre-con that's okay you're gonna have to get the Breya, Etherium Shaper pre-con which is good and then the other two pre-cons as well. It's just how it's gonna have to go and yes even though you'd like to order just 50 Atraxa, Praetors' Voice online that's not how this is going to work so they have the power to do that but that power will be waning with their influence because of what happened with Toys R Us. There was a phenomenon from a YouTuber: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hNAji3lIGE who would go to his local Toys R Us and different Toy stores to show all the Star Wars toys literally just rotting on the shelves collecting dust.
These toys were made by Hasbro, the same company that owns WotC and they weren't even selling. With The Last Jedi being as bad as it was, Star Wars is a dying brand as far as toy sales go which was a huge part of Hasbro's business and now it's either all gone or slowly drying up. Toys in general just aren't what they used to be anymore. The reality is you go into a mall or a store and you see what all of today's kids have, they have the latest smartphone or tablet device to stream TV shows, movies, and play games, the reality is when you get a shell case like that on an iPad that probably costs $400-500 by handing it to a kid then you don't have to buy them anything else again.
You could give them a new app every once in a while, you know kids nowadays download apps since a lot of them are for free anyway. That's a lot cheaper than buying new DLC for video game consoles/handhelds, new video game software that costs $50-60 a piece, action figures which are now $12-14 a piece and it's like, "Wow... You're really gonna give your kid just one action figure?" Kids from my generation were into that kind of stuff but not today's generation. So let's say you buy a kid 6 action figures, well you're looking at almost $100 there after tax and then depending on the type of child If they don't open the toys they're just gonna go on a shelf and look at them and that's that but If you give the kid an iPad you're done. Congratulations you've literally just bought yourself a babysitter.
Now we can debate the morals and ethics of that later and how involved parents should be in raising their own children which obviously I'm gonna take the stance that they should be more involved in raising their own kids down the line but that's a conversation for another day. The reality is that parents in America are spending less time with their children and as an end result they're not buying toys for them anymore. They're buying one or two pieces of electronic equipment and that's their new mom and dad stereotype. So that's bad news for Hasbro and table top games in general not just MTG and other Trading Card Games/Collectible Card Games.
Most of their products are going the way of the dodo and that means Hasbro's going to need to find money elsewhere. They're gonna start squeezing MTG hard, we've already started seeing this with the increased flow of Masters sets and I think a lot of that had to do with Hasbro making up for poor sales of Star Wars toys. I wouldn't be surprised If this motivates Hasbro into looking at other ways to shake down WotC for more money and one of those would be rescinding the Reserve List. Hasbro bought WotC after WotC created the Reserve List, ergo Hasbro can say:
"Yeah we didn't write this policy. WotC has altered this policy repeatedly throughout the years but by not following it, they removed stuff from it, they added stuff to it. We're Hasbro we don't care we're just gonna do whatever we want. It's our company and we're not WotC since they're a part of us now and they're young." They could chuck it and start reprinting Reserve List cards again which would be a huge boom for sales. I'm just saying that it's a possibility. As far as the culture war stuff and everything that we seem to be dealing with and again hopefully Hasbro as a company learned their lesson from Star Wars but then again both Hasbro and Mattel bought into this regressive PC Marxist culture that we live in.
Ya know put Barbie dolls in the boys toys section, so this whole push for just basically disrupting and destroying the traditional and biologically driven notion of gender and sexuality, they just went full on postmodern feminist on it and we've seen the results. You have Rose action figures sitting on dollar store shelves because they couldn't sell them at Toys R Us and they either needed to fire or sell them to someone else. Toy stores are going out of business because they're unable to move this crappy merchandise. In one of the videos of the YouTuber I previously mentioned, Toys R Us had Rey cosplay in the boys department and of course it wasn't selling.
Hopefully Hasbro learned a painful financial lesson because of it and maybe they'll start to take a look into the complaints about WotC and say, "Ya know, we've already lost a huge portion of our toy business to this stuff and we're not gonna lose another with a multi million dollar franchise. You guys got to pull it together, over half the people in the United States are Conservative, not everyone is Liberal, you need to pull it together." So we'll see. I just know that just like Blockbuster now we've lost Toys R Us and If WotC doesn't pull it together then we're going to be losing most of our local game stores. If no one wants to buy the products, If nobody's showing up to play Standard, then these stores aren't going to be able to stay open forever and we're going to continue to move into a digital space.
If we've learned anything over the past year it's that WotC doesn't know how to properly manage a digital space, you look at the disaster with MTGO and it's only going to continue to get worse with MTG Arena. All of the sudden they turn into George Orwell's nightmare as soon as you give anyone who works there a little bit of power. You can't keep a customer base especially an online one with that kind of attitude. So anyway sad day for America, sad day for a lot of jobs from Toys R Us with 33,000 employees displaced and looking for new jobs. This is really depressing for people who were born in the early 80's since Toys R Us was definitely a part of their life, myself included.
Hopefully one day a phoenix will rise from the ashes where something good comes out of this and maybe these manufacturers will learn their lesson about the type of products that people want to buy, that men and women have different tastes, and that they need to stop trying to pretend otherwise. Don't get the wrong idea I'm not trying to come off as being sexist here but it is what it is. The statistics you pointed out Hermes_ seem to showcase the continuing lack of communication between the company and consumer because they're stuck in their own social media bubbles of who they choose to listen and ignore. The fact of the matter is that they need to start listening to the consumer outside of social media.
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Cancel Culture is the real reason why everyone's not allowed to have nice things anymore." - Anonymous
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" - Mark 8:36
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta
"Restriction breeds creativity." - Sheldon Menery on EDH / Commander in Magic: The Gathering
"Cancel Culture is the real reason why everyone's not allowed to have nice things anymore." - Anonymous
"For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul?" - Mark 8:36
"Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution." - Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
"Every life decision is always a risk / reward proposition." - Sanjay Gupta
I have no idea how you came to that conclusion from the investor presentations, which I posted to point out that you were and still are flat out wrong that Hasbro is upset over how WotC is doing and in particular handling MTG.
I find it baffling that you can first make totally reasonable arguments about why toys R us went out of business and why toys in general are declining as a market - namely the increase in personal technology that outclasses anything sold at a toy store - and then somehow turn around and say that it's because of...liberals?
I mean, first of all, toys r us is (or was) a business, and it would be asinine to think that they're organizing their stores based on political motivations over economic ones. Second, I think you'd have a hard time proving that more than half the US is conservative - polls I've seen show both liberal and conservative significantly short of half given the number of people in the middle. Third, and not to totally derail this conversation by actually talking about wotc, but wotc's liberal leanings have pretty close to zero impact on the casual magic player. I mean what's seriously at stake here? A few twitter posts? A few obnoxious loudmouths being banned from tournament play? That's what going to bring down wotc? right.
I really have no idea what your point is with this constant reiteration that "men and wimmin be difrent". What does this have to do with wotc? They make a product. If men want that product, great. If women want that product, great. This sounds like it has a lot more to do with your sexual hangups than anything wotc is involved in.
Also, sidebar, but man am I tired of people throwing around the term "regressive" as it relates to liberals without any understanding of why the term exists. "Regressive left" is a term coined by other liberals (principally sam harris, who is great) to describe the attitudes of liberals who are excessively tolerant of extremely conservative ideologies (principally within islam) that have extremely regressive - backwards looking - attitudes towards women, homosexuals, atheism, etc. Hence "regressive". There's nothing regressive about putting dolls with the boys toys or whatever crap you're whinging about. Even if you think it's wrongheaded, it's still not regressive because it doesn't correspond to anything in the past. You know...regress...move backwards...do you get it? Do you get why it doesn't make any sense the way you're using it? Are you going to stop? Or are you going to keep using it anyway because it sounds cool and words don't matter unless they help you win arguments on the internet?
If you're wondering why no one takes your arguments seriously, it's probably because shoehorning your political ideologies into conversations where they have little, if any, relevance is tiresome in the extreme.
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