Dungeons

In August 2024, John Hight became president of Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro-owned company that’s in charge of two of the most precious brands in gaming: Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering.

But it’s fair to say that before his arrival, the company had been through something of a rocky patch.

John Hight, president of Wizards of the Coast

In January 2023, fans were up in arms about leaked plans to restrict D&D’s Open Game Licence (OGL), which permits players to freely use the D&D rules and mechanics. In the wake of overwhelming player backlash, Wizards of the Coast quickly walked back its plans.

At around the same time, the company reportedly cancelled the development of at least five video games. Then, towards the end of the year, parent company Hasbro announced it would cut nearly 1,100 jobs (although the firm didn’t specify if or how the cuts would affect Wizards of the Coast).

The bright spot of Baldur’s Gate 3 notwithstanding, it was a complicated legacy to inherit. But Hight says that “some of the hard bits were past us” by the time he joined.

And right now, he’s ecstatic by the growth of Magic: The Gathering in particular, which has surpassed his expectations, buoyed by the release of Final Fantasy Universe Beyond expansion earlier this year. The much-sought-after crossover cards made $200 million in revenue in a single day.

“I know that in the beginning, I think there was debate about how successful some of these Universe Beyond endeavours would be,” recalls Hight. “Would they overshadow the things that we were doing in our original IP? What was the right mix on it?

“And I think we landed it pretty well. The popularity of our original IP has done extremely well: It wasn’t impacted by the introduction of what we saw with Final Fantasy.”

Hight says that the company knew the Final Fantasy crossover would be big – but it was his call to predict exactly how big, in terms of deciding how many cards to print.

“We wanted to make sure that we had enough cards in place,” he says. “But you don’t want to make too many cards, because it’s a collectible, right? And if you make too many, it’s not like you’re going to discount them and sell them later. You literally have to bury them. So we had to be very careful.

“And then once early signs were that, oh my gosh, this is going to be bigger than we thought it was, we had to move quickly to reprints so that we’d be in place by the time the expansion came out.”

Hight says that for the Universe Beyond expansions have been particularly successful at expanding the audience. “We’ve had a lot of new players come into Magic,” he says.

Digital versus physical

Hight has had a long career in video games, with stints at The 3DO Company, EA, Atari, and Sony. But before he joined Wizards of the Coast, he spent nearly 13 years at Blizzard Entertainment, culminating in him becoming general manager of the Warcraft franchise.

So although he might be comfortable dealing with the digital side of Wizards of the Coast’s business – juggling the various video games based on its franchises – we wonder how challenging it has been to adapt to the physical side.

The Final Fantasy Magic: The Gathering cards have proved extremely popular | Image credit: Wizards of the Coast

“I mean, I’ve been in the gaming business so long that I can still remember what it was like to press discs and put them in a box,” he smiles. “So in terms of that aspect of supply chain, that I’m familiar with.”

But he recalls that the “spectre of tariffs” at the start of this year prompted an urgent look at the dependencies in the Magic card supply chain, in order to assess how the company might be impacted in the wake of President Trump’s wide-ranging import tax measures.

“Fortunately for us, we had made the decisions a while ago with Magic to produce product in-region. A lot of that was to be faster [and more] responsive to our player bases in those regions.”

That panic aside, he has found the physical side of the business intriguing. “One of my first field trips was to go to one of our major print facilities in North America, in Raleigh, North Carolina, and literally see how Magic cards get made, going from the blank sheets all the way through the process,” he says. “It’s fascinating.”

Under one roof

But how does he find balancing the physical and digital sides of the business?

“One of the things I’ve done is effectively move to a franchise view of how we do things,” says Hight. “So all of Magic, whether it’s digital or physical, sits under Ken Troop.”

Troop has been with the company for 20 years, and acts as the global play lead for the game. “Obviously, he knows a lot about Magic,” says Hight. “I wanted to make sure that anything that we did on the digital side was true and authentic to the Magic community. And I wanted to make sure that all of our activities were under one roof, so to speak.”

Similarly, on the D&D side, all of the operations now come under Dan Ayoub, “who’s a longtime D&D player,” says Hight. “He started playing when he was 12.”

Hight notes that by aligning everything Magic-related under one division and everything D&D-related under another, it should allow for better coordination between different aspects of the same franchise: such as making sure TV or film adaptations align with game releases.

He gives the example of the movie Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. “We’d love to have had a D&D book or campaign a part and parcel with the movie,” he says.

He cites Stranger Things as another example. The show led to “fantastic” interest in D&D, he says, “but it’d be nice to have that all lined up, so when this thing rolls out, we’ve got a campaign for you to enjoy that’s something you saw on the show, or the characters in the show.”

Hight’s aim is to ensure that the digital and physical sides of the business are fully integrated – and he anticipates that more gamers will return to in-person play.

“Unfortunately, because of COVID, there’s a whole generation of gamers that has spent a good deal of their time playing only online,” he says. “And they’re re-discovering the joy of being able to play together.

“What I want us to be able to do is have players move fairly seamlessly between in person play and online play.”

Magic: The Gathering Arena | Image credit: Wizards of the Coast

That means ensuring the digital and physical sides are fully linked up. So with Magic, for example, the aim is to debut cards at the same time in both the physical game and in the digital version, Magic: The Gathering Arena.

In fact, Hight notes that the firm’s tabletop group, Studio X in Seattle, has now been combined with the internal group working on Arena.

But in addition to the Magic and D&D divisions, there’s a third vertical: Wizards Digital Ventures.

“That is essentially where we’re going to incubate new franchises,” says Hight, “or take existing franchises from our board games, physical toys, or even some of the digital products that we may have on the licencing side, but now we want to elevate it to a larger digital presence.”

Hight is currently the acting head of the division, but the company is looking for a new VP to lead it. Their role will be to build relationships with the development community and matchmake developers with IP.

Ultimately, Hight says, the key thing he wants to achieve is to make Wizards of the Coast a kind of safe haven for talented people. “What makes games great is the talent behind them, and I think if we can create an environment where they feel appreciated, if they feel like they can do their best work, that will be the key to our success.”

A fresh approach

One of the biggest changes Hight has made is altering the way that the company makes video games. There’s now far more coordination.

He points out that both Wizards of the Coast’s internal studios and the company’s external partners are all working on a common platform: Unreal Engine 5.

In addition, Wizards of the Coast operates a central content development team that any of its internal or external studios can draw on. The idea, he says, is to have a “set of artists and designers that are trained up on the IP, that have a love and affection for the IP and an understanding of it, and can effectively move from one game to the next.”

The move aims to avoid the typical peaks and troughs of game development.

“One of the complexities from a business standpoint for these big games,” he says, is that they require the assembly of a huge workforce towards the tail end of the development cycle. “Then after the game releases, you’ve suddenly got this very large team on your hands.”

The task then is to find something for all those people to do at a point when the next project might only require a few individuals to work on the concept stages.

But by maintaining a central team, he says, “we’ll have this group of people that we can move from one game to the next.” And because they all share a love of D&D and will all be working on story-driven, D&D-themed games, the transitions should be relatively easy. “It isn’t like we’re trying to take them from a football game to a racing game to an RPG.”

Wizards of the Coast’s internal studios include Atomic Arcade in North Carolina, Invoke Studios in Montreal, and Skeleton Key and Archetype in Austin, Texas.

In addition, Hight has just welcomed a team of 15 former Cliffhanger Games employees who had been working on EA’s cancelled Black Panther game. Led by Michael de Plater, former VP at Monolith Productions, the team will be incubating a new title.

Meanwhile, the external studio Giant Skull, led by Star Wars Jedi: Survivor director Stig Asmussen, is working on a single-player action-adventure title set in the world of D&D.

Exodus | Image credit: Wizards of the Coast

Hight says that in addition to drawing on a central pool of Wizards of the Coast artists and designers, its studios have been utilising outsourcing and co-development. He notes that a portion of Exodus, Archetype’s AAA sci-fi action adventure, is being developed by Climax.

Speaking of Exodus, Hight gives it as an example of the kind of joined-up transmedia approach he’s hoping to foster within Wizards of the Coast, noting that celebrated British sci-fi author Peter F. Hamilton has written two “incredible novels” that explore the Exodus universe.

The AI future

We move on to the thorny topic of AI: what role does Hight think it will play in the future of game development?

Hight stresses that both Magic and D&D are “very supportive of the art community” and that artists are the “foundation” of both. “The art that you see in a D&D product will come from the mind of a human, will be made by a human,” he says.

He’s open, however, to the use of AI to come up with ideas. “But the final product, the thing that you see, will be made by a human being. And that’s our position on it. So we’re not using generative AI to create the artwork for our cards or games.”

He thinks that AI could be used to help out in the development process, though. “Absolutely, we’re looking at that.”

He stresses that any uses of AI will be examined “on a case by case basis” that questions how it’s being used.

“Is this displacing the human soul, spirit, creativity in doing it? Because we don’t want derivative work. We want that innovation. We want things that people have dreamt up.

“We’re not using generative AI to create the artwork for our cards or games”

John Hight, Wizards of the Coast

“But on the other hand, is it allowing us to explore different things? Is it allowing us to take the drudgery out of things?

“For instance, generating an audio performance so that a writer can hear their words before we go into the recording studio I think is going to help us make those recording sessions go a lot faster and smoother.”

The idea here would be to see how players respond to AI-generated lines first and to examine how the dialogue works in game, with the recording sessions with real actors being left as late as possible in the development process – so by the time the sessions happen, the dialogue is honed and complete, enabling the actors to give the “best performance”.

He also thinks machine learning could be useful for checking for errors in code, thus helping to avoid ‘breaking the build’ when introducing new elements into a game, or highlighting problems that could occur further down the road of development.

“AI is really good at that,” Hight says. “Humans, it’s a little bit clunky for us to figure out.”

Dynamic difficulty is another area where he thinks AI could be useful. “Right now, it kind of stinks,” he says in regards to difficulty settings, with binary choices between, say, easy or hard difficulties that don’t allow for nuance.

He gives an example. “I’m pretty good at puzzle solving, but I’m kind of crap these days on dexterity stuff, and yet I like games that have both. So wouldn’t it be great if the AI was analysing a little bit about how I’m playing?”

He suggests the game could, perhaps, increase the difficulty of puzzles but reduce the difficulty of dexterity challenges if it sensed the player was breezing through the former, but struggling with the latter.

MMORPG ambitions

Finally, given the huge, resurgent popularity of D&D – and noting Hight’s background with World of Warcraft – we suggest that it’s strange there isn’t a current MMORPG based around the D&D universe.

“I’d love to have that,” he says. “I think that we’ll want to rethink what an MMO is in this day and age. I think the traditional model that Blizzard – well, even before that, Ultima Online, Everquest – pursued, that could use updating.

“I think in our case, it’s probably a crawl, walk, run [situation]. We want to make sure that we’ve assembled the talent, we have the backend technology, we have the plans to pursue. But of course, that’s a glimmer in my eye. I want to see that happen.”

He says he drops hints “all the time” to his team about the possibilities. “I think technology can help us a lot, too, to make some of the things that were difficult to accomplish back in the day a lot easier.”

“I think that we’ll want to rethink what an MMO is in this day and age”

John Hight, Wizards of the Coast

Of course, the modern online gaming landscape is also much more competitive than the one into which World of Warcraft was born. Any new MMORPG would have to compete for attention with ‘forever games’ like Fortnite, Minecraft and, indeed, the still very much ongoing World of Warcraft.

But Hight reckons one of the key strengths of D&D is its flexibility. “We laid the foundation for great storytelling, great world building,” he says. “We can adapt to different styles of play, different distribution methods.”

And he thinks there’s always the opportunity to do something revolutionary, rather than evolutionary.

In the Digital Ventures division in particular, he wants designers to pursue innovation. “What [will] an MMO look like in five, ten years?” he asks. “Where do people go next, after Battle Royale?”

“It’s out there, there’s people working on it right now. And what I’m interested in is, can we tie the ideas that they have for gameplay to some of the worlds and the brands that we have?”

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