Hasbro CEO Claims All His Friends Use AI For D&D, Signal To Embrace It 54
Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks revealed at a Goldman Sachs conference that the company has been using AI in game development, including for "Dungeons & Dragons" and "Magic: The Gathering," and plans to integrate AI further into gameplay, despite previously banning AI-generated content. "Inside of development, we've already been using AI," Cocks said. "It's mostly machine-learning-based AI or proprietary AI as opposed to a ChatGPT approach. We will deploy it significantly and liberally internally as both a knowledge worker aid and as a development aid." Futurism reports: While the logistical aspects of the technology seem fairly par for the course in the world of out-of-touch CEOs over-relying on it, Cocks then suggested that it will become a part of D&D gameplay. "I'm probably more excited though about the playful elements of AI," he said. "I play with probably 30 or 40 people regularly. There's not a single person who doesn't use AI somehow for either campaign development or character development or story ideas. That's a clear signal that we need to be embracing it."
After paying lip service to using AI "responsibly" and "paying creators for their work," Cocks then doubled down on his point. "The themes around using AI to enable user-generated content, using AI to streamline new player introduction, using AI for emergent storytelling -- I think you're going to see that not just our hardcore brands like D&D but also multiple of our brands," the Hasbro CEO said. Further reading: Magic: The Gathering Community Fears Generative AI Will Replace Talented Artists
After paying lip service to using AI "responsibly" and "paying creators for their work," Cocks then doubled down on his point. "The themes around using AI to enable user-generated content, using AI to streamline new player introduction, using AI for emergent storytelling -- I think you're going to see that not just our hardcore brands like D&D but also multiple of our brands," the Hasbro CEO said. Further reading: Magic: The Gathering Community Fears Generative AI Will Replace Talented Artists
As a shareholder (Score:1)
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is it possible to use the existing headcount to make a better quality product that could possibly increase sales and make the brand more valuable? or is your sole focus on reducing head count? if so, why?
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is it possible to use the existing headcount to make a better quality product
A graphic artist is unlikely to be a competent writer or programmer.
It's better for Hasbro and the worker for the worker to find a job with a better skill match elsewhere.
It is best to eliminate the workers with the skills you don't need and hire workers with the skills you do need.
or is your sole focus on reducing head count?
Of course not. The sole focus is on profit, and automating work is a great way to accomplish that.
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is it possible to use the existing headcount to make a better quality product that could possibly increase sales and make the brand more valuable? or is your sole focus on reducing head count? if so, why?
Have you watched investor/owner strategy over the past few decades? Nobody wants to make a better product. That would raise expectations. You need to keep those expectations in the consumer low, so that you can continue to lower the bar on quality, lower headcount, while increasing prices in the field. Pay attention. This is modern economics from the C-suite perspective.
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It's not hard to keep expectations low when you primarily market to young people. Ever notice how the older you get, what is advertised to you changes? You age out of certain categories and it's easier to sell shit to kids and young adults then it is to older adults.
For example, it's easier to take a 40 year old board game, make it into a software game, then sell it to kids that never even heard of the board game. If you try to sell to people that know about it, they will have much higher expectations becau
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It's not hard to keep expectations low when you primarily market to young people. Ever notice how the older you get, what is advertised to you changes? You age out of certain categories and it's easier to sell shit to kids and young adults then it is to older adults.
For example, it's easier to take a 40 year old board game, make it into a software game, then sell it to kids that never even heard of the board game. If you try to sell to people that know about it, they will have much higher expectations because they have already seen it.
This to me is likely why most games are targeted at kids and a lot of games were in fact better then the same bullshit they put out today. They don't care about older fans because we are pickier. They can sell shit to kids and kids won't know it's shit because they've never seen it before.
My expectation of an RPG should include a lot of features we've seen over the past 30 years and when certain quality of life things are not there, I'm displeased to the point where why waste money on new shiny when it's worse then the older game, sometimes of the same name.
I've read a few histories on advertising (know your enemy) and how it refocused to be mostly pandering to the younger folks somewhere in the late seventies/early eighties. Rarely does anyone make the connection you've made here, that it's easier to sell to kids because they haven't seen it all before, and been numbed to most of it.
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It is a Toy (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean, AI is toy, so it makes sense for a toy company to embrace it.
I would certainly prefer for an AI hallucinate an encounter in a dwarven tavern over when giving medical advice.
Re: It is a Toy (Score:2)
When I first encountered LLMs, my initial thought was that it could revolutionize RPGs.
No wonder the 2024 rules are so blah (Score:1)
2024 rules, just enough changes to screw up existing characters, and nothing interesting or creative. Yup, sounds like AI generated crap.
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Right. 5th edition was fine. Its where it needs to be, its streamlined and easy for newbies to pick up (goddam 2nd edition did my head in as a teenager trying RP for the first tie) , it doesnt need to be "fixed" by AI.
People love D&D for its human touches and hand crafted nature. By all mean put out expanded monster manuals and new adventures, created by *humans*, but leave the existing stuff as is. And
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2024 rules, just enough changes to screw up existing characters, and nothing interesting or creative. Yup, sounds like AI generated crap.
I perused a site that highlighted the rule changes; there were a few good changes, and quite a few that were more clarification than anything. I'd have called the new ruleset D&D 5.5.
Not enough to get me to buy all new books, however. My groups will stay on 5 for the foreseeable future.
Higher profit margins... (Score:2)
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Exactly.
WotC is making up a good majority of Hasbro's revenue and profit. So much so that Hasbro needs WotC money machine to go whirr.
WotC makes very profitable products - they have very little marginal costs and sell for lots of money. (What, you can sell packs of cardboard for $500? that cost pennies to make?) Or books, which most of the physical
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They lost me a few years back.
I wasn't a whale, but I paid for the season pass to mtg:arena and felt it was good value for "cards" I couldn't trade or anything. I had fun building and varying decks and even building one or two with cardboard, but they leaned into online only (impossible in real life even) cards and it lost the allure of being magic, but I could play more variety and afford it.
I doubt I'm the only person that stopped paying after that.
Ironically, they're being ripped off by AI (Score:4, Interesting)
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Which is exactly why a CEO would be excited. He gets to be the one doing the ripping and he can brag about it.
Re:Ironically, they're being ripped off by AI (Score:5, Insightful)
My very first test of any of the modern LLMs was asking Bing's Copilot to write me a D&D adventure, just to see what it came up with. What it came up with was a summary of the Light of Xaryxis, the published adventure from the 5E Spelljammer Box Set. No creativity at all, it just regurgitated an outline of the exact adventure that had been published a year or so ago. Not exactly a great source of ideas if it mostly just paraphrases stuff you already wrote.
I thought about this for a bit after my emotional instinct to throw up in my mouth a little bit died down.
There might be a good use for LLM in RPG development. Throw your rulebooks at it. Then ask it to explain or summarize things. "Can someone with invisibility push a shelf onto an enemy without breaking the spell?" Or "if my character is on fire and gets attacked with cone of ice does it extinguish the fire?" "Explain dispel magic to me."
Basically, see if your rules are clear enough that a trained LLM can summarize or regurgitate them. I recognize that failure could be because either the rules are written badly or the LLM is written badly, but... this is the area I think there's a possibility of a sensible use. Not creating. These expert systems don't create. They combine and repeat. Nothing can be truly new out of them because that literally goes against the concept of training the models. So don't try to create. Use them to test. Use them to find flaws. Use them to analyze.
For GMs, sure, there's value in an image-generation tool that can produce illustrations on demand that they don't have the skill, time, or budget to make professionally. Hasbro shouldn't be doing that for the art in their products though.
Otherwise we're going to get exactly what you got: the same stuff, again.
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Right, I dont have a problem with hobbyist uses of AI, or even artists using it to create little concept arts to test out ideas before putting brush to canvas. Thats all good and fine.
I just resent the idea of this stuff being used to put people out of work. I've known some fine artists and musicians. The best ones, often its *all* they are good at and would be utterly useless in other jobs. God knows we dont need more graphic designers becoming javascript devs. Look at the mess we are in already. :/
(And ke
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Reduced headcount (Score:3)
So they want us to pay money for something they used to reduce headcount? How about we just use those same tools ourselves and reduce their headcount to zero? Sounds fair to me.
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LOL yeah right. People are obsessed with "brand" and if you just write your own, then you aren't really doing "brand". You are paying for the name. Keep paying!
You are not wrong though.
Still, if you are that awesome, use those tools, roll out your own and see if you can at least get your group to go for it. I mean, how hard can it really be to develop a card game like this? It's not THAT complex after all.
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Soon you won't even have to play it yourself (Score:2)
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I mean, if you toss in a full functional, self cleaning sex bot and enough UBI to cover all expenses, why not? :)
cliche content just repeated (Score:2)
D&D will lose quality when AI is used.
I'm more interested in how formula TV Shows, like lego Ninjago, Chima, Kingdoms will 'rewrite' the same stories over and over for each new series. Kids won't notice.
Anyone can chime in if Marvel or other commercial serial entertainment are using AI for comic books?
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Well, that certainly did it! (Score:3)
My spark went out. Just like that.
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Art connects humans, it's a shared experience, meaningful on both ends. Putting AI into the creators seat destroies it's soul.
This is very funny (Score:2)
Hasbro is trying to change the relationship between DMs and players in a way that deeply misunderstands WoTC's cultural and market positions.
I don't know how they think they're going to convert this high thought, high engagement medium into a passive consumer one, but they seem to think they have a plan. So far a lot of the plan appears to be 'leave a steaming crater as a threat' but again, they don't seem to understand that they're not the only source of content and people have decades of already released
Re: This is very funny (Score:2)
"Hasbro is trying to change the relationship between DMs and players"
The reality is their biggest bottleneck is a lack of DMs. Now this might be because they stopped producing DM books (only one needed per group, while player books can sell to everyone). But the push into procedurally generated content is connected to the fact that no one can find a DM to run their games.
The problem is bad enough that there are professional DMs now who players pay to play with.
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Be the DM you want to see in the world. If you want this content, you were always able to create it yourself.
The fact that there are people out there who wanted badly enough to be DMs full time that they decided to charge for their content and time is completely orthogonal to the point you're trying to make. All it shows is that there's a large enough market of people willing to pay for 3rd party content, from people who are actually still part of the community... and anecdotally those folks seem to play wi
Re: This is very funny (Score:2)
No one's saying you can't create your own shit. Where did you get that idea?
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Chris Cocks. You may have noticed that his argument doesn't make any sense if people can create their own content.
Also you, from your previous post. In which you seemed to be complaining about a lack of available DMs as if using an LLM was possibly a reasonable solution, which was the context of the article which we're commenting on.
Of couse (Score:2)
All his friends are AI
As Paul Simon said... (Score:2)
If you'd be my bodyguard ,,, what do you mean, "AL", it looks like "AI" to me!
I can be your long-lost pal
I can call you Betty
And Betty, when you call me
You can call me Al, call me Al
I used to be an AD&D player and DM. (Score:2)
I always thought part of the attraction of such games was that it called for alot of imagination from both the DM and the players.
If you are going to use "AI" to imagine for you, I doubt that the game is going to be much fun after that.
he lie (Score:2)
Makes sense (Score:2)
Why pay money for teams of creatives to create content and expansion packs when you can just say "Awesom-O, create 100 detailed books of campaigns involving goblins."
I used AI for my character portrait (Score:2)
But I had to crop my halfling's feet and hands out of the picture because they were a twisted wreck of nightmare fuel.
Re: I used AI for my character portrait (Score:2)
Lean into it. Create a backstory about their time in the Far Realm.
Chris Cocks (Score:2)
At first they came for.... (Score:1)
When they replace him with an AI CEO, he will probably have a different opinion.
Of course with some CEO's, it might actually result in a more pleasant work environment.