YouSaid · the spoken record

Chris Cocks

lines on the record: 105
first: 2023-03-31
most recent: 2023-03-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And we're going to embrace working with the best in classes on that. And hopefully you'll start seeing more of that vice versa, things like creativity and action figures and board games. You'll see other people's brands pop up in where you'd expect to see Hasbro products”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh gosh, you know, I think from Hasbro, we're going to be doing more and more to that engaged fan with our direct business, more and more bespoke product has labs or at least amazing things that we have. I think kind of mass personalization of toys is kind of a next big thing. And I think it's going to be kind of that more engaged fan who helps us kind of drive that. We have a very early iteration of it in our selfie series. And I think there's much more that we can do. I think the next area that you're going to see is focus on is digital, trying more ways to digitally express our brands, more games, either done by us or done by partners. And then last but not least, I think you're going to see Hasbro thinking more and more like an overall brand company. We're not going to be tied to traditional views of who our competition is. We're going to have our brands in all kinds of categories and all kinds of places.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I would say that's too reductive versus our strategy. Again, going back to like kind of that NFL or MLB analogy, you can never forget the core audience because that's where you meant the next generation of fans. And when you think about a company kind of going back to kind of like the overall idea behind the podcast, we've been a company that's been around for 100 years. If we want to be around for a hundred more, we got to not only embrace the people who are 20 to 50 today and are like those hardcore fans and giving us feedback and wanting products a certain way, but we got to continue to engage the two to 12 year old because that's going to be the people who three versions for me are going to be servicing the next generation of 20 to 50 year old fans. So you got to do both and you got to do it well.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What you should be worried about is if they stop doing it. And so, you know, it's not that we want to create negative feelings or negative feedback loops, but I think we just need to be adults about it, understand that people are passionate. And ultimately, if you do the right thing over time, occasionally when you make a little blip or bloop, things will even out and people will ultimately be happy and continue to be engaged.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just think it's natural that the audience that's 13 plus super passionate, hyper engaged, has tremendously high expectations because they spend so much of their time and money on a product. I just think that's natural. That's how you engage with people. And our company needs to be proficient at it. We need to embrace them. We need to be willing to take feedback, even when it's negative, because it often will be negative. But recognize that when people care enough to give you negative feedback and to post on like a Reddit thread about a brand, that means they really love the brand.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was like furious Well, take this for what it's worth. I think you'd get maybe a deeper philosophical answer if you were talking to a typical toy person, someone who grew up working on Barbie or working on Nerf or working on Legos. My first job in the entertainment industry was the product manager for Halo. I started at Hasbro working on magic and Dungeon& Dragons.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That didn't exist. No one was mad about masks going away. My favorite line of toys when I was a kid. I was like, furious about it. I had nowhere to go with this information. called my cousin New Jersey long distance on nights and weekends to be pissed that my toy was going away that's it that was as far as it got now you've got people with money you've got lawyers in the reddit comments talking about your licenses That's just a very different dynamic. It's a different audience. And I'm just wondering, is there yet another turn to it, do you think”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mint to fan by the age of 13. Because if they don't start watching football or playing football by the age of 13, they probably never will. I think, you know, likewise, we have this amazing opportunity where we start to build a relationship with kids as early as the age of two or three in preschool. And it's up to us to keep that relationship strong well into adulthood and make sure that the brands are big enough and flexible enough and evolved enough that we can simultaneously continue to serve the next generation of fans when they're young, but have them age up and do amazing games, amazing entertainment, and amazing collectibles as they grow older and more sophisticated.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, I think it's a seismic shift inside of the entertainment industry and the toy industry in particular. When I was a kid, it was weird to be the comic book guy. It was weird to be the pop culture nerd. And I think artists like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas helped to pave the way for a whole new generation of fans who would not just be fans when they were young, but lifelong fans. And I think Gen X is among the first generations who really drove that. Just look at Gen Z and millennials' favorite brands. They're usually game brands. They're usually things they played on their consoles or played on their PC or now played on their phones because it's the highest engagement entertainment property they have. I think it's incumbent upon the entertainment industry and the toy and games industry in particular to adopt a very similar methodology as professional sports have. You know, like the NFL has an ethos that I need.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is a new phenomenon in business. Like, you are a Company that services fandoms. And the fandoms are huge and they're vocal and they're adults with money. When did you see that shift and how much farther do you think that shift goes?”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very good. So here's the last big think question. I've been thinking about this throughout this entire interview. You have described Hasro's going from a toy company for kids to an entertainment company for adults. There's a nerf community in their vocal and they want things. There's a DD community that pushed back on a copyright license change. I mean, that speaks to me and like, right, that's incredible. There's a magic community. There's a Transformers fandom. You now operate a company that services these huge fandoms that are basically like adults with money. I think the phrase is kids at heart, right? It's like the toy industry phrase.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like an immediate response to this, you know, they're super hydrated little pellets that kind of melt away after you blast them. They're super high velocity and a heck of a lot of fun. I think the second part of the question is we've got this new sport that we're developing called Nerfball. It's like dodgeball meets basketball, meets paintball. And I think Sean's going to be really psyched with the Nerf Darts that we have for those specific blasters.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can react to that Well, the first thing I tell you, what's his name, Sean? Sean, you should try our new gelfire blasters.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we got a lot of upside. And we're still allowing our teams the ability to kind of think about a breakthrough. So it's not like we're just going to focus on these five categories and seven focus brands inside of them. If someone comes up with a great idea, we're going to chase it. For instance, we have a sci-fi RPG in development by, you know, the former head of former chief creative at BioWare. James Olen, who created the game that inspired me to get into the video game industry, which led me to ultimately to Hasbro. He's developing a new IP for us. Our toy teams are developing new IPs and new ways to extend and kind of push the boundaries of where things like Nerf live or My Little Pony live. So I feel like we have a decent balance on that now, but maybe have me back in a year and a half and test me and see how we did.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From Hasva's perspective, we have over 1,500 brands in our vault. We've got a ton of different IP and trademarks that we can be able to mine. I think where we are in our journey 100 years in thinking about what our next 100 years look like is, hey, where do we really want to focus and where do we really want to break through on? And again, it kind of goes back to that three-part decision making. What's best for the fan, what's best for the shareholder, what's best for the employee and the teammate. And so we've really focused in on with our new strategy on the five categories we think we can deliver the best play experiences on. And we have one or more brands in each of those categories we think can be a category leader inside of that. And so we're really going to focus on those and drive those to break through. And I think where we are, you know, on developing each of those IPs, we're maybe in the second inning of a nine inning game.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, maybe if I was someone as fantastically successful as a Marvel, I would love to have that problem if I was as fantastically successful as a Marvel, I might have that concern.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you talk about quality over quantity, you're an IP based business, right? You have these big franchises, you have a brand-based strategy. I can just make the comparison to something like Marvel, where they have made too much stuff, right? And the fans are sort of reacting to this latest phase. It felt like I had to do a lot of homework and then the homework never paid off, right? There's just like too much stuff and whatever. This comes back to sort of the animating tension that I'm kind of poking at here. The risk is you're making too much stuff and you're not making enough new stuff and you won't turn the volume down and let it breathe before you come back with something new and bigger and better. Does that worry you with these franchises with transformers? Now we're going to turn D&D into a movie and all these things are going to be always on.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Drive efficiency so I can have a better margin structure than my smaller competition. Or I have a distribution platform that I need to inject content in cost efficiently. And I want to have some IP and teams that can do that. And so those are really kind of like the two nodes of interested bidders inside of E1. And we're fortunate in that the E1 team has some fantastic content. They have some fantastic brands and they have some really good teams that I think are generating significant interest.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, I think the original rationale of we've got a brand blueprint. We want to make content that injects into it and drives kind of merchandise sales, that still holds. And if anything, I think that's become more important as people are focusing on quality over quantity, they want to have brands that break through. And I think that's why Transformers continues to be a blockbuster film franchise. I think that's why D&D has seen such a warm, critical fan reception in the early previews we've had. And that's why we're seeing success with the Hasbro portfolio. I think for the non-Hasbro-based IP, I think what people are looking for is consistent executional quality and people who really are a team, who really know how to get this done and can do it cost efficiently because margins are becoming compressed in that space. And as you think about a content spend and you think about production, I think you have to think about it either as I'm going to drive scale and really be able to”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of the conversation about running a business like that was sort of what you might call a zero interest rate phenomenon in the streaming wars. Right. All of the streamers were just throwing money at everyone to get build a catalog, attract an audience, and I think become a monopoly. I'm not actually sure what the end goal of all that was, but that has pulled way back, right? The Netflixes and HVO Max as the world are not spending nearly as much as they were, and they're certainly not spending an arms race with each other. Is that part of the rationale here? Like, this market has totally cooled. We want to stick with the winners.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mrs. Harris goes to Paris Monopoly. Probably not going to be a huge business opportunity for that. So we're taking a fairly large hunk of the film and television division. And we've had a pretty robust process with a lot of interested parties. And we're putting that up for sale. We'll be able to retain kind of the ability to do creative development, do business affairs, do co-productions and co-financing for our own IP in film and TV. We'll have really robust production capabilities and animation, which is very core for like a toy and game company like Hasbro. But the kind of balance of it, I think we'll be able to find a good home with either someone who has really high scale in production and can kind of drive more cost savings and synergies or has their own distribution platform where they're looking for their own kind of first party IP that they can then put on their platform.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so the parts that are up for sale are the non HASRO-based IP. So we looked at like, okay, if our strategy is this thing called the brand blueprint and it's all about kind of creating play experiences and merchandise experiences for content that we create and brands that we create, what brands fit in that envelope and what brands don't necessarily fit into that envelope. Transformers, supernatural that we would have entertainment and help to execute entertainment for transformers. So we want to make sure that we retain those capabilities, whether it's live action, movies, or kids animated TV shows. Naked and afraid reality TV show, probably not going to do an action figure, at least not one that would ship at Walmart.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's do it. But the production studio E1, you put it up for sale. Parts of it anyway. You just bought it basically, you bought it four billion in 2019. They had a music division, which definitely didn't seem like a fit. Death row records. That didn't seem like a fit for Hasbro.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Were you 90s kid? Did you do 80s and 90s? No, I was an 80s kid. So beasts were a little bit after my time, but I've seen the movie and it's pretty cool.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really cool and something that we think people would enjoy playing. And you know, I think the pandemic with people having to play remotely and relying more and more on these digital tools just kind of accelerated that trend. So, you know, that's kind of where we see D&D beyond. We think it'll continue to work with third-party digital tabletops and compendiums. We see a rich ecosystem for that, but we always think kind of the thing that comes from the brand will probably have a pretty important part of the ecosystem.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The general trend that we saw with DD Beyond before we bought it or what we're trying to continue moving forward, where today probably about close to 50% of D&D games are played using some kind of digital tabletop, most frequently D&D beyond as kind of like an intermediary for play. And we see that trend only continuing so that the vast, vast majority of play is going to involve a screen of some form, either to manage your character or to kind of manage the visuals associated with the game. And we think D&D Beyond is one of the best platforms for it. It's got deep integration with the content. There's a lot of fantastic opportunities for adding visuals to it. You know, we've had a kind of friends and family playtest of an Unreal-based digital tabletop that's kind of a compendium to D&D Beyond that adds kind of like an isometric high-end 3D tabletop RPG experience to it that we think could be really.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But they could do it on something like roll 20 or DD beyond. And so as we saw how important D&D Beyond was becoming to D&D based play made more and more sense for us to think about, hey, maybe we should be talking to the current owner around kind of insourcing it into D&D. And so we had a fairly lengthy amount of discussions around that and ended up at what we thought was a fair price. They got rewarded for a pretty good investment that they made a couple years prior. And we got a fantastic platform at a good valuation that's been high growth for us since we bought it.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would that really be a thing? Would that replace kind of in person play? So from our perspective, when we had a couple different partners among them was Kurse, who wanted to come up with D&D Beyond, you had role 20, you had fantasy grounds, and then there's been a whole bunch since then. It made sense for us given the size of the brand and like nascency of the opportunity to do a partnership approach and see kind of a thousand flowers bloom and let's see what actually made sense. And what we found was that as a fifth edition started taking off and Twitch streaming was a real enabler of it, more and more people wanted to use kind of digital intermediaries, either because they couldn't connect with their friends in person or because they wanted to bring kind of a rich visual palette to the game that theater of the mind didn't fully allow and and or people's pocketbooks didn't allow because they couldn't afford $10,000 of dwarven forge high-end minis.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For sure, for sure. I mean, back in 2016, D&D was maybe a $30, $40 million product. It wasn't very large. And we didn't have like a huge budget associated with it. And this whole concept of, gosh, would people really want to play on their phones or like things like Skype video calling, which was the state of the art back then, as shocking as that is.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, just bought DD Beyond, right? You bought it last year for almost $150 million, and that was a really winding road for that product, right? It was a curse, and then it was at Twitch, and I was at fandom. And then finally, it's like back home. Why wasn't that a thing you already had in house? These are pretty, these seem like very natural extensions of the games to me. They like put them on a phone, you know.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm saying I don't know what it's going to be. I just pretty darn sure that the solutions we have now aren't going to cross the chasm.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The concept of the digital ownership and digital collectibility is obviously going to happen. I don't think it's going to be NFTs, but I think it's obviously going to be something that happens and the permanence is going to be important for people. And something, you know, we're investing R&D and some partnership resources against. As it relates back to the OGL, I think that's probably separate from something like that because what the opening game license really focuses on is rules and concepts and not really imagery or proper nouns. And so, you know, I think platforms like D&D Beyond, platforms like future video games that we have or even like with Magic, Magic the Gathering Arena, this concept of digital ownership and digital tradability is definitely something that you'll see from us in the future. I don't know if the future is three years from now or five years from now, but it's definitely.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think for something like DD, scarcity is maybe a little less important for us. Magic, that kind of thought of rarity and specialness tends to be important in the collectible. D&D tends to be more of a collaborative game where scarcity isn't the real idea. It's more about social fun and helping to enable that. I'm not a huge fan of NFTs. I was when I was at Wizards, I was always very skeptical of them. And that's why our brands didn't really participate in them. But that said, you know,”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It actually makes sense, unlike almost every other NFT idea I've ever heard my entire life. This is one I'm like, all right, there's a glimmer of something there that makes sense. Is that something you want to do to kind of go into the world of digital scarcity? Because it does seem like the scarcity is important in the physical world.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's very confident. I want to ask one more question on DD, and then I do want to talk about entertainment. It does seem like one of the things you could do without a license that's more restrictive is keep the NFT companies and the metaverse companies outside of this brand, right? Just keep them at bay. You can put out your own NFTs, whatever. If there's one use case for NFTs that I've ever heard anyone say that's good, it's D&D beyond, right? Where you get the cards in the game, you can trade and sell the cards or digital goods. You could do a smart contract. You would get a cut of those secondary sales.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm pleased that we ended in a place that's good for our creators. And I'm pleased that the community is rallying around the brand again. We got a great movie coming out this weekend that's knock gun wood tracking really well. The reviews are great. I think the movie does a great job of introducing D&D to nonfans, but I think most importantly, it's a real love letter to the fans. And, you know, hopefully it's something that millions of people around the world who love to roll dice and use funny pretend voices around the table can have a real celebration moment for.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think it solves it in that you have very strong product led leadership in charge of each brand. And sometimes big organizations need to, you know, we're not perfect. We're going to step in it now and then. And what you need to do when you step in it is take a step back and say, okay, what was I trying to achieve? Is that still achievable? And what's the right thing for the fan? And sometimes even big organizations on highly successful brands like D&D.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think if we would have done it through our more traditional means, which is playtesting, having the product people in charge and really trying to driving it through an executive producer and our designers who are super tied into the community and super tied into our fans, I think we would have done it in a far different way. And ultimately, I think we would have landed in a similar place, but I think it wouldn't have caused too much churn and burned so much trust equity with our fans.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. So, you know, this all came about when we were having a leadership transition on the brand. And, you know, People were well intentioned. It was BizDev people and legal people who were given a task to say, hey, we need to update this for X and Y reasons. They went out and started executing their marching orders. And they just did it in a way that firmly applied foot to mouth.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll connect this to the OR chart questions, the executive producer of Dungeons Dragons, Kyle Brink, said publicly part of the issue with this whole proposal. He said it was a screw up, was that the creative and community teams at Wizards of the Coast didn't get a chance to give feedback. That is just a structured, right? It's like you've got teams that are not aligned in a structure to even create that feedback, especially when you're all remote, which I imagine this is all happening when you guys were mostly remote. Have you addressed that structure?”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It does on a light basis because we have a little bit of trademark protection with Creative Commons where we can revoke the trademark. But I think one thing we definitely learned through the processes is the community is very good at policing itself.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, you know, the only change that we made to the license was we put the content into the Creative Commons. So if anything, it's even more robust protections for creators gives us a little bit of protection on our trademark because we can police it a little bit through Creative Commons. And it makes the license unrevocable. So people can use it in perpetuity.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That the trademarks weren't misused, that we didn't get in trouble by using someone else's content inappropriately and vice versa, whether they were a fan or another large company. And I think those were the two kind of like animating forces for making a change in the license. Now, the way that we rolled things out and the way that we did it, that was just a screw up. We did it wrong. I think we definitely heard the feedback. We backtracked, I think, reasonably quickly. And I think we ended at a place that's good for our creators and ultimately good for our fans. Know it cost us some trust, particularly with some of our most ardent creators that we're building back. But I think in general, people are pleased with the result and we're moving forward.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think what was more on our mind with DD and the open game license was two things. First off, very fairly our fans have a high bar for how we represent the brand and how we represent the fandom in the brand. And the original open game license didn't give us a lot of kind of liberty to be able to police what people were doing in our name. So that was certainly something that was important for us because diversity and inclusion is very important across all our brands, but notably with the D&D team. And the second thing we were thinking about is like, okay, you know, we're investing a lot in content and in building the brand and in digitizing the brand. How do we make sure we kind of modernize this license, which was originally created for books for this kind of like modern context and technological context making sure”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I want to talk about some dungeons and dragons drama. You had an open gaming license people could just make stuff for D&D. And I think that served that community really well. It was part of the growth story of that product. There was a proposed update to that license that would have made it more restrictive. It leaked and it caused a major backlash in the community. You backed off of that. But part of that was obviously we're worried about NFTs, right? That was part of the rationale here. We need to change this license to get ready for a world of digital scarcity. Is that on your mind? that the scarcity is an important part of the project?”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“New players. That's a tide that lifts all boats. It helps our stores. It helps our player community because there's more fans to be able to play with. And if you participate on the secondary market in a collector, it's just more people to be able to share your fandom with and trade with.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We always make changes and we always try to minimize any kind of dissat. Our job is to bring joy. Our job is not to make people mad. We recognize, though, inside of a high passion player base, sometimes you're going to do some things wrong or some things that's going to bristle some people the wrong way. So we try to minimize those. So I think definitely for this year, you'll definitely see better spacing across our product releases. You know, I think we're going to be more focused this year on new player acquisition, particularly with some of our new products like Universes Beyond. We just announced and started previewing our latest Universes Beyond based on Lord of the Rings. We think that'll be cool for existing players, but more importantly, I think it's a great opportunity to introduce some new fans to Magic who might be geeks about Tolkien's work but haven't picked up a card game yet. And generally speaking, you know, I think as we're able to bring in”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And like any kind of player population, you're going to have this Pareto curve of players who are more open to change and less open to change. And so, of course, there are some people who maybe started playing 2002 and they want the game to be exactly the same as it was in 2002. And any kind of changes, they don't really like very much. And they might be quite chatty online. I just think you have to balance out kind of that individual feedback with kind of like the totality of feedback of tens of thousands of inputs and make sure that you're doing the right thing overall.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We make a casual product for casual players, and they're not really appropriate for high-end collectors and vice versa. And then I think the last thing you have to realize is as you're starting to measure like your player base in the tens of millions of kind of active fans. And in particular, you have a game like Magic, which is so hyper engaged and like the tenure of players can be so long, you have some players who are actively playing today who've never stopped playing since when they first picked up a car.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For double-sided LAN cards that we had inside of it. We had another one that got delayed simply because demand for cardstock generally across all trading card games, sports card games as well, was just too much. And we had to delay it by about two months. So we had a couple releases last year where rather than having our traditional five to eight weeks of spacing, we only had a couple weeks of spacing. You know, I think some of the other complaints that we've heard, you know, particularly if you go on a site like Reddit or Twitter, it's a little bit of a side effect of a strategy, which is purposely saying, you know, we're making products that aren't necessarily for all players, for all products. We're trying to segment things. And there definitely is a section of players who are completionists. They want to be able to buy everything and they want to engage with everything. And as your brand gets bigger and bigger, that becomes harder and harder to necessarily be able to service that player. We'd love to, but sometimes.”
2023-03-31 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · The surprisingly complex business of toys, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT