The official D&D virtual tabletop, now officially called Sigil, was released three weeks ago. It launched on Feb 28th, promising players the chance to experience the game in stunning 3D.
Yesterday, Andy Collins (in a now-viral) LinkedIn post said,
Today, approximately 30 talented developers (90% of the team) were laid off from the Sigil (virtual tabletop) team at Wizards of the Coast, including yours truly.
Andy is a writer and game designer with years of experience in titles like Marvel, Star Wars, and D&D computer games and tabletop games like D&D 3.5 and D&D 4e. Hire him.
It’s estimated that WotC has just cut about 90% of the team. It might be that now the VTT has been built that, the company no longer needs the builders but it’s not a good sign.
Rascal reports that;
A former WotC employee, who wished to remain anonymous, shared with Rascal a screenshot of the internal message sent to staff. It stated that a majority of the Sigil team had been let go except for a skeleton crew tasked with folding the project’s existing features into D&D Beyond.
Gizmodo shared the text of Rascal’s insider tip;
After several months of alpha testing, we’ve concluded that our aspirations for Sigil as a larger, standalone game with a distinct monetization path will not be realized,”
Sigil uses the powerful Unreal Engine 5, which is more commonly used to create whole computer games. The speculation is that the Hasbro leadership, who are keen on D&D’s digital future, might have hoped that Sigil would become a computer game of sorts, too. If s,o then that’s a failure to understand the role of the virtual tabletop, which is odds as Hasbro boss, Chris Cocks, plays D&D and used to run Wizards of the Coast.
