Wizards of the Coast made DDM. WotC was already a subsidiary of Hasbro by that point though.jmpowell wrote: ↑Tue Sep 10, 2024 8:26 amI had thought the DDM minis were made by WotC in the 3.5 to 4e era (thus when Hasbro owned them). Not so?BBShockwave wrote: ↑Tue Sep 10, 2024 8:17 amHasbro has never made miniatures before - heck, they allowed not just Wizkids but Jada to make metal D&D prepainted minis, after all. So I'd not be worried about them taking back the license. They do not have the capacity or experience for making minis, at least not yet.
WotC bought TSR in 1998 IIRC, then Hasbro put in the offer to buy WotC in 1999, with that finalizing in 2000, around the same time D&D 3.0 came out. The D&D Miniature Line started in 2003, and continued until about a year before 5E came out.
WotC also made two other PPM miniature lines in that time period - Star Wars, and the Short live collectable miniatures game, Dreamblade.
However Hasbro definitely made their own miniatures as well more directly - most notably for Heroscape, though I believe at least one Avalon Hill game also had a lot of minis. in 2012-13ish Hasbro shuffled around which division of the company worked on what, and put WotC in charge of all of their "hobby gaming" products, so Avalon Hill, and Heroscape stuff was being handled by the WotC team as well, which, I suspect, is why the last few original Heroscape releases were using a lot of reused and left-over D&D Miniatures sculpts since the DDM line was ending, but they had done work ahead for other sets anyway.
And at this point in 2024, Hasbro is back making Heroscape, and thus PPM miniatures more directly, and WotC is outsourcing the minis line out to Wizkids, so they are not!
I don't see WotC or Hasbro bringing D&D miniatures production back in house though - while they could definitely leverage whatever business relationship Hasbro is using with a manufacturer to make the new Heroscape line to not have to start from zero on sculptors and manufacture like they did back in 2003. I don't think it makes a lot of business sense. (The New Heroscape line itself doesn't make a lot of sense, especially since the haslabs crowdfunding of the return of the game did not do particularly well) Right now Wizkids is the only company putting in a lot of overhead and risk on production and manufacture of the minis line, and WotC gets the big licensing cheques. Sure they could get more money by making them themselves again - but the risk of sets not selling very well are so huge for minis, and the initial outlays are high enough that I just don't see it happening unless Wizkids collapses and no other manufacturers want to pick up the license otherwise.
Also, not a huge fan of this Dragon, especially at this price point - the new black design I see as the least bad of the Dragon redesigns, however I am still glad I have a couple of correctly sized Huge Black dragons in the original design, so I can ignore these.
What the timing of this release says to me is that Wizkids is aiming to get their first 2024 Monster Manual based set out as soon as possible after the release of the book (in Feb)- maybe also in March or early April, which is a much lower lag time between book and miniatures than most recent sets have been - likely only able to be done because art commissions for the MM would need to be in to WotC earlier than they would be for most books, just because of how cross-referenced the three core books have to be.
I will admit that I like the horns on the older design more, but this will look great next to my other black dragon models.
