The most outrageous example is the 30-year anniversary of Magic the Gathering. In order to celebrate this event, Wizards of the Coast is reprinting some of the rarest Magic cards. But in order to not ruin the secondary market, they reprint them with special backs, and make the reprints not tournament legal. So, yeah, you could get the fabled "Black Lotus", but you couldn't use that card for anything. So, how much do you think that a box with 4 boosters of 15 unusable Magic cards sold to celebrate an anniversary should cost? Wizards of the Coast decided the right price would be $1,000. For 60 fake Magic cards. Which are randomized, so you might not even get the one you want. Needless to say, the fans are not happy. The 30th anniversary seems more like an outright money grab than an occasion to celebrate. Which ironically led a large enough number of Magic players to want to sell their collection, crashing the secondary market, which was exactly what WotC wanted to avoid.

At the same time, Magic Arena, the digital version of MtG isn't doing great either. The introduction of a new format, Alchemy, wasn't popular. And Arena since its inception has a built-in flaw: In order to drive sales through players feeling competitive, Arena has no way to play against the computer, except for a sort of tutorial. That means that there is a strong network effect, the more people play Arena, the more interesting the game becomes. But with money being tight everywhere and the new format so unpopular, a decreasing number of players also has a strong negative network effect, making the game less interesting. I much preferred Magic Duels, the previous digital implementation of Magic, which was abandoned for Arena, but was a much less predatory game that could be played against a decent AI.

On the Dungeons & Dragons side it is too early to see an effect, but the announced new One D&D edition is proving to be controversial. By releasing the playtesting material, WotC has made it obvious to anybody that the promised "downward compatibility" isn't actually there. We will pretty much be obliged to buy new books when One D&D comes out. And while the new rules are certainly different and a few things are genuinely improved, the improvements aren't large enough for people to be excited about having to replace their existing D&D library. And while the official One D&D virtual tabletop looks really cool in the trailer, WotC has a rather bad track record with digital products for both MtG and D&D, so we will have to see how good and customer-friendly this actually will be.

Wizards of the Coast isn't at the Blizzard level yet, but seems to be on a similar trajectory: A small company got big by making beloved hobby products, and then lost their way, taking their fan base as granted, falling into increasingly predatory business practices and delivering less value for money.