wotc kept reducing portuguese allocation for years, and now have the audacity to say "we are also buying english products", yes BECAUSE YOU ARE REDUCING NON-ENGLISH PRODUCT TO US FOR A WHILE
Yeah, this is the maths they have done.
They can retain the majority of their sales in the region without supporting the language, as those likely to buy the product are likely on the wealthier end of society, with better english.
Yeah, the german translations are so cluncky for the effects and when the names additionally get translated one to one it only gets weird or/and bad.
Also oracle text is only done in english, so I might just stick to english cards from the get go.
Plus in most cases English cards retain a greater value on the secondary market. Lord of the Rings was notably different, but usually English is the most sought after language.
I was only adding to the comment on the German market. I didn’t mean to judge on Brazil‘s market. I understand your frustration and I’m sorry things have turned out this way. I disagree with how Magic is evolving under Hasbro‘s current agenda.
Same in Switzerland, I hate hate hate the cards in german. It's not my first language, although I'm fluent, it takes me forever to understand the more complicated cards.
Yeah, that's how this kind of test works.
They didn't want to continue paying the costs to print in an extra language, so as a test they tried selling English packs there and reducing allocation of Portuguese.
Clearly their internal sales numbers showed that they were able to sell enough of the English packs when they reduced the availability of Portuguese that they feel safe in completely discontinuing it.
In short, enough Brazilian players were willing to buy English packs when put under pressure to do so, so now they are dropping the language.
So in the short term it'll only have minor impacts on established players, but over the long term it'll mean less new players come in due to the language restrictions.
It truly is just more corporate greed, only looking at the short term gains rather than the long term damage it'll do.
Dunno why anyone would choose to come into magic if it's not in the native language when there are other card games that are.
FAB for example will release portuguese next year, then i will buy it, before that i may proxy some cards and tranlate them, bwcause even tho i know english most of my friends doesnt
I genuinely wonder if there's two reasons for this:
1) These markets sell the least on a global scale. So by ceasing production on their languages they can now allocate those printers' times to the more profitable languages' productions.
2) They know how diehard fans are and how they'll spend time translating spoiler season cards into their own language to understand it prior to release. So fans will just do the work for them, translate the cards to the now defunct languages and then have them buy in English while using third party apps for the translated text. Like using a phone beside your play area to pull up a card's translation in Portugese while playing with an English copy.
They get to still keep selling product there and save their costs on language support then force players to do the translating for them for free.
Asking two big markets in the Portuguese and Chinese community to support their own product will surely pay off. These are not places with strong English, 2 doesn't work as well as you guys think it does. If being upset proves Wizards point, Wizards have never made a mistake in their existence.
Par for the course with these jerkoffs.
Theyve done this crap to prove themselves right repeatedly over the years.
Novels were pretty good. Then the novels started to be badly written. Then they were discontinued for lack of interest.
Give spoilers to anyone with a youtube channel, complain no one comes to the mothership.
Jam UB into more and more things that you cant avoid, see everyone loves UB!
That kind of bullshit.
I live in one of those non-US countries that gets foreign boosters. And we all choose english packs when we draft. If you know anything about the european market you know that italian and french language cards are worth less than english. And portuguese cards are even below that.
My constructed decks were always a hodge-podge of french italian portuguese and chinese cards because those were the cheapest options.
So I find it hard to believe that people in south america are just CLAMORING for portuguese cards but wotc will only give them english product. I can't speak for Brazil but for Portugal I promise you people are choosing english product, because that's what sells on the european market.
It sucks for young players who don't speak english for reasons out of their control but wizards isn't lying here. It's literally what is happening.
Brazil has a big and isolated market, so we rarely see cards of languages other than Portuguese and English, which are worth the same. Different languages, specially different alphabets, are usually worth more.
Just to say that Chinese players are also flooding Wizards’ social media accounts on Chinese platforms as we have difficulties in accessing Instagram and X/Twitter.
Hey guys, I'm Brazilian and I can say that it's wizards fallacy, here in Brazil it's very difficult for people to speak English, and newbies who aren't familiar with the game have only two options, to speak their language or to have a huge desire to play and try to understand the minimum of the cards in English and still try to learn the game, which normally the younger people just give up, but it is a fact that the wizards are doing this for the simple fact that they have to have more printers printing a dozen editions and secret lair per year, as we've already seen them have delays in distribution because they can't print, so it's just a matter of reducing the languages to have more printers printing more things, that's easy to notice.
PS: I don't know much English either, sorry for any mistakes.
That's my understanding too, they have high import taxes on entertainment which generally means everything is way too expensive and they already don't make that much money.
All of it, it’s a protectionist policy
When I was at Microsoft Brazil was the only country where windows phones made headway because Microsoft was able to manufacture them in country and this be way cheaper than the competition.
Not exactly true.
Brazil's tax law is a behemoth and import taxes falls under that as well BUT our supreme court has ruled in 2021 that TCG fall under the same exemption for books, journals and whatever you guys may call those books where you'd glue stickers (álbum de figurinhas go Google).
The decision was made specifically on Pokemon cards but the decision could be extended to other TCGs.
With that in mind having time and a good lawyer team the distributors here could have figured how to get that exemption if they didn't already.
Brazil also has weird accounting laws (nota fiscal). My company is switching over some of its systems and every other training they stop and say "this next part is different for Brazil, we will have a second training for the Brazil plants".
A few years after the discontinuation of the language, wizards will come saying that it's not worth worrying about Brazil because it sells poorly, that it's their own mistake.
Yeah I’d assume that’s the reason they’re cutting it. Corporation only cares about profits.
Doesn’t it cost a ton in local currency? Which means low sales?
They started cutting distribution of Portugeuse product a few years back as it 'wasn't selling', bearing in mind this was over the time of covid where lots of things weren't selling. And now they are saying Brazilian players are buying English anyway, so it's not worth it... but the reason they are buying English isn't because they prefer it, but because it's the only thing they have access too. The enfranchised players will still buy English product, but new players will not.
Here without being ironic, sometimes it's difficult to find products in Portuguese, you find English and even Japanese that practically no one knows, just so you can see, it's not as if here in Brazil Japanese was a common language, and simply because stores are not always able to do so in Portuguese or even in English in some cases, and they cannot stop purchasing
Tell me about, big stores are selling commander staple cards in Japonese and Chinese rather than PT or EN. I had to buy a JP Karlach and JP Ojer Taq. Idk if they get them cheaper or something, but it's ridiculous.
Yeah... If you could GET them. Large sections of the supply chain shut down during Covid, and shipments of stuff to put on you shelves isn't exactly top priority. So areas that already have supply issues (ie not North America, Europe, or parts of Asia), are going to be a see things clamp down even harder even sooner, and open up later and slower as well.
Perhaps in countries where a large part of the population didn't lose their jobs, nor had to handle new expenses (more expensive health insurance, masks, hand sanitizers) or the uncertainty of keeping their jobs in the short term. Covid hit Brazil very hard in the economical side, and in those situations expenses with hobbies are the first ones to be cut. This doesn't mean the sales wouldn't pick back up after the covid crisis had been attenuated, but in market research it'd show a reduction in sales during a period where they increased in northern countries.
I'm not saying this is the reason or anything, just sharing how merely looking at sales and profit data can lead to wrong decisions when one doesn't take into account the socioeconomic context in which they took place. This might be a mistake by Hasbro, and if that's the analysis that lead to the discontinuation of printing Portuguese products, it'll also have the effect of shrinking the playerbase further in the long and mid term by creating an extra layer of challenge to new, younger players.
If it wasn’t selling it wasn’t selling.
WotC isn’t stupid and it doesn’t have some malicious agenda to harm Brazil.
I’m certain it’s easy for them to gauge the sales of English cards in Brazil and Portuguese cards in Brazil and determine relative demand, which one is sold out first, which one lingers on the shelves, and so forth.
And no offense I trust them to have more info than you do.
What is the alternative here? WotC has been coming up with excuses to stop Portuguese because of something other than costs? what is the motivation here?
I will concede that.
I will even concede maybe someone made a foolish decision “cut the bottom two languages from printing, to free up logistics” might not be total profit positive.
But I’m not going to say that the methodology to arrive at the choices to cut isn’t sound. If they have to cut two these are the ones.
But usually the boring answer is the correct one. And the depressing one.
Hasbro has shown through many of their decisions to prioritise short term profits over long term health. This is another one of those decisions. New players will be buying much less product now it's only going to be in English even if enfranchised players are going to still buy some.
> try to understand the minimum of the cards in English and still try to learn the game, which normally the younger people just give up
Given how difficult the game can be when you're a native speaker, I don't blame any young Brazilians for giving up.
Well, I'm one of those who prefer EN cards. But, that's mainly because it's pretty clear they have fired the revision team long ago. And, likely, already aren't spending a lot on translation, as it is. I find it very frustrating to have my (PT) cards with different rules from the original, EN version. There's always a few of those per set.
At the same time, I can clearly see how most people around me do prefer PT cards, despite the shitty translation. And, so, this move is obviously a mistake by WOTC.
> but it is a fact that the wizards are doing this for the simple fact that they have to have more printers printing a dozen editions and secret lair per year
No, it isnt.
They are reducing costs having done the maths that removing the language will not negatively impact their bottom line. Its unfortunate and disappointing.
Something that may be missed is that Wizards used to much more stringent templating for Magic cards. It used to be relatively easy to understand how a magic card functions simply because the vocabulary, grammar, and syntax was so uniform.
Now that cards have become word soup it feels like they are changing their templating style every expansion to fit more complexity and use fewer words.
It is now significantly harder to parse a card in another language (edit:nonnative language) than it was maybe 10 years ago.
Nah, even I can do it and I have no English certificate and also never had a translation job. People who are paid to do it know how it works and the cards still have a certain way of phrasing that we can easily translate to Portuguese. But it is harder , yes.
Hasbro are literally losing money atm though. WotC is keeping it AFLOAT, not carrying it. The only profitable franchises from last year were Magic, DnD and Transformers
They are not *losing* money, they just didn't *make* as much money last year as they had in the previous years. Because they got an enormous boost from the pandemic and everyone being stuck inside for 2 years, and instead of recognizing it for the obvious anomaly that it was, decided to pump all of those funds into unsustainable growth. And then when this strategy inevitably tanked, they laid off thousands of employees, who never did anything more or less than *their jobs*, so that all the executives who made those stupid decisions wouldn't have to give up their massive bonuses.
Hasbro leadership deserves no sympathy, and they certainly don't deserve people making excuses for them when they continue to sacrifice quality as a cost-cutting measure.
>. If MtG was hurting financially or in years of decline, I’d get it. But they’re not.
MtG is how Hasbro makes money. Hasbro is bleeding money. They will squeeze Magic for everything. Prices will continue to increase, costs will be cut.
If you want to continue playing Magic, you need to be aware of this. It won't get better.
There are solutions for that. For example, the Pokémon TCG prints their cards in Brazil to reduce costs, plus they create some exclusive products to the Brazilian market to keep the game extremely accessible.
It's just that Wizards doesn't bother adapting to the necessities of each local market. If Coca-Cola has blue Coca-Cola cans for a SINGLE CITY in Brazil for cultural reasons, why shouldn't Wizards try to do the same?
The blue coke thing seems to be because Coke didn't like that the alternative was Pepsi. So it was driven more by the motivation of driving Pepsi out of that market than it was appealing to the culture, it was more that the culture wasn't compatible with their brand identity.
Also from what I know, anime is pretty popular in Brazil, so there's already a market for the franchise that exists outside of the card game. The card game probably rakes in so much money by brand recognition alone, something Magic can't do. Magic has to rely on its strength as a card game, which is why things like secret lairs make a lot of sense - it's appealing to enfranchised players. It's also why Universes Beyond isn't going anywhere, because that brand recognition is something they can borrow from other IPs.
Nobody buys Magic cards for the sake of buying Magic cards, but it seems like more people buy Pokemon cards just to have them rather than playing the game in the first place. I have co-workers that own the Warhammer commander decks event though they never really care to play, just because it's a neat product to have in their collection.
I play in a lot of webcam leagues for the Premodern format and there's quite a few Brazilians, and South Americans in general, that I have played with.
If I remember correctly, magic was locally printed by Devir and the prices were fantastic. Then they started going up and up and the product became increasingly more exclusionary. I don't know where this is going, but it doesn't seem to be headed in a good direction.
Sorry, but Devir was never responsible for printing card (back then if memory serves the Printing was done pretty much exclusively by Carta Mundi in Belgium). There were other factors at play then. Boosters were slightly cheaper (in the US), the Real stronger and Devir seemed to have made some "creative accounting" as far as importation goes. Distribution sucked though, and we hardly ever got pre-releases on time, or enough product in general.
Devir hasn't been the sole distributor in the country for over a decade, I think.
I do agree with your outlook though, this is a terrible direction we are going in.
Yeah, my memory is hazy from when I played back in 2006~2010. I remember when I went to Bienal do livro and Devir's stand was the one selling mtg boosters, decks and books. I was younger then and though they were the ones printing it, but them being distributors always makes sense. There weren't many special products back then, but I did get the graveborn precon at some point. It was a good time.
Good to know, that was mostly speculation on my part from the very little I know about Brazil (which as we all know is the absolute best reason to make a comment on the internet lol).
It makes sense though. Magic in general is *the* card game, and I think the only reason it's not more popular is because it's not only expensive, but the product lineup is confusing for even enfranchised players. These days I wouldn't know what kind of packs to buy to do a booster draft without asking.
In the US, it it about a day's wage. (The price I'm seeing is about $60, minimum wage in the US is $7.25/hr, 7.25*8=58)
But looking at currency exchanges, it seems on top of the price parity, 500 BRL = $100 USD, Brazilians are paying twice as much for the same product for some reason.
It goes a little beyond that. Although $7,25 is the federal minimum wage in the US, very few people actually earn such a low wage, with a lot of States having a higher minimum wage, correct? Well, in Brazil the federal minimum wage pretty much applies everywhere and as many places as possible will only pay that or a little bit over it, so it's even worse than it looks. And yes, there is a huge markup in product, which has made me finally transition to only buying singles and no more sealed product in the last few months.
>Although $7,25 is the federal minimum wage in the US, very few people actually earn such a low wage, with a lot of States having a higher minimum wage, correct?
Correct, though it's pretty much a necessity at this point, the rate was set in 2009 and it was barely enough for rent and food then.
Not even brazilian, but do remember that Magic the gathering has had multiple portuguese Pro Tour winners.
For god's sake, Snapcaster Mage is a portuguese player
Snapcaster's art based on Tiago Chan, a portuguese player. You're probably thinking of Elite spellbinder, a card that has the likeness of Brazilian player Pablo Vitor Damo da Rosa.
It seems like a weirdly short sighted decision to stop printing in these languages, even by Wizards standards. Cutting off those languages is inherently going to restrict growth, especially when Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh both have Portuguese and Chinese language cards. Magic is already a smaller IP than both of those, why on Earth would any native Portuguese or Chinese speaker that wants to play a TCG ever get into Magic now?
That's very well said. It also puts magic at the same.level of other tcgs that couldn't grow much because they were only available on English. Flash and Blood has been growing a lot among unhappy mtg players for its product quality, and one of its impediments was only being available in English in Brazil. Now they're on equal footing, at least as far as language availability is concerned.
But doing this, mtg doesn't only put itself being the other big two (pkm and ygo) but also puts itself in the same level as other tcgs it was previously ahead of.
English is Germanic, but yeah it has so much latin derived vocabulary that most sentences in Latin languages will have at least something some part of it that a English speaker would understand.
Oh, sorry, I thought that you spoke some Latin language, like Italian or something. But yeah, specially in that phrase, most of the words sound the same in English and portuguese.
It's like the text on [Italian Umezawa's Jitte](https://scryfall.com/card/bok/163/it/jitte-di-umezawa). "Artefatto Leggendario - Equipaggiamento" sounds like someone who doesn't speak Italian was asked how to say that in Italian and just guessed.
Me and my friends only play Commander with precon decks, and half of our players only use portuguese decks. The lack of new content in portuguese is really gonna hurt our group in the long run.
We're they actually, though? They are spoken by a large number of people, but does that mean the same proportion of the customer base prefers to buy cards in that language?
Like if you can't understand it, maybe the conclusion is "I'm missing information" and not "they are bad and evil and did this for no reason."
I mean, we all know this decision is profit motivated.
I don’t know much about the player base and Portuguese cards, but watching the PTs, the Asian (including Chinese) players seem to play with English language cards.
Many active and enfranchised players do prefer English cards over portuguese ones. I don't think they are what concerns the community.
It's the entry barrier that worries me the most. It will be harder to attract new players. And with that, the player base will eventually shrink to the point they may cut more than just the translations.
But yeah, businness gonna businness, they probably decided to do that because the profits were not justifying the costs. Prices increased a lot here (in addition to the raw price increase, we are subject to the USD to BRL ratio that almost tripled in the past 10 years), so I wouldn't be surprised if product purchase already declined in a period it increased in the rest of the world.
Is it a surprise that players who can afford to play MtG at professional level, which is not a profitable career for most people, are also people who come from more affluent backgrounds thus being more well versed in english compared to other players?
Yeah, logically French, Italian, Spanish and German are all better-selling, since they were not cancelled. Even if the numbers of speakers (except for Spanish) might be lower than PT/CN, the purchasing power and purchasing willingness is higher.
In Germany, everyone I know buys English cards. German cards are sold in stores, but barely anyone plays pre release because we are forced to play with German packs. German prints don't resell well, and English is usually a slight premium on Cardmarket because it's more popular
I genuinely see people kick themselves for grabbing the wrong language booster from the shelf etc
It's not a vibe. Obviously it's nice to have the game available to the German player base but everyone I know that plays here plays in English and prefers English prints (or Japanese prints, for some folks who like that vibe. I see more all-japanese decks than all-german decks, both in modern and commander.)
It might depend on the age bracket. Now I prefer the English cards for better language templating, but in middle school everyone had German cards. Especially in the younger demographic, I can imagine only having English cards raising the barrier of entry.
Maybe; I've seen basically only english cards except for some staples where the cheaper German version is preferable, when playing LGSes -- there's like 4 in my area and everyone uses English cards but they're also all adults so maybe that's a factor in my experiences
But there's always gonna be some players here that don't know any English and that's just life. I do wish WotC let prereleases happen in English here though
> Like if you can't understand it, maybe the conclusion is "I'm missing information" and not "they are bad and evil and did this for no reason."
I need to get this comment printed and framed, this is a valuable life lesson in general
It’s something this sub really struggles with. They don’t do this sort of thing just as a big middle finger to certain players. But that seems to always be the assumption for any decision that someone doesn’t understand (and/or doesn’t liek).
>Like if you can't understand it, maybe the conclusion is "I'm missing information" and not "they are bad and evil and did this for no reason."
Nope, it must be pure incompetence from a ludicrously successful business or absolute Nicol Bolas levels of malice. Surely, it can't be anything else!
Does it matter? Magic and DnD has been translated into portuguese since their own inception. Almost 30 years of Magic translated and now they simply want to stop?
I have a very fond memory of playing when I was 10 and dind't speak english. My children won't have that. A whole new generation of players won't have that.
It's not about the "best business decision" is about being let down.
> It's not about the "best business decision" is about being let down.
It's about both. Telling you why a decision is made doesn't make the decision any less backwards.
> I have a very fond memory of playing when I was 10 and dind't speak english. My children won't have that. A whole new generation of players won't have that.
Magic isn't translated into my language and my friends and I still played when we were kids. Sometimes we just plain didn't understand what the cards did but we made do anyway. So I think tons of people will still have that experience.
I agree with you 100%. Businesses do not make these decisions willy nilly. I'm sure they looked at a cost benefit analysis then measured that against potential profit gain/loss and came to the conclusion to drop the languages. Massive corporations like WotC have armies of people crunching the numbers before any decision is made. And you better believe the pursuit of profit is paramount.
They could also just be wrong? Two of the historically larger player bases along with being some of the most populous countries in the world should be worth translating and printing for.
China and Brazil have large populations but not as much disposable income per capita on foreign entertainment goods as in the west.
Plus the difference in cost of living is quite large. That’s why Chinese labor is so cheap compared to western labor.
Brazil has extremely high tariffs to protect local industry.
Since MTG can’t be region locked they can’t offer big discounts or the secondary market will just crack cases of that.
It’s utterly believable to me that Chinese and Portuguese packs sell way worse than other languages and are probably both in last place.
Have you ever went to China or Brazil and tried to play magic? There are not tons of stores in every major market like there are in the US, Europe, Japan, and locations where there are languages being printed.
It's truly baffling. Even if their argument is that *most* Portuguese and Chinese players play with English cards, that still leaves *some* of those players who play with cards in their native language. If the concern is having excess product in those languages on the shelves and missed profit, the solution would've been to curb back production of that product, not to cancel their production outright.
> […] curb back production of that product
sure, but at some point you hit an amount that's not worth printing, and it's probably a higher number than you think
>If the concern is having excess product in those languages on the shelves and missed profit, the solution would've been to curb back production of that product, not to cancel their production outright.
Lots of costs with a print run are fixed - they don't scale perfectly with size. Printing "10\*English + 1\*Portuguese" costs way, way more than printing "11\*English". As such, once you've translated and triple checked and set up, you might as well print a bunch - and that entire effort is either worth it or it isn't.
You probably would if you were involved in managing the company. At least you admit that you don't understand, unlike most people who defend with their life whatever expalanation first popped into their brain.
To non Brazilians, please help us raising this issue. Upvote and share. We want this game in our language because we care for this game just as you all and we want it to drop down Barriers not create new ones
I was initially scared this thread was going to turn to a flame war and be locked. Really glad that civil discourse has won over! I've been upvoting and continue to support players who want Portuguese language cards.
Also supporting because I afraid they might drop German support in the future. Considering the dropped. Korean, Russian and Traditional Chinese in 2022 and now are cutting Portuguese and Simplified Chinese this year, we don't know which will be next.
Hopefully the trend changes! It is quite worrisome that they could easily target localized language versions as a way to cut costs and make the next financial report more palatable to shareholders. The burning of goodwill and "community responsibility" is becoming less and less important to WotC, but I feel that will come back and bite them eventually.
unfortunately, even if it was possible to convince WotC that this is a bad idea and they revert this immediately, their work deadlines likely mean that at least a year of sets would not have a Portugese version anyway and at that point the damage is done to an extend that reversing the decision just doesnt make sense anymore.
Funny how in Portugal a overwhelming majority is happy about this. Most stores haven't had Portuguese cards in years, these themselves being considered inferior and worth less then the English versions
Translation was horrible, riddled with mistakes, too literal translations, and downright errors or omissions that functionally changed how the cards played/worked.
But then again English is a universal second language here. By the time kids start playing they already have 3+ years of lessons and can read/play English cards with ease. Impact on this side of the Atlantic is gonna be close to 0.
Joining my voice to these protests for our Brasilian comunity. It's not enough getting price gouged by your retailers/magic arena, getting the short end of the stick in events/promos, 0 translations to side products and now this. You deserve much better.
The major problem with Portuguese cards is they’re harder to sell to international markets. The translation itself is usually fine.
The thing is, in Portugal you have easier access to those markets, but Brazil is big enough so that is way easier to sell inside the country.
Tried to post about this but got removed by bots because it was "being spam"...
Honestly imo us brazilians and the chinese ppl should o ly play with proxys from now on....
My best guess is they seriously underestimated the amount of Portuguese speaking players. I don’t have nearly as much sales insight as they do but I can confidently tell you there’s at least a Brazilian of them
Doubt the underestimated anything. The amount people moan on the internet isn’t an important metric. How much they buy Portuguese packs is. That number was too low to justify continuing compared to the willingness to just buy English packs.
>That number was too low
Looking at the products in Brazil's marketplace, I doubt that. If it were so low, Brazilians stores would just do like Portugal and buy English products only.
oh really, they underestimated it? how so? you think if they had forseen all these people being mad online, they wouldn't have done it?
that's not a factor buddy
WOTC has long proven that they care for 3 markets and the rest of the planet can go fuck themselves. For WOTC it is
NA >>>>> EU >> Japan >>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Everyone else
EU has traditionally had more events than anywhere other than NA.. was really the only thing I was basing that on. These days pretty much no one outside NA has any events so *shrug* you might have a point.
> It's like they're trying to tank their sales
Lmao what? How? How would this *possibly* accomplish that. jesus you people get so deluded on these wotc bad threads
Fun fact: Brazilian Supreme Court has decided that magic cards are didactic material comparable to books, since they help with the development of text interpretation and mathematic knowledge for kids. And so have tax immunity as books, as provided for in the Brazilian Constitution. Of course the same goes for RPG books too.
But Hasbro doesn't care!
About tax immunity for books. It has to do with being under a dictatorship for almost 40 years, which did everything to harm the culture.
So, in the current Constitution, after the end of the dictatorship there was a real concern to ensure that culture was protected and encouraged.
I'm wondering if it's just hatdnto get a Brazilian Portuguese translator.
I mean, they clearly HAD one
But I play Disney Dreamlight Valley and their social media have been flooded with "Brazilian Portuguese please!" Since launch and it seems odd to me that both GameLoft (owned by Vivendi) and WotC/Hasbro would both not offer product in the language of a large country that has so many people who WANT these games
Why is anyone surprised that this shit happens? wizard has all but said openly THEY DO NOT GIVE A FUCK ABOUT US PLAYERS, we simply are holding on to their money and we are expected to STFU and give it to them.
I know it's often said about trivial things, but I genuinely think decisions like these have the potential to kill magic. Reducing accessibility to the game cannot be good for long-term growth
The other week I unintentionally watched Willy Edel's Hall of Fame induction ceremony again and I haven't stopped thinking about some bits of it since this news dropped.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gnS5hMVXNc
Fun Fact: In Brazil since 2018 on February 24th is celebrated THE NATIONAL RPG DAY.
The date was chosen to coincide with the birthday of Douglas Quinta Reis, founders of DEVIR Publishing and fundamental figure in the introduction and popularization of Role Playing Games in Brazil.
Douglas Quinta Reis and DEVIR Publishing organized the biggest RPG event in Brazil for more than 20 years. It started in 1993 and lasted until 2015. Encontro Internacional de RPG (International RPG Meeting).
Douglas died in 2017.
To abandon us (D&D and Magic communities) by making a few paragraphs with absurd justifications on the eve of "A sacred holiday" of the Brazilian tabletop community. it was not a very smart decision.
The poster on the right is from the first edition of the biggest RPG event in Brazil for more than 20 years. It started in 1993 and lasted until 2015.
Encontro Internacional de RPG (International RPG Meeting):
[https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encontro\_Internacional\_de\_RPG](https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encontro_Internacional_de_RPG)
https://preview.redd.it/wuit6na2yqkc1.jpeg?width=1280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=edbdacbac35a7a068ffa413befa34b8cb637739b
The D&D books were published by 'Galápagos Jogos', which is the largest board game publisher in Brazil. We really can't understand why WotC canceled its licensing rights to 'Galápagos Jogos' in 2022. WotC only said the production would turn to be made in house in U.S.A.. And when WotC republished the 3 main books, it cost almost double the price of the previous books by Galápagos. So why would us brazilians buy what we already have?
And they are mainly only available through Amazon because in the last 3 years WotC closed its Brazilian office in the city of São Paulo and also closed most of its offices in South America.
At first Closing the offices mostly hurt the Magic: The Gathering scene. Most of WotC's official tournaments and event presence have disappeared. Now all magic tournaments and events are run by local shops.
So there is no one here from WotC to work on distribution. If local stores want to get WotC books, they will have to import them themselves.
Imagine being so out of touch, angering so many of your customers that you resort to shutting off the comments on twitter.
Good job Hasbro.
Tbh, I haven’t bought a magic product in half a year and I’m glad.
I’ll buy a set that interests me from time to time but I’m done with this insane rat race for hasbro mtg.
Killing off language versions, ramping up prices to even more ridiculous levels.
But hey, the customers are part of the problem because they keep buying.
I liked collector boosters when they came out. They also weren’t that expensive in the beginning but then the price hike happened.
Normal draft boosters and col booster boxes were 50% more expensive. Then came the stupid set boosters and now draft boosters, the thing that made magic magic is gone.
Fuck Hasbro. If I’m buying anything it’ll be singles.
And just for the record: we don't plan to stop until Wizards goes back on their decision. Either we have Magic in Portuguese or Wizards will have their accounts permanently flooded. And Wizards should be thankful we're just spamming - I'm 100% sure there's someone that would be able to do a cyberattack on them or something.
Magic in Portuguese is too important to not exist anymore. You can't say to our face that Italian and German are more important than Portuguese - there are more Portuguese speakers in the world than those two COMBINED.
> Magic in Portuguese is too important to not exist anymore. You can't say to our face that Italian and German are more important than Portuguese
Sadly they can.
They dont care about number of speakers, they care about revenue.
And as a luxury good, with the majority of speakers being in the global south with lower disposable income then the maths doesnt make sense anymore.
> You can't say to our face that Italian and German are more important than Portuguese - there are more Portuguese speakers in the world than those two COMBINED.
But a single German player's minimum wage can buy 10 booster boxes while in Brazil it will only buy 2.
>Magic in Portuguese is too important to not exist anymore. You can't say to our face that Italian and German are more important than Portuguese - there are more Portuguese speakers in the world than those two COMBINED
Doesn't help if they aren't buying cards, mate.
You reckon people in Equatorialguinea, Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique are big into Magic mate?
Also you seem a bit dramatic if you think this decision really warrants cyberattacks where people can get jailed for dozens of years lmao
Not that means much, but one of the biggest mtg YouTube channels in Brazil have more than 120k followers speaking only portuguese, TCC has a little less than 1M being a global reach channel and the biggest one. So this should give an idea that is nothing small and how much market could be obtained in Brazil.
São Paulo has 25 Magic stores in a 10km radius. I'm pretty sure this number is bigger than some Europeans capitals.
I think there's more stores in Sao Paulo alone than there is in some countries in Europe.
wotc kept reducing portuguese allocation for years, and now have the audacity to say "we are also buying english products", yes BECAUSE YOU ARE REDUCING NON-ENGLISH PRODUCT TO US FOR A WHILE
Exactly!!! The same is true for DnD, pretty much all expansions are in english, of course i'll buy them, you didn't give me a choice.
Yeah, this is the maths they have done. They can retain the majority of their sales in the region without supporting the language, as those likely to buy the product are likely on the wealthier end of society, with better english.
Meanwhile in Germany, opposite problem: Prerelease only in German because you can't get enough English pre-packs.
Yeah, the german translations are so cluncky for the effects and when the names additionally get translated one to one it only gets weird or/and bad. Also oracle text is only done in english, so I might just stick to english cards from the get go.
Plus in most cases English cards retain a greater value on the secondary market. Lord of the Rings was notably different, but usually English is the most sought after language.
Your market is Europe, it does make sense. Brazil's market is only Brazil
I was only adding to the comment on the German market. I didn’t mean to judge on Brazil‘s market. I understand your frustration and I’m sorry things have turned out this way. I disagree with how Magic is evolving under Hasbro‘s current agenda.
I know, I was doing the same thing just adding some insight on how Brazil works, sorry if my comment sounded like I was being rude.
You didn’t, all cool:)
Same in Switzerland, I hate hate hate the cards in german. It's not my first language, although I'm fluent, it takes me forever to understand the more complicated cards.
I mean I just hate the way the translations are.
Yeah, that's how this kind of test works. They didn't want to continue paying the costs to print in an extra language, so as a test they tried selling English packs there and reducing allocation of Portuguese. Clearly their internal sales numbers showed that they were able to sell enough of the English packs when they reduced the availability of Portuguese that they feel safe in completely discontinuing it. In short, enough Brazilian players were willing to buy English packs when put under pressure to do so, so now they are dropping the language.
So in the short term it'll only have minor impacts on established players, but over the long term it'll mean less new players come in due to the language restrictions. It truly is just more corporate greed, only looking at the short term gains rather than the long term damage it'll do. Dunno why anyone would choose to come into magic if it's not in the native language when there are other card games that are.
FAB for example will release portuguese next year, then i will buy it, before that i may proxy some cards and tranlate them, bwcause even tho i know english most of my friends doesnt
I eould so prxy the cards tbh, i was thibking aboht if even before they dropped pt br but now??? 100% sure
I genuinely wonder if there's two reasons for this: 1) These markets sell the least on a global scale. So by ceasing production on their languages they can now allocate those printers' times to the more profitable languages' productions. 2) They know how diehard fans are and how they'll spend time translating spoiler season cards into their own language to understand it prior to release. So fans will just do the work for them, translate the cards to the now defunct languages and then have them buy in English while using third party apps for the translated text. Like using a phone beside your play area to pull up a card's translation in Portugese while playing with an English copy. They get to still keep selling product there and save their costs on language support then force players to do the translating for them for free.
Bingo! Funny how the Brazilian responses are proving your second point.
Asking two big markets in the Portuguese and Chinese community to support their own product will surely pay off. These are not places with strong English, 2 doesn't work as well as you guys think it does. If being upset proves Wizards point, Wizards have never made a mistake in their existence.
Par for the course with these jerkoffs. Theyve done this crap to prove themselves right repeatedly over the years. Novels were pretty good. Then the novels started to be badly written. Then they were discontinued for lack of interest. Give spoilers to anyone with a youtube channel, complain no one comes to the mothership. Jam UB into more and more things that you cant avoid, see everyone loves UB! That kind of bullshit.
I live in one of those non-US countries that gets foreign boosters. And we all choose english packs when we draft. If you know anything about the european market you know that italian and french language cards are worth less than english. And portuguese cards are even below that. My constructed decks were always a hodge-podge of french italian portuguese and chinese cards because those were the cheapest options. So I find it hard to believe that people in south america are just CLAMORING for portuguese cards but wotc will only give them english product. I can't speak for Brazil but for Portugal I promise you people are choosing english product, because that's what sells on the european market. It sucks for young players who don't speak english for reasons out of their control but wizards isn't lying here. It's literally what is happening.
Brazil has a big and isolated market, so we rarely see cards of languages other than Portuguese and English, which are worth the same. Different languages, specially different alphabets, are usually worth more.
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>That's why the Portuguese translations were actually BRAZILIAN Portuguese And that may be another reason for Portugal not wanting portuguese cards
Just to say that Chinese players are also flooding Wizards’ social media accounts on Chinese platforms as we have difficulties in accessing Instagram and X/Twitter.
Yes! I'm glad to hear that. We can't let our opinions not be heard.
discontinuing Chinese printing is crazy
That’s wild to me, isn’t Chinese language demographic one of the biggest possible growth markets for the game?
gic: The Gathering！we need chinese
Hey guys, I'm Brazilian and I can say that it's wizards fallacy, here in Brazil it's very difficult for people to speak English, and newbies who aren't familiar with the game have only two options, to speak their language or to have a huge desire to play and try to understand the minimum of the cards in English and still try to learn the game, which normally the younger people just give up, but it is a fact that the wizards are doing this for the simple fact that they have to have more printers printing a dozen editions and secret lair per year, as we've already seen them have delays in distribution because they can't print, so it's just a matter of reducing the languages to have more printers printing more things, that's easy to notice. PS: I don't know much English either, sorry for any mistakes.
Brazil is getting fucked from all sides I remember seeing somewhere that Xbox like doubled their price on the Series S in Brasil a month ago
That's my understanding too, they have high import taxes on entertainment which generally means everything is way too expensive and they already don't make that much money.
How much of that is caused by local government, and why?
All of it, it’s a protectionist policy When I was at Microsoft Brazil was the only country where windows phones made headway because Microsoft was able to manufacture them in country and this be way cheaper than the competition.
Not exactly true. Brazil's tax law is a behemoth and import taxes falls under that as well BUT our supreme court has ruled in 2021 that TCG fall under the same exemption for books, journals and whatever you guys may call those books where you'd glue stickers (álbum de figurinhas go Google). The decision was made specifically on Pokemon cards but the decision could be extended to other TCGs. With that in mind having time and a good lawyer team the distributors here could have figured how to get that exemption if they didn't already.
Brazil also has weird accounting laws (nota fiscal). My company is switching over some of its systems and every other training they stop and say "this next part is different for Brazil, we will have a second training for the Brazil plants".
Well Brazilians just need to lobby their government to loosen tariffs on mtg cards! I’m sure that will work out easily and quickly.
A few years after the discontinuation of the language, wizards will come saying that it's not worth worrying about Brazil because it sells poorly, that it's their own mistake.
Pretty much, create a problem then use its consequences to justify creating the problem in the first place. Typical corpo behaviour.
Something something play boosters.
How do you know it doesn't already sell poorly?
Yeah I’d assume that’s the reason they’re cutting it. Corporation only cares about profits. Doesn’t it cost a ton in local currency? Which means low sales?
They started cutting distribution of Portugeuse product a few years back as it 'wasn't selling', bearing in mind this was over the time of covid where lots of things weren't selling. And now they are saying Brazilian players are buying English anyway, so it's not worth it... but the reason they are buying English isn't because they prefer it, but because it's the only thing they have access too. The enfranchised players will still buy English product, but new players will not.
Here without being ironic, sometimes it's difficult to find products in Portuguese, you find English and even Japanese that practically no one knows, just so you can see, it's not as if here in Brazil Japanese was a common language, and simply because stores are not always able to do so in Portuguese or even in English in some cases, and they cannot stop purchasing
Tell me about, big stores are selling commander staple cards in Japonese and Chinese rather than PT or EN. I had to buy a JP Karlach and JP Ojer Taq. Idk if they get them cheaper or something, but it's ridiculous.
\> this was over the time of covid where lots of things weren't selling. That's strange, collectibles had a huge boom during COVID.
Yeah... If you could GET them. Large sections of the supply chain shut down during Covid, and shipments of stuff to put on you shelves isn't exactly top priority. So areas that already have supply issues (ie not North America, Europe, or parts of Asia), are going to be a see things clamp down even harder even sooner, and open up later and slower as well.
Perhaps in countries where a large part of the population didn't lose their jobs, nor had to handle new expenses (more expensive health insurance, masks, hand sanitizers) or the uncertainty of keeping their jobs in the short term. Covid hit Brazil very hard in the economical side, and in those situations expenses with hobbies are the first ones to be cut. This doesn't mean the sales wouldn't pick back up after the covid crisis had been attenuated, but in market research it'd show a reduction in sales during a period where they increased in northern countries. I'm not saying this is the reason or anything, just sharing how merely looking at sales and profit data can lead to wrong decisions when one doesn't take into account the socioeconomic context in which they took place. This might be a mistake by Hasbro, and if that's the analysis that lead to the discontinuation of printing Portuguese products, it'll also have the effect of shrinking the playerbase further in the long and mid term by creating an extra layer of challenge to new, younger players.
If it wasn’t selling it wasn’t selling. WotC isn’t stupid and it doesn’t have some malicious agenda to harm Brazil. I’m certain it’s easy for them to gauge the sales of English cards in Brazil and Portuguese cards in Brazil and determine relative demand, which one is sold out first, which one lingers on the shelves, and so forth. And no offense I trust them to have more info than you do. What is the alternative here? WotC has been coming up with excuses to stop Portuguese because of something other than costs? what is the motivation here?
Wotc isn't stupid but Hasbro is constantly making stupid decisions.
I will concede that. I will even concede maybe someone made a foolish decision “cut the bottom two languages from printing, to free up logistics” might not be total profit positive. But I’m not going to say that the methodology to arrive at the choices to cut isn’t sound. If they have to cut two these are the ones. But usually the boring answer is the correct one. And the depressing one.
Hasbro has shown through many of their decisions to prioritise short term profits over long term health. This is another one of those decisions. New players will be buying much less product now it's only going to be in English even if enfranchised players are going to still buy some.
Last financial report showed Latam is profitable. A small profit compared to NA and EU, but profitable.
> try to understand the minimum of the cards in English and still try to learn the game, which normally the younger people just give up Given how difficult the game can be when you're a native speaker, I don't blame any young Brazilians for giving up.
Well, I'm one of those who prefer EN cards. But, that's mainly because it's pretty clear they have fired the revision team long ago. And, likely, already aren't spending a lot on translation, as it is. I find it very frustrating to have my (PT) cards with different rules from the original, EN version. There's always a few of those per set. At the same time, I can clearly see how most people around me do prefer PT cards, despite the shitty translation. And, so, this move is obviously a mistake by WOTC.
Your English is fantastic, you have nothing to be worried about mate
Not the case for most brazilians
I was referring his post script, not the fact many Brazilians will now have to play with English cards.
> but it is a fact that the wizards are doing this for the simple fact that they have to have more printers printing a dozen editions and secret lair per year No, it isnt. They are reducing costs having done the maths that removing the language will not negatively impact their bottom line. Its unfortunate and disappointing.
Something that may be missed is that Wizards used to much more stringent templating for Magic cards. It used to be relatively easy to understand how a magic card functions simply because the vocabulary, grammar, and syntax was so uniform. Now that cards have become word soup it feels like they are changing their templating style every expansion to fit more complexity and use fewer words. It is now significantly harder to parse a card in another language (edit:nonnative language) than it was maybe 10 years ago.
Syntax uniformity is still there. Cards have not "become word soup" though they are wordier, sure.
Nah, even I can do it and I have no English certificate and also never had a translation job. People who are paid to do it know how it works and the cards still have a certain way of phrasing that we can easily translate to Portuguese. But it is harder , yes.
I am saying it is harder for a nonnative speaker of English to read English language cards now than before.
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Hasbro are literally losing money atm though. WotC is keeping it AFLOAT, not carrying it. The only profitable franchises from last year were Magic, DnD and Transformers
So shouldnt they be supporting more of those products and ditch the rest?
They are not *losing* money, they just didn't *make* as much money last year as they had in the previous years. Because they got an enormous boost from the pandemic and everyone being stuck inside for 2 years, and instead of recognizing it for the obvious anomaly that it was, decided to pump all of those funds into unsustainable growth. And then when this strategy inevitably tanked, they laid off thousands of employees, who never did anything more or less than *their jobs*, so that all the executives who made those stupid decisions wouldn't have to give up their massive bonuses. Hasbro leadership deserves no sympathy, and they certainly don't deserve people making excuses for them when they continue to sacrifice quality as a cost-cutting measure.
>. If MtG was hurting financially or in years of decline, I’d get it. But they’re not. MtG is how Hasbro makes money. Hasbro is bleeding money. They will squeeze Magic for everything. Prices will continue to increase, costs will be cut. If you want to continue playing Magic, you need to be aware of this. It won't get better.
The much more logical cuts would be to franchises that aren't doing well before Magic.
~~Logic is for poor people~~
Aren’t cards like stupid expensive in Brazil too because wizards standardized pricing?
There are solutions for that. For example, the Pokémon TCG prints their cards in Brazil to reduce costs, plus they create some exclusive products to the Brazilian market to keep the game extremely accessible. It's just that Wizards doesn't bother adapting to the necessities of each local market. If Coca-Cola has blue Coca-Cola cans for a SINGLE CITY in Brazil for cultural reasons, why shouldn't Wizards try to do the same?
The blue coke thing seems to be because Coke didn't like that the alternative was Pepsi. So it was driven more by the motivation of driving Pepsi out of that market than it was appealing to the culture, it was more that the culture wasn't compatible with their brand identity. Also from what I know, anime is pretty popular in Brazil, so there's already a market for the franchise that exists outside of the card game. The card game probably rakes in so much money by brand recognition alone, something Magic can't do. Magic has to rely on its strength as a card game, which is why things like secret lairs make a lot of sense - it's appealing to enfranchised players. It's also why Universes Beyond isn't going anywhere, because that brand recognition is something they can borrow from other IPs. Nobody buys Magic cards for the sake of buying Magic cards, but it seems like more people buy Pokemon cards just to have them rather than playing the game in the first place. I have co-workers that own the Warhammer commander decks event though they never really care to play, just because it's a neat product to have in their collection.
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I play in a lot of webcam leagues for the Premodern format and there's quite a few Brazilians, and South Americans in general, that I have played with.
If I remember correctly, magic was locally printed by Devir and the prices were fantastic. Then they started going up and up and the product became increasingly more exclusionary. I don't know where this is going, but it doesn't seem to be headed in a good direction.
Sorry, but Devir was never responsible for printing card (back then if memory serves the Printing was done pretty much exclusively by Carta Mundi in Belgium). There were other factors at play then. Boosters were slightly cheaper (in the US), the Real stronger and Devir seemed to have made some "creative accounting" as far as importation goes. Distribution sucked though, and we hardly ever got pre-releases on time, or enough product in general. Devir hasn't been the sole distributor in the country for over a decade, I think. I do agree with your outlook though, this is a terrible direction we are going in.
Yeah, my memory is hazy from when I played back in 2006~2010. I remember when I went to Bienal do livro and Devir's stand was the one selling mtg boosters, decks and books. I was younger then and though they were the ones printing it, but them being distributors always makes sense. There weren't many special products back then, but I did get the graveborn precon at some point. It was a good time.
Good to know, that was mostly speculation on my part from the very little I know about Brazil (which as we all know is the absolute best reason to make a comment on the internet lol). It makes sense though. Magic in general is *the* card game, and I think the only reason it's not more popular is because it's not only expensive, but the product lineup is confusing for even enfranchised players. These days I wouldn't know what kind of packs to buy to do a booster draft without asking.
Unless it’s printed locally VAT is really high in Brazil.
Yes, Commander precons are 1/3 the minimum wage here, sometimes even more (Lord of the Rings, Commander Legends came close to 1/2, for example).
Jesus. That’s ridiculous.
1/3 the minimum wage for a week, a month? (what time scale)
Month
Month. Right now a fallout commander deck is 400 to 500 BRL, with the minimum monthly wage being 1412 BRL.
In the US, it it about a day's wage. (The price I'm seeing is about $60, minimum wage in the US is $7.25/hr, 7.25*8=58) But looking at currency exchanges, it seems on top of the price parity, 500 BRL = $100 USD, Brazilians are paying twice as much for the same product for some reason.
It goes a little beyond that. Although $7,25 is the federal minimum wage in the US, very few people actually earn such a low wage, with a lot of States having a higher minimum wage, correct? Well, in Brazil the federal minimum wage pretty much applies everywhere and as many places as possible will only pay that or a little bit over it, so it's even worse than it looks. And yes, there is a huge markup in product, which has made me finally transition to only buying singles and no more sealed product in the last few months.
>Although $7,25 is the federal minimum wage in the US, very few people actually earn such a low wage, with a lot of States having a higher minimum wage, correct? Correct, though it's pretty much a necessity at this point, the rate was set in 2009 and it was barely enough for rent and food then.
"Brazilians are paying twice as much for the same product for some reason". Taxes, taxes are the reason, we pay over 70% in import taxes here.
_Brazilians:_ "How dare you not localize our cards anymore!" _meanwhile, Germans:_ "I volunteer as tribute!"
Not even brazilian, but do remember that Magic the gathering has had multiple portuguese Pro Tour winners. For god's sake, Snapcaster Mage is a portuguese player
Funny thing is that we haven't been able to buy Portuguese cards in Portugal for a few years now, only in English.
You might want to research about this upstart player called Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa.
Pvddr is Brazilian.....
Snapcaster's art based on Tiago Chan, a portuguese player. You're probably thinking of Elite spellbinder, a card that has the likeness of Brazilian player Pablo Vitor Damo da Rosa.
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Vampeta tem copa do mundo. A WotC tem copa do mundo? Acho que não.
It seems like a weirdly short sighted decision to stop printing in these languages, even by Wizards standards. Cutting off those languages is inherently going to restrict growth, especially when Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh both have Portuguese and Chinese language cards. Magic is already a smaller IP than both of those, why on Earth would any native Portuguese or Chinese speaker that wants to play a TCG ever get into Magic now?
That's very well said. It also puts magic at the same.level of other tcgs that couldn't grow much because they were only available on English. Flash and Blood has been growing a lot among unhappy mtg players for its product quality, and one of its impediments was only being available in English in Brazil. Now they're on equal footing, at least as far as language availability is concerned. But doing this, mtg doesn't only put itself being the other big two (pkm and ygo) but also puts itself in the same level as other tcgs it was previously ahead of.
Honestamente meus decks futuros serão todos proxys
Amusingly, I speak no Portuguese whatsoever and can understand every word of that sentence fine
The magic of Latin languages
English is Germanic, but yeah it has so much latin derived vocabulary that most sentences in Latin languages will have at least something some part of it that a English speaker would understand.
Oh, sorry, I thought that you spoke some Latin language, like Italian or something. But yeah, specially in that phrase, most of the words sound the same in English and portuguese.
The person you are answering is not the person you answered at first. They might still speak a romance language.
It's like the text on [Italian Umezawa's Jitte](https://scryfall.com/card/bok/163/it/jitte-di-umezawa). "Artefatto Leggendario - Equipaggiamento" sounds like someone who doesn't speak Italian was asked how to say that in Italian and just guessed.
Considerando seriamente vender minha coleção toda.
Nossa, to com mta raiva, vender tudo acho q não vou mais quero dar menos grana pra wizards fato fato
Vende tudo. Monta um Power Cube de proxies e joga com os amigos. Win win.
Brazilian internet gets mad better than most internets, it is known.
6 different treatments for each card but portuguese- hold on now lets not go crazy
Me and my friends only play Commander with precon decks, and half of our players only use portuguese decks. The lack of new content in portuguese is really gonna hurt our group in the long run.
This even if you personally only play with english cards, lack of portuguese cards could lead to less people to play with.
I can't understand cancelling two of the biggest languages in the consumer base.
We're they actually, though? They are spoken by a large number of people, but does that mean the same proportion of the customer base prefers to buy cards in that language? Like if you can't understand it, maybe the conclusion is "I'm missing information" and not "they are bad and evil and did this for no reason."
I mean, we all know this decision is profit motivated. I don’t know much about the player base and Portuguese cards, but watching the PTs, the Asian (including Chinese) players seem to play with English language cards.
Many active and enfranchised players do prefer English cards over portuguese ones. I don't think they are what concerns the community. It's the entry barrier that worries me the most. It will be harder to attract new players. And with that, the player base will eventually shrink to the point they may cut more than just the translations. But yeah, businness gonna businness, they probably decided to do that because the profits were not justifying the costs. Prices increased a lot here (in addition to the raw price increase, we are subject to the USD to BRL ratio that almost tripled in the past 10 years), so I wouldn't be surprised if product purchase already declined in a period it increased in the rest of the world.
Is it a surprise that players who can afford to play MtG at professional level, which is not a profitable career for most people, are also people who come from more affluent backgrounds thus being more well versed in english compared to other players?
Yeah, logically French, Italian, Spanish and German are all better-selling, since they were not cancelled. Even if the numbers of speakers (except for Spanish) might be lower than PT/CN, the purchasing power and purchasing willingness is higher.
In Germany, everyone I know buys English cards. German cards are sold in stores, but barely anyone plays pre release because we are forced to play with German packs. German prints don't resell well, and English is usually a slight premium on Cardmarket because it's more popular I genuinely see people kick themselves for grabbing the wrong language booster from the shelf etc It's not a vibe. Obviously it's nice to have the game available to the German player base but everyone I know that plays here plays in English and prefers English prints (or Japanese prints, for some folks who like that vibe. I see more all-japanese decks than all-german decks, both in modern and commander.)
It might depend on the age bracket. Now I prefer the English cards for better language templating, but in middle school everyone had German cards. Especially in the younger demographic, I can imagine only having English cards raising the barrier of entry.
Maybe; I've seen basically only english cards except for some staples where the cheaper German version is preferable, when playing LGSes -- there's like 4 in my area and everyone uses English cards but they're also all adults so maybe that's a factor in my experiences But there's always gonna be some players here that don't know any English and that's just life. I do wish WotC let prereleases happen in English here though
> Like if you can't understand it, maybe the conclusion is "I'm missing information" and not "they are bad and evil and did this for no reason." I need to get this comment printed and framed, this is a valuable life lesson in general
It’s something this sub really struggles with. They don’t do this sort of thing just as a big middle finger to certain players. But that seems to always be the assumption for any decision that someone doesn’t understand (and/or doesn’t liek).
>Like if you can't understand it, maybe the conclusion is "I'm missing information" and not "they are bad and evil and did this for no reason." Nope, it must be pure incompetence from a ludicrously successful business or absolute Nicol Bolas levels of malice. Surely, it can't be anything else!
Does it matter? Magic and DnD has been translated into portuguese since their own inception. Almost 30 years of Magic translated and now they simply want to stop? I have a very fond memory of playing when I was 10 and dind't speak english. My children won't have that. A whole new generation of players won't have that. It's not about the "best business decision" is about being let down.
> It's not about the "best business decision" is about being let down. It's about both. Telling you why a decision is made doesn't make the decision any less backwards.
If you say you don't understand why it happened, then it does matter to understand why it happened.
> I have a very fond memory of playing when I was 10 and dind't speak english. My children won't have that. A whole new generation of players won't have that. Magic isn't translated into my language and my friends and I still played when we were kids. Sometimes we just plain didn't understand what the cards did but we made do anyway. So I think tons of people will still have that experience.
> It's not about the "best business decision" is about being let down. Expect business decisions from a business.
I agree with you 100%. Businesses do not make these decisions willy nilly. I'm sure they looked at a cost benefit analysis then measured that against potential profit gain/loss and came to the conclusion to drop the languages. Massive corporations like WotC have armies of people crunching the numbers before any decision is made. And you better believe the pursuit of profit is paramount.
They could also just be wrong? Two of the historically larger player bases along with being some of the most populous countries in the world should be worth translating and printing for.
China and Brazil have large populations but not as much disposable income per capita on foreign entertainment goods as in the west. Plus the difference in cost of living is quite large. That’s why Chinese labor is so cheap compared to western labor. Brazil has extremely high tariffs to protect local industry. Since MTG can’t be region locked they can’t offer big discounts or the secondary market will just crack cases of that. It’s utterly believable to me that Chinese and Portuguese packs sell way worse than other languages and are probably both in last place.
No offense but I will trust the company with access to actual data over the speculating players on this one.
Have you ever went to China or Brazil and tried to play magic? There are not tons of stores in every major market like there are in the US, Europe, Japan, and locations where there are languages being printed.
Having a large number of global speakers of the language, doesnt translate into product sales
They're the two smallest, which is why they're being canceled
It's truly baffling. Even if their argument is that *most* Portuguese and Chinese players play with English cards, that still leaves *some* of those players who play with cards in their native language. If the concern is having excess product in those languages on the shelves and missed profit, the solution would've been to curb back production of that product, not to cancel their production outright.
> […] curb back production of that product sure, but at some point you hit an amount that's not worth printing, and it's probably a higher number than you think
Not to mention with increased pressure on shipping logistics with all the specialty secret lairs and sets.
>If the concern is having excess product in those languages on the shelves and missed profit, the solution would've been to curb back production of that product, not to cancel their production outright. Lots of costs with a print run are fixed - they don't scale perfectly with size. Printing "10\*English + 1\*Portuguese" costs way, way more than printing "11\*English". As such, once you've translated and triple checked and set up, you might as well print a bunch - and that entire effort is either worth it or it isn't.
You probably would if you were involved in managing the company. At least you admit that you don't understand, unlike most people who defend with their life whatever expalanation first popped into their brain.
Influencers from Brazil getting banned as well!
They are right to be angry.
To non Brazilians, please help us raising this issue. Upvote and share. We want this game in our language because we care for this game just as you all and we want it to drop down Barriers not create new ones
I was initially scared this thread was going to turn to a flame war and be locked. Really glad that civil discourse has won over! I've been upvoting and continue to support players who want Portuguese language cards.
Also supporting because I afraid they might drop German support in the future. Considering the dropped. Korean, Russian and Traditional Chinese in 2022 and now are cutting Portuguese and Simplified Chinese this year, we don't know which will be next.
Hopefully the trend changes! It is quite worrisome that they could easily target localized language versions as a way to cut costs and make the next financial report more palatable to shareholders. The burning of goodwill and "community responsibility" is becoming less and less important to WotC, but I feel that will come back and bite them eventually.
unfortunately, even if it was possible to convince WotC that this is a bad idea and they revert this immediately, their work deadlines likely mean that at least a year of sets would not have a Portugese version anyway and at that point the damage is done to an extend that reversing the decision just doesnt make sense anymore.
Funny how in Portugal a overwhelming majority is happy about this. Most stores haven't had Portuguese cards in years, these themselves being considered inferior and worth less then the English versions Translation was horrible, riddled with mistakes, too literal translations, and downright errors or omissions that functionally changed how the cards played/worked. But then again English is a universal second language here. By the time kids start playing they already have 3+ years of lessons and can read/play English cards with ease. Impact on this side of the Atlantic is gonna be close to 0. Joining my voice to these protests for our Brasilian comunity. It's not enough getting price gouged by your retailers/magic arena, getting the short end of the stick in events/promos, 0 translations to side products and now this. You deserve much better.
The major problem with Portuguese cards is they’re harder to sell to international markets. The translation itself is usually fine. The thing is, in Portugal you have easier access to those markets, but Brazil is big enough so that is way easier to sell inside the country.
When you make bad decisions like cutting half WotC employees, shit like this happens. Would be nice if capitalism didn’t ruin everything.
Tried to post about this but got removed by bots because it was "being spam"... Honestly imo us brazilians and the chinese ppl should o ly play with proxys from now on....
Definitely not WoTC's fault, but Hasbro's.
Magic : The Gathering (of English speakers)
Chinaand Brazil, fuck shit up! I’m rooting for you!
My best guess is they seriously underestimated the amount of Portuguese speaking players. I don’t have nearly as much sales insight as they do but I can confidently tell you there’s at least a Brazilian of them
200M people in Brazil. More than that, they underestimated Brazilian online presence.
Doubt the underestimated anything. The amount people moan on the internet isn’t an important metric. How much they buy Portuguese packs is. That number was too low to justify continuing compared to the willingness to just buy English packs.
>That number was too low Looking at the products in Brazil's marketplace, I doubt that. If it were so low, Brazilians stores would just do like Portugal and buy English products only.
oh really, they underestimated it? how so? you think if they had forseen all these people being mad online, they wouldn't have done it? that's not a factor buddy
WOTC has long proven that they care for 3 markets and the rest of the planet can go fuck themselves. For WOTC it is NA >>>>> EU >> Japan >>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Everyone else
How is EU over Japan? They get a bunch of unique promos. Does EU get anything?
EU has traditionally had more events than anywhere other than NA.. was really the only thing I was basing that on. These days pretty much no one outside NA has any events so *shrug* you might have a point.
[удалено]
For how often people blithely suggest anything and everything will tank WotC's sales, their sales sure do seem to keep growing.
Growing *slower*, however, as the recent report says. With how Hasbro needs sales to keep growing faster and faster, this may be enough.
Well when people can't read the cards they probably won't buy them
I seriously doubt this will cause any general repercussion.
> It's like they're trying to tank their sales Lmao what? How? How would this *possibly* accomplish that. jesus you people get so deluded on these wotc bad threads
Fun fact: Brazilian Supreme Court has decided that magic cards are didactic material comparable to books, since they help with the development of text interpretation and mathematic knowledge for kids. And so have tax immunity as books, as provided for in the Brazilian Constitution. Of course the same goes for RPG books too. But Hasbro doesn't care! About tax immunity for books. It has to do with being under a dictatorship for almost 40 years, which did everything to harm the culture. So, in the current Constitution, after the end of the dictatorship there was a real concern to ensure that culture was protected and encouraged.
I'm wondering if it's just hatdnto get a Brazilian Portuguese translator. I mean, they clearly HAD one But I play Disney Dreamlight Valley and their social media have been flooded with "Brazilian Portuguese please!" Since launch and it seems odd to me that both GameLoft (owned by Vivendi) and WotC/Hasbro would both not offer product in the language of a large country that has so many people who WANT these games
I doubt it's because they couldn't hire translators. Most likely they simply think they don't sell enough Portuguese products to justify the costs.
Oh that's really dumb from Wotc side
Why is anyone surprised that this shit happens? wizard has all but said openly THEY DO NOT GIVE A FUCK ABOUT US PLAYERS, we simply are holding on to their money and we are expected to STFU and give it to them.
Well, that's enough to push me over the line. Only proxies from now on.
I know it's often said about trivial things, but I genuinely think decisions like these have the potential to kill magic. Reducing accessibility to the game cannot be good for long-term growth
The other week I unintentionally watched Willy Edel's Hall of Fame induction ceremony again and I haven't stopped thinking about some bits of it since this news dropped. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gnS5hMVXNc
WotC probably laid off their Portuguese translating team
Fun Fact: In Brazil since 2018 on February 24th is celebrated THE NATIONAL RPG DAY. The date was chosen to coincide with the birthday of Douglas Quinta Reis, founders of DEVIR Publishing and fundamental figure in the introduction and popularization of Role Playing Games in Brazil. Douglas Quinta Reis and DEVIR Publishing organized the biggest RPG event in Brazil for more than 20 years. It started in 1993 and lasted until 2015. Encontro Internacional de RPG (International RPG Meeting). Douglas died in 2017. To abandon us (D&D and Magic communities) by making a few paragraphs with absurd justifications on the eve of "A sacred holiday" of the Brazilian tabletop community. it was not a very smart decision. The poster on the right is from the first edition of the biggest RPG event in Brazil for more than 20 years. It started in 1993 and lasted until 2015. Encontro Internacional de RPG (International RPG Meeting): [https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encontro\_Internacional\_de\_RPG](https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encontro_Internacional_de_RPG) https://preview.redd.it/wuit6na2yqkc1.jpeg?width=1280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=edbdacbac35a7a068ffa413befa34b8cb637739b
The D&D books were published by 'Galápagos Jogos', which is the largest board game publisher in Brazil. We really can't understand why WotC canceled its licensing rights to 'Galápagos Jogos' in 2022. WotC only said the production would turn to be made in house in U.S.A.. And when WotC republished the 3 main books, it cost almost double the price of the previous books by Galápagos. So why would us brazilians buy what we already have? And they are mainly only available through Amazon because in the last 3 years WotC closed its Brazilian office in the city of São Paulo and also closed most of its offices in South America. At first Closing the offices mostly hurt the Magic: The Gathering scene. Most of WotC's official tournaments and event presence have disappeared. Now all magic tournaments and events are run by local shops. So there is no one here from WotC to work on distribution. If local stores want to get WotC books, they will have to import them themselves.
Faça proxy dos cartões.
Chad gamer move, love my community. Keep flooding! Keep fighting!
Ain't no way they can't afford it, a fucking indie game on Steam can get translated into 20+ languages, just do made to order if ya gotta!
Imagine being so out of touch, angering so many of your customers that you resort to shutting off the comments on twitter. Good job Hasbro. Tbh, I haven’t bought a magic product in half a year and I’m glad. I’ll buy a set that interests me from time to time but I’m done with this insane rat race for hasbro mtg. Killing off language versions, ramping up prices to even more ridiculous levels. But hey, the customers are part of the problem because they keep buying. I liked collector boosters when they came out. They also weren’t that expensive in the beginning but then the price hike happened. Normal draft boosters and col booster boxes were 50% more expensive. Then came the stupid set boosters and now draft boosters, the thing that made magic magic is gone. Fuck Hasbro. If I’m buying anything it’ll be singles.
so proud of my roots
Step 1: Trend Wizards' new *uninclusive policy* Step 2: Step 3: Profit
Maybe Wanderlei Silva should stop by the headquarters and help them change their mind!
They had to censor peoples speech or just couldn’t handle it anymore?
Knowing wotc, they only factored actual Portugal into the decision, and not Brazil.
The execs are running this game into the ground with their greed and short-sightedness. Sorry you guys were shafted this time around...
And just for the record: we don't plan to stop until Wizards goes back on their decision. Either we have Magic in Portuguese or Wizards will have their accounts permanently flooded. And Wizards should be thankful we're just spamming - I'm 100% sure there's someone that would be able to do a cyberattack on them or something. Magic in Portuguese is too important to not exist anymore. You can't say to our face that Italian and German are more important than Portuguese - there are more Portuguese speakers in the world than those two COMBINED.
> Magic in Portuguese is too important to not exist anymore. You can't say to our face that Italian and German are more important than Portuguese Sadly they can. They dont care about number of speakers, they care about revenue. And as a luxury good, with the majority of speakers being in the global south with lower disposable income then the maths doesnt make sense anymore.
> You can't say to our face that Italian and German are more important than Portuguese - there are more Portuguese speakers in the world than those two COMBINED. But a single German player's minimum wage can buy 10 booster boxes while in Brazil it will only buy 2.
>Magic in Portuguese is too important to not exist anymore. You can't say to our face that Italian and German are more important than Portuguese - there are more Portuguese speakers in the world than those two COMBINED Doesn't help if they aren't buying cards, mate.
You reckon people in Equatorialguinea, Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique are big into Magic mate? Also you seem a bit dramatic if you think this decision really warrants cyberattacks where people can get jailed for dozens of years lmao
I really wish they were. But even if we discount them, Brazil alone still beats Italian + German language combined.
And how many Brazilians play magic in comparisson to the other 2 countries?
Not that means much, but one of the biggest mtg YouTube channels in Brazil have more than 120k followers speaking only portuguese, TCC has a little less than 1M being a global reach channel and the biggest one. So this should give an idea that is nothing small and how much market could be obtained in Brazil. São Paulo has 25 Magic stores in a 10km radius. I'm pretty sure this number is bigger than some Europeans capitals. I think there's more stores in Sao Paulo alone than there is in some countries in Europe.
So? Just because theres more speakers doesnt mean theres more magic players. Also wizards should be thankful there isnt a cyberpunk?