Hasbro’s Wizards of the Coast has laid off 30 people who built Sigil, its recently released virtual tabletop experience, Polygon reports. The app allows Dungeons & Dragons players to build virtual, 3D game boards, complete with miniatures and dice, so they can play the classic tabletop roleplaying game remotely.
News of the layoffs were first shared on March 18 in a LinkedIn post from Andy Collins, the design lead on Sigil. “Today, approximately 30 talented developers (90 percent of the team) were laid off from the Sigil (virtual tabletop) team at Wizards of the Coast, including yours truly,” Collins wrote. “I wish my former colleagues success in their future endeavors. I’ll also be pulling for the crew left behind who’ll do their best to keep improving and iterating the experience we shipped last month.”
The layoffs leave Sigil with a skeleton crew of three people to support the app, Rascal reports. Sigil launched in early access on February 28, 2025 as a perk for subscribers to D&D Beyond, and early reviews found it to be both limited and a little broken.
The problems may have started even earlier, though, according to at least one Wizards of the Coast employee Rascal spoke to. Management at Hasbro, the parent company of Wizards of the Coast, were reportedly uninterested and “constantly moving goalposts.” There may have also been a fundamental misunderstanding over what Sigil was: Hasbro didn’t know the difference between a video game and the VTT (virtual tabletop) app it ultimately got.
Sigil remains live and will continue to be a perk of paying for a D&D Beyond subscription, Wizards of the Coast’s tool for playing Dungeons & Dragons virtually.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/hasbro-laid-off-the-team-behind-its-virtual-tabletop-app-only-weeks-after-it-was-released-214024876.html?src=rss
