Wizards of the Coast reportedly lays off staff working on virtual tabletop Sigil

Reports spread on Tuesday via social media that Wizards of the Coast, the Renton, Wash.-based company that publishes Dungeons & Dragons, has dismissed most of the employees that were working on its virtual tabletop (VTT) project Sigil.

According to posts on LinkedIn, roughly 30 employees working on Sigil were dismissed on Tuesday, including senior writer Andy Collins, VFX artist Eben Bradstreet, and community manager Chung Ng.

GeekWire has reached out to Wizards for further comment.

Recently exhibited at a media summit at the end of January, Sigil was initially announced in 2022 as Wizards’ entry into the VTT space. It’s intended as a visual and coordination aid for anyone who’s playing D&D or other tabletop games online, with a number of creation tools built into the program to create dungeons, towns, and random encounters. It recently debuted to the public at the end of February as part of the online storefront D&D Beyond.

VTTs such as Foundry, Roll20, Game Master Engine, and TaleSpire have become a big part of the hobby in recent years. The COVID lockdowns in 2020 led many people to start playing tabletop role-playing games over chat programs such as Zoom and Discord.

However, for more tactical TTRPGs like D&D, it can be tricky to run the game without some kind of map in front of the players, since character placement and range can be big factors. In those cases, a VTT can vastly streamline the process of online play.

With that in mind, it was inevitable that Wizards would make its own entry into the VTT space. I’d initially seen an alpha version in 2023 that served as a straightforward virtual map and playset for running simple D&D adventures. It subsequently reappeared in January under the working title Project Sigil, and had evolved into more of a tool for virtually constructing online maps and playsets.