Indie game designers unite to buy D&D!?

[Dungeonosophy]

I wonder how much it would cost to buy the D&D intellectual property outright.

Picture this: Paizo, Monte Cook, Green Ronin, Ryan Dancey, and Peter Adkinson, with the help of a massive Kickstarter, co-operate to make an offer to Hasbro.


This D&D Initiative:

• Owns the D&D brand and all its rule books, campaign settings, novels, magazine articles, board games, memorabilia, and other spin-offs; with the minor pen & paper RPG brands, such as Gamma World and d20 Modern, thrown in too.
• Simultaneously releases D&D Next and reissues Original D&D, BECMI/Rules Cyclopedia D&D, First Edition, Second Edition, Third Edition, and Fourth Edition.​
• Rebrands all Paizo, Monte Cook, and Green Ronin d20/OGL products as Dungeons & Dragons. Pathfinder RPG, True20, Arcana Evolved, and other related rules sets become iterations of D&D.
• Makes an easy-to-use license for 3rd Party D&D publications.
• Explicitly opens all D&D content for non-commercial purposes.
• All D&D/d20/OGL campaign settings and adventures from TSR, WotC, Paizo, Malhavoc, and Green Ronin are translated into each rules iteration.
• Perhaps operates as a game designer co-op, a sort of "CSG" (community supported gaming), which aims to provide a partial or full livelihood for many past, present, and future game designers and fantasy artists, where they may work in artistic freedom while receiving enough bread to live a modest life.
• Commissions work from all sorts of former TSR and WotC designers and artists, and other grognards, to make new material for all the D&D settings. For example, for Mystara: Bruce Heard, Aaron Allston, and Ann Dupuis.
• Enacts all the product suggestions in Mike Evan's petition for a content-provider publishing model.

 

[Grydan]

I wonder how much it would cost to buy the D&D intellectual property outright.

More money than the entire rest of the RPG industry has.

 

[CasvalRemDeikun]

More money than the entire rest of the RPG industry has.

This.

Plus, Hasbro wouldn't sell the game.

 

[Umbran]

I wonder how much it would cost to buy the D&D intellectual property outright.

That would first require that it be up for sale. Hasbro is not known for letting go of IP once they have it. You can raise an arbitrarily large sum of money, but if they aren't interested in selling, you're just out of luck.

 

[TwinBahamut]

Yeah, Hasbro pretty much has no reason to sell. They know they can make more money off of such a famous brand than anyone is willing to pay for the rights. They are more likely to shelve D&D as an RPG entirely and bring it out only once a decade for a movie licensing deal than they would be to sell it.

A bunch of indie publishers banding together to buy it from Hasbro is an impossibility.

 

[Stormonu]

Oh, throw enough money at them, and I'm sure they'll sell. I doubt they'd even miss it if someone offered as much or more than they're raking in - say about 5 years of revenue. I doubt anyone at Hasbro corporate much even acknowledges D&D's existance or value - probably less than a blip on the radar.

But I think we're discussing in the tens of millions here, at least (though probably less than 50). I don't think the 3PP publishers, even in their hey-day could spare that much - even with a kickstarter. And then, who is going to sheperd it? Certainly anyone who paid in is going to want a stake in how it's handled henceforth. Would OGL become the standard D&D, like the ANSI standard for computers?

I'd love to see D&D back in the hands of a publisher the size of Paizo or Green Ronin, but I fear it is a pipe dream unless the government steps in and starts breaking up corporations (which honestly, I'd like to see, but many are international and I don't think any one government could break 'em up nowadays).

 

[CasvalRemDeikun]

The thing is, D&D makes money year after year, probably in the range of 20-30 million dollars, but a sizeable chunk of change. EVERY YEAR. Meaning the outside buyer would have to make a pretty hefty offer in order for 30 mil minus operations costs every year to be acceptable to lose. It would probably be at least 100 million dollars when it was all said and done. Hasbro bought WotC in its entirety for $325 million in 2000. If D&D constituted even a third of that, it would be around $125 million to buy it now. That is well beyond what the indie publishers could muster, even IF Hasbro was selling.

 

[the Jester]

I wonder how much it would cost to buy the D&D intellectual property outright.

More money than the entire rest of the RPG industry has.

This.

Plus, Hasbro wouldn't sell the game.

Sad but true. I'd say that, barring a Hasbro bankruptcy, there is literally zero chance of this ever happening.

Picture this: Paizo, Monte Cook, Green Ronin, Ryan Dancey, and Peter Adkinson, with the help of a massive Kickstarter, co-operate to make an offer to Hasbro.


This D&D Initiative:

• Owns the D&D brand and all its rule books, campaign settings, novels, magazine articles, board games, memorabilia, and other spin-offs; with the minor pen & paper RPG brands, such as Gamma World and d20 Modern, thrown in too.
• Simultaneously releases D&D Next and reissues Original D&D, BECMI/Rules Cyclopedia D&D, First Edition, Second Edition, Third Edition, and Fourth Edition.​
• Rebrands all Paizo, Monte Cook, and Green Ronin d20/OGL products as Dungeons & Dragons. Pathfinder RPG, True20, Arcana Evolved, and other related rules sets become iterations of D&D.
• Makes an easy-to-use license for 3rd Party D&D publications.
• Explicitly opens all D&D content for non-commercial purposes.
• All D&D/d20/OGL campaign settings and adventures from TSR, WotC, Paizo, Malhavoc, and Green Ronin are translated into each rules iteration.
• Perhaps operates as a game designer co-op, a sort of "CSG" (community supported gaming), which aims to provide a partial or full livelihood for many past, present, and future game designers and fantasy artists, where they may work in artistic freedom while receiving enough bread to live a modest life.
• Commissions work from all sorts of former TSR and WotC designers and artists, and other grognards, to make new material for all the D&D settings. For example, for Mystara: Bruce Heard, Aaron Allston, and Ann Dupuis.
• Enacts all the product suggestions in Mike Evan's petition for a content-provider publishing model.

So the little guys beg, borrow and scrape to do what bankrupted TSR by trying to support everything at once?

Your plan, while beautiful in a sort of "fan service" way (and boy would that be awesome!), is horribly impractical from a business perspective. Why would Paizo give up their position as the upstart industry maverick when it's doing them so well, for instance?

If anyone did manage to make Hasbro an offer they couldn't refuse for D&D, they would have to make it profitable in order to pay back the loans. Supporting every D&D evar with new print products is expensive and unlikely to pay off as well as focusing on a single line of stuff, perhaps with pdf sales of old material.

OTOH I could see an occasional old-skool release as a viable option, perhaps.

 

[Umbran]

Oh, throw enough money at them, and I'm sure they'll sell. I doubt they'd even miss it if someone offered as much or more than they're raking in - say about 5 years of revenue.

I expect you'd have to do better than that. Usually, a brand's value exceeds its revenue. See below...

I doubt anyone at Hasbro corporate much even acknowledges D&D's existance or value - probably less than a blip on the radar.

A company as large as Hasbro doesn't get to where it is by missing the details. The value may be small compared to other properties, but I'm sure they know what it is.

But I think we're discussing in the tens of millions here, at least (though probably less than 50).

"The brand" includes potential movie or TV rights. In potential, that's well over $50 million.

 

[Jacob Marley]

The thing is, D&D makes money year after year, probably in the range of 20-30 million dollars, but a sizeable chunk of change. EVERY YEAR. Meaning the outside buyer would have to make a pretty hefty offer in order for 30 mil minus operations costs every year to be acceptable to lose. It would probably be at least 100 million dollars when it was all said and done. Hasbro bought WotC in its entirety for $325 million in 2000. If D&D constituted even a third of that, it would be around $125 million to buy it now. That is well beyond what the indie publishers could muster, even IF Hasbro was selling.

I used 20-30M in revenues when I did my back-of-the envelope calculations. Assuming that the ratios are somewhat in line with Hasbro -- which is not a good assumption, but better than anything else we have -- I am getting a valuation of between 23M and 35M for the brand, probably higher. (With more information I could do a more thorough valuation.) I'd gather an offer to Hasbro would probably have to exceed that by a substantial margin.

Using the old sale figure is a huge mistake; too much has changed over the last thirteen years in both the economy as a whole and with WotC and Hasbro in particular. (Remember, in 2000 Lehman Brothers was worth $145 a share! How's that valuation today? ) Specific to WotC, in 1999 the company was producing Pokémon at the height of that game's popularity. I'd bet dollars to donuts that the cash flow generated by Pokémon was a major (if not the major) contributer to the 1999 WotC valuation.