D&D 5E Hasbro Acquires D&D Beyond For $146M

D&D owner WotC and D&D Beyond have announced that the online tools platform is being acquired by WotC. DDB’s (former) owner was Fandom, which acquired it in 2018, and which also acquired the Cortex Prime TTRPG system recently. Fandom is producing a range of licensed games using the Cortex Prime system starting with the recent Tales of Xadia: The Dragon Prince RPG. Several DDB core staff...

D&D owner WotC and D&D Beyond have announced that the online tools platform is being acquired by WotC.

DDB’s (former) owner was Fandom, which acquired it in 2018, and which also acquired the Cortex Prime TTRPG system recently. Fandom is producing a range of licensed games using the Cortex Prime system starting with the recent Tales of Xadia: The Dragon Prince RPG. Several DDB core staff members and founders moved on to other projects last year.


This move has been widely expected for some time. The purchase figure being circulated is $146 million. By comparison, when WotC purchased then-D&D owner TSR in 1997, it did so for $25M. Hasbro later purchased WotC for $325M.

D&D Beyond was created in 2017 by Curse LLC, a company owned by Twitch. Fandom purchased Curse in 2018. WotC will be the third owner of the platform.

In other news, back in November WotC applied for a trademark for 'Atomic Arcade' for a variety of electronic gaming applications, and earlier in the year, rumours spread regarding WotC’s plans for its own virtual tabletop platform (VTT) following a survey in which they gauged opinions and allegedly showed off graphically rich 3D screenshots.

313AEE52-8192-48E9-95E8-B1B620185508.jpeg



Hasbro, Inc. (NASDAQ: HAS) today announced that it is acquiring D&D Beyond, the leading digital toolset and game companion for the Company’s groundbreaking fantasy franchise, DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, from Fandom. Fandom, the world’s largest fan platform, has owned and operated D&D Beyond since 2019 and has grown the direct-to-consumer business to be the leading role-playing game (RPG) digital toolset on the market with close to 10 million registered users. This strategic acquisition, for $146.3 million in cash, will further strengthen Hasbro’s capabilities in the fast-growing digital tabletop category while also adding veteran talents to the Wizards of the Coast team and accelerating efforts to deliver exceptional experiences for fans across all platforms.

Since 2017, D&D Beyond has helped to power DUNGEONS & DRAGONS tabletop play and deliver the brand's eighth consecutive year of growth in 2021. Over the last three years, the royalty paid to Hasbro by D&D Beyond has represented a significant contribution to the fastest growing source of revenue for DUNGEONS & DRAGONS. The strategic acquisition of D&D Beyond will deliver a direct relationship with fans, providing valuable, data-driven insights to unlock opportunities for growth in new product development, live services and tools, and regional expansions. As part of Wizards, the brand’s leadership will soon be able to drive a unified, player-centric vision of the world’s greatest role-playing game on all platforms.

“The acquisition of D&D Beyond will accelerate our progress in both gaming and direct to consumer, two priority areas of growth for Hasbro, providing immediate access to a loyal, growing player base,” said Chris Cocks, Hasbro Chief Executive Officer. “Hasbro’s gaming portfolio is among the largest and most profitable in the industry, and we continue to make strategic investments to grow our brands, including in digital.”

“This is the perfect next step for the talented D&D Beyond team, who built a transformative digital product that engaged and delighted millions of D&D fans around the world,” said Perkins Miller, CEO of Fandom. “We can't wait to see what this team will do next as an integral part of the D&D franchise, and I look forward to investing in more brands and products to super serve Fandom’s 300 million+ global fans.”

“D&D Beyond has been one of our most valuable partners in the digital space for the past six years and we’re excited to bring their best-in-class talent onto our team,” said Cynthia Williams, President of Wizards of the Coast and Digital Gaming. “The team at D&D Beyond has built an incredible digital platform, and together we will deliver the best-possible DUNGEONS & DRAGONS experience for players around the world.”

Hasbro’s continued investment in Wizards of the Coast’s digital growth for its two iconic franchises, DUNGEONS & DRAGONS and MAGIC: THE GATHERING, is representative of the significant opportunity in PC and mobile gaming, an industry that represented over 3 billion players globally and $129 billion in revenue in 20211. With the launch of Magic: The Gathering Arena on PC in 2019 and on mobile in 2021, Wizards has built a unique ecosystem of best-in-class tabletop and digital play to create deeper player engagement and satisfaction and grow revenue across all expressions and regions. Similarly, with more than 80% of DUNGEONS & DRAGONS fans having already played the game virtually in 2021, aided by online digital platforms such as D&D Beyond, this acquisition accelerates the game’s ability to penetrate new markets, gather valuable consumer insights and provide players with the best DUNGEONS & DRAGONS experience on all platforms.

The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and the receipt of certain regulatory approvals, and is expected to close during the second or third quarter of 2022. The transaction will be funded out of cash on hand and is expected to be immaterial to revenue and earnings per share in 2022 and accretive to earnings per share in fiscal year 2023 and beyond. The transaction has been approved by both Hasbro’s and Fandom’s Boards of Directors.


 

log in or register to remove this ad

ECMO3

Hero
I can't see this as anything but good news. This gives more support to the D&D Beyond, which could give it the boost that it was desperately in need of (having tons of unfinished updates to the tool that have been planned for years), will pave the way for an official VTT that can be integrated with D&D Beyond,
Foundry and Roll20 (and maybe others?) are already integrated into DNDB.

It is not oging to be good for other VTTs I don't think, and I am not sure DNDB can pull off a great VTT.

Roll20 and Foundary are both awesome. But on closer examination - If you look at Roll20 - it is simple, very simple, essentially a blank sheet, Using Roll20 is as simple as pulling a blank character sheet out of the boxed set. Foundary is much more complex, but it is also crowdsourced and mostly freeware. I am not sure a corporate-driven product will measure up to either of them.
 

log in or register to remove this ad


SkidAce

Legend
Supporter
Shrink wrap exists.
LOL!!! I laugh not at you, but at the effectiveness of shrinkwrap.

I work at Barnes and Noble. I cant keep shrink wrap on things. Customers feel it some type of "right" to open and view content. Some steal collectables bundled with books, some think the bar code on the shrink wrap is the alarm device, and rip it off, others photograp the pages they want.

Now, this is not all customers, but enough that I have a pile of shrink wrap, empty cardboard mystery boxes, open MTG packs etc by the end of the day.

So in the end, I don't oppose the idea of print+digital, just that shrink wrap won't be what's solving the issue.
 

SkidAce

Legend
Supporter
Many new books are sold in shrinkwrap at the bookstore. I actually much prefer buying shrink wrapped books. Also, there are countless streamers and bloggers who get advance copies of the books and can browse them for the public.
I approached a customer once who opened a shrinkwrapped item, viewed it, then picked up an unopened one for purchase.

Refused to buy the one they had opened.
 

tetrasodium

Legend
Supporter
Epic
There's the Bits and Mortar program that many companies at least used to be involved with. I don't know the status of it now - it's been a while since I've bought a non-D&D book that wasn't used or just a digital copy or purchased as a pre-order or as part of a kickstarter.

That is a way they could do it - exclusive to hobby stores. It would probably irritate the folks who buy their books on Amazon tho.
I've used it a bunch of times with fate books a few years back & never had issues, o'rielly (tech book publisher not fox news host) had something similar with the isbn at one point too I think. Pretty much take a picture of you your book & receipt to get a pdf download code/link & it was always funny how it completely shut down casual piracy with a veneer of "oh I bought the pdf" claim since that was such BS it practically insulted the people asking bob where his book was.
Foundry and Roll20 (and maybe others?) are already integrated into DNDB.

It is not oging to be good for other VTTs I don't think, and I am not sure DNDB can pull off a great VTT.

Roll20 and Foundary are both awesome. But on closer examination - If you look at Roll20 - it is simple, very simple, essentially a blank sheet, Using Roll20 is as simple as pulling a blank character sheet out of the boxed set. Foundary is much more complex, but it is also crowdsourced and mostly freeware. I am not sure a corporate-driven product will measure up to either of them.
The API DDB has to let that work was never actually made public. Sure it existed & worked but it was always use at your own risk. wotc could make changes to it or put some kind of auth on the API that locked out anything using it at any time without the slightest hurdle
 

Honestly, I hope they shake the sugar (ahem) out of the dev team.

They're godawful, and have been getting worse, and worse, and worse for nearly three years. Before that they were actually improving, gradually. Have you been following the development? It's slowed to almost nothing, and it's been largely features that are either monetized junk, or that nobody was asking for being added, whilst basic stuff, that's in actual rulebooks, is written off as "too hard to implement" - for literally years.

I profoundly hope WotC kick them very hard in the bottom about that.

But yes I am happy we probably don't have to worry about product support. That was always a good reason to hope/expect WotC would buy this too.
I agree, look how long it took them to integrate a die roller and a player app. My biggest fear was losing all of that material when D&D 2024 rolls out. This, this I like.
 


Interesting read .

this part jumps out to me
And finally, the amount of data that Wizards now has access to has increased by magnitudes. This is the largest thing from the purchase that we shouldn’t discount. For the first time in history, a TTRPG company will both create a system and run a platform that millions of people use the system with. Just from the Beyond purchase, Wizards gains a lot of data on how 5e is played. Which classes and subclasses are used more often? What are the most popular monsters to throw at players? How long does average sessions runs for? How many players there typically are in a party? The level of insight they now have into how people actually play 5e is insane. It’s something that will only increase over time as they work towards a fully fledged VTT.
 

Maxperson

Morkus from Orkus
I could see WOTC buying out a VTT and then doing a closer integration between it and DndBeyond. With Roll20 for example, I can use Beyond20 to integrate the two. WOTC owning both could just set up an internal API to make it smoother. Or they could open up and license the API of course.

Hard to say what will happen, I'm just glad we have some decent tools that look like they will continue to be supported even if they aren't perfect.
Isn't Dndbeyond working pretty closely with Foundry right now?
 

Maxperson

Morkus from Orkus
Nobody has yet cracked the puzzle of how to make a physical book that gives access to digital content, where the codes for that can't be easily stolen, so I doubt that'll happen.
They could do it the way MtG did their Mana Vault cards back in the day. You had to buy the book and tear out the page that gave you the free card and mail it back. If you had to physically remove the code and mail it to WotC in order to receive the digital content, it would be harder to steal.
 

Remove ads

Remove ads

Top