D&D General No, Hasbro Is Not Selling D&D

Disney could afford it, but any whiff of open gaming would be gone in a heartbeat, and they might even start going after small RPG companies. That would be no good at all. Ditto any other major media company.

The perhaps one exception would maybe be Microsoft, if they really wanted to break into the tabletop space for some reason (but they don't). They've been better actors in recent years than they used to be. I still wouldn't count on it being good overall, though. We'd probably get some amazing D&D video games and they'd just dump the whole tabletop side in the trash after the first bad quarter.

Staffan said:

I think there are companies I'd rather see in charge of D&D than Hasbro/Wizards. I also think there are very few companies who could drive up to Hasbro with a big enough dump truck full of money to buy it off them. And the intersection between those two sets is non-existent.

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Of the companies that could actually afford to purchase the D&D IP, if one of those companies were to do so, I suspect those that have gripes with Wizards & Hasbro stewardship would be...further disappointed in the results.

I guess here almost everybody agrees about what is not happen, other threat would be about what would like to happen.

Now I am thinking about Tencent creating its own fantasy multiverse, different titles within the same franchise. Like this they can save money with the promotion. Tencent, like others, would rather to start from zero to have complete creative control. Even they could create a fantasy cinematic universe, I mean action-live productions.

We are watching lay off in several companies, and I talk about among the biggest megacorporations. It is a bad momment to speculate about future mergers or acquisitions.

* If it a fake new by fault of an AI... Should this to be fired? But if this happen... could this type of actions to cause in the future the rebellion of the machines?

Abstruse said:

YouTube channel Dungeon Masterpiece also claims that the entire story was faked. Ignoring the clickbait video title

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No. He regularly relies on clickbait. He needs to knock it off and his clickbait content shouldn't be promoted.

CleverNickName said:

Wait... you can just reach out and ask when you hear a rumor on the internet, and you want to check if it's true or not?

This changes everything.

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I don't want anyone to get sued, but the traditional bottom line for legit journalists in the US and many other countries is the threat of lawsuits for irresponsible reporting. Proving damages because of a stupid YouTube video would be challenging, but it'd probably just take one well-publicized case of a clickbait YouTuber getting sued off the platform to calm everyone down for a while.

In any case, this is a good reminder to not make YouTube or Tiktok or Snapchat or Instagram your primary news source for anything. Look at the reporting from people who are, essentially, putting their financial lives on the line when they report the news. It won't make them perfect, but it puts some important guard rails in place.

Timespike said:

I mean, if we're talking about "I just got three wishes from a genie and have to spend them on the TTRPG industry" scenarios, I'd love to see everything about D&D in the public domain. Rules, settings, characters, everything. It will never happen. Like "the universe will literally experience heat death first" levels of never.

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Steamboat Willie is in the public domain now, so I wouldn't say never. I do think very few people on this board will live to see it happen, though.

jgsugden said:

Last estimate I heard for BG3 sales was 6 million copies. At $60 or $70 per copy, that would be ... far less than 1bn in US Dollars. I hear lifetime total sales for OS 2 was about the same. Lifetime they may have $1Bn overall all their titles.

Does anyone have data contradicting that?

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Those figures are obviously not correct. Where did you get them? I can't find anything like that Googling.

We don't know the exact figures but we know enough to dismiss 6m entirely.

The Belgian embassy (!!!) said it sold 5m copies at PC launch last year (presumably including the Early Access ones). So you'd be claiming that they've only sold 1m copies in the seven months since, despite having since released on PS5 and Xbox? BG3 sat at between second and fourth on Steam bestsellers for that entire period, only dropping down the list when Palworld and some others arrived this month. Note that DOS2, which you seem to think had the same sales, was only briefly in the Steam top 10 (comparatively), so that seems like a very poor comparison. And the market is a lot larger now for CRPGs than it was when DOS2 came out (and for videogames in general!).

They seem to have sold 9.8m copies on Steam as of mid-September though, though I'm trying to find the exact source for this.

As of October, VG Insights estimated "over 10m" on Steam and they now estimate 13.4m, and SteamSpy estimated 21-22m on Steam as of December (but SteamSpy is often pretty high). Other analysts generally put them between 10-12m late last year on Steam alone.

Until Larian release figures, if they ever do, we won't know, but frankly there's no realistic possibility it sold less than 10m copies and likely quite a lot more than that. Furthermore, it's likely to keep selling. DOS2, which you were using as a comparison, sold 700k copies at launch (considered high at the time), but kept selling for a very long time, so reached $6m to $7.5m (the latter figure was implied by Swen) by some time before the release of BG3. If the same ratio (taking the 6m figure you supplied re: DOS2) applied to BG3 (it probably won't, but you wanted to compare), the launch sales were 5m, so we'd expect the sales over 6 years to be 8.5x that, or over 42 million.

That seems laughable until you remember The Witcher 3 sold over 50m copies over a slightly longer period (8 years).

Realistically I suspect it's somewhere in the 12m-18m range right now, but it could be a lot higher, and it can't be much lower than 10m just from the Steam sales. I suspect when Larian start marketing whatever game comes after BG3, they'll mention actual figures then. Be unsurprised if they were 30m in say 5 years. Higher if it gets an expansion.

Osgood said:

Plus it's noting that Larian doesn't get the whole $60 from each sale either. Steam, Amazon, or whoever sold the game gets a their cut, and there's overhead and the development costs. I have no idea what they make from each sale. Anyone know? $20 $10? Less? Nothing to sneeze at, but I doubt it's lets buys D&D and get into a whole new type of industry (publishing) money!

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We're talking revenue figures, not how much the company actually gets, because the reduction is similar for most companies and those figures are more fiddly to work with.

Steam takes 30%, the rest goes directly to Larian though some percentage goes to WotC (unlikely to be more than 5%*). Most other storefronts take similar amounts to Steam except Epic which takes less.

So no, the era of companies getting only $20 or $10 from game sales is long over, ancient history. That's never been true for digital. That was what was happening when games were $40-$50 and physical only, and particularly when they were on expensive to manufacture cartridges.

* = But whatever it was, it was enough that it seems to be the reason why WotC's "digital licenced games" income went up from $76m to $133m.

DarkCrisis said:

Troll Lord Games keeps posting about it on Twitter and it just makes them look bad / petty. Im actually surprised they went this route. I never got they had it out for WotC.

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It's disappointing, but I think it's hard for people who don't publish games to understand how badly betrayed publishers felt by the OGL crisis. Some of these companies, like Troll Lords, spent decades publishing RPGs with the understanding that the OGL, even if they didn't actively use it, provided enough legal cover for everyone to go about their own business in peace.

If, last January, you suddenly woke up worrying about bankruptcy and losing your house (and possibly your marriage as a result, statistically speaking), it wouldn't be surprising if emotions remained a bit raw.

Another rumor probably created by people that dislike hasbro blah blah blah. It would be in better hands with another company blah etc. sorry but I highly doubt it. If there was they could bought out another Ip and turned it into the new better stuff.

We had a "Hasbro is looking to sell WotC!!" in 2020, and I'm quite certain there were another one around 2017. It's a recurring click-bait by now.

And I don't think I've heard of Hasbro selling an IP ever — if it's not profitable for now they'll shut it down and let it rest for ten to fifteen years before dusting it of for something new. The only way you'd get a new D&D home is by someone buying Hasbro — and from where I am we really don't need bigger conglomerates — or it going bankrupt and have to sell things off.