D&D 5E According to the Hasbro Q1 earning call D&D sales are up substantially.

[cbwjm]

Not all that surprising, they've just recently released the revised version of 5e.

 

[Imaro]

Some I interesting speculation up thread.

As for the results. If releasing 3 big deluxe corebooks for the most popular edition in the game’s history did not lead to a spike in revenue it would be a disaster. So they have avoided disaster.

And yet somehow this is exactly what many opportunistic youtubers and dissatisfied forum goers claimed was happening... a disaster.

 

[FrogReaver]

yep, that works, 462.1 - 316.3 for WotC + Digital makes for a 46% increase. If we take that 143.8 increase as 46, then the Tabletop's 115.6 increase comes out to 37, i.e. its contribution to the overall 46% increase. Nice, so that resolves the % values.


works for me, makes calculating the D&D portion harder, but that is no reason not to accept it. The surprising thing to me is that Wizards Digital barely grew (or is very small in comparison to print and thus only contributed 1 to the 46 while print contributed 37 of the 46). Given that WotC said that D&D sales are 60% DDB these days, that would have to mean that MtG sells a metric ton of cards but does not get much revenue from Arena.

In any case, that means that most of the Digital + License growth was in licensing, which also matches the WotC chart where it contributed 8 to the 46, so that too appears to work out.


makes sense. So these are the numbers we have available

	March 30, 2025	March 31, 2024	% Change
Tabletop Gaming	343.8	228.2	51%
Digital and Licensed Gaming	118.3	88.1	34%
MtG	346.3	237.9	46%
Net revenues	462.1	316.3	46%

That also confirms the 'MtG is split across Tabletop and Digital' part - and makes calculating D&D growth more complicated. To me the surprise is that print grew a lot but digital remained flat (most of WotC's non-print growth came from licensing if you look at the WotC breakdown)

Given that digital is essentially flat, let's focus on print and try some ratios between MtG and D&D to see what we get

Ratio (MtG : D&D)	Formula	D&D %
5:1	0.83 * 1.46 + 0.17 * x = 1.51	75%
4:1	0.8 * 1.46 + 0.2 * x = 1.51	71%
3:1	0.75 * 1.46 + 0.25 * x = 1.51	66%

Which would be pretty impressive print growth, the surprise is that digital does not seem to show anywhere near similar growth. Harder to figure out because Arena and Licensing 'dilute' the numbers we have

My guess is digital is flat because of project sigil.

 

[The Soloist]

it’s definitely a bump as you have people ‘upgrading’ in addition to the new players coming in that D&D always had. What the numbers will look like after the upgrade phase, no one knows, they could stay higher than the 2014 ‘baseline’ due to continued growth or not. We won’t know for at least two years imo

What it certainly isn’t is D&D dying right now

If the Anti-Wotc-D&D YouTubers say it's just a bump, when they talked about a slump a few weeks ago, that would put them in the same category as astrologers.

 

[mamba]

My guess is digital is flat because of project sigil.

that certainly did not help, but if people buy 50% more printed books, why do people not also buy more of them on DDB?

Ultimately we cannot say whether contributing 1 to the 46% growth means it did not grow or whether digital did grow but is that much smaller compared to print. That could be an explanation too, but in that case the disparity would need to be on the MtG side as Hasbro said that DDB accounts for 60% of D&D sales in the previous report.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

But we should remember thanks D&D-Beyond the 3PPs can be sold to other countires when they physical books aren't sent to the shops.

Other point is the new edition of the classic dungeon-crawling tabletop board game "Hero Quest" is being a great success, maybe even better than the original, and my opinion is this detail is very important because thanks HQ lots of new players were intitiated into the TTRPGs. Said with other words, the good sales of HQ will be a great help for the D&D brand.

 

[occam]

My guess is digital is flat because of project sigil.

But the numbers we're discussing are just revenue; they don't include costs. Sigil brought no revenue, and any costs it may have incurred don't affect gross revenue. So the small growth in Digital still seems fairly mysterious.

My guess is still that Digital includes more stuff than we're thinking about, things other than DDB and Arena, and that revenues weakened there to counter the presumed growth that DDB and Arena were likely to have seen.

 

[GreyLord]

But the numbers we're discussing are just revenue; they don't include costs. Sigil brought no revenue, and any costs it may have incurred don't affect gross revenue. So the small growth in Digital still seems fairly mysterious.

My guess is still that Digital includes more stuff than we're thinking about, things other than DDB and Arena, and that revenues weakened there to counter the presumed growth that DDB and Arena were likely to have seen.

Exodus?

 

[bedir than]

But the numbers we're discussing are just revenue; they don't include costs. Sigil brought no revenue, and any costs it may have incurred don't affect gross revenue. So the small growth in Digital still seems fairly mysterious.

My guess is still that Digital includes more stuff than we're thinking about, things other than DDB and Arena, and that revenues weakened there to counter the presumed growth that DDB and Arena were likely to have seen.

they shuttered a rather low earner recently too - Dark Alliance

 

[Henadic Theologian]

If the Anti-Wotc-D&D YouTubers say it's just a bump, when they talked about a slump a few weeks ago, that would put them in the same category as astrologers.

Plato and other Platonists believed in Astrology, no need to look your nose down at people who do.