WotC D&D Gets A New Division At Hasbro

Hasbro is reorganizing and giving tabletop gaming -- Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: the Gathering -- a higher priority.

According to the Wall Street Journal, WotC's revenue last year was $816 million (a 24% increase on 2019). Brian Goldner, Hasbro's Chief Executive, says WotC is predicted to double revenue from 2019 to 2023.

Hasbro is dividing into three 'units' -- Consumer Products (toys, classic board games); Entertainment (film, TV, licensing); and Wizards & Digital (WotC plus digital licensing).

Hasbro bought WotC in 1999 for about $325M.

WSJ News Exclusive | Dungeons & Dragons Gets a Bigger Role at Hasbro

Toy maker Hasbro is reorganizing to capitalize on a pandemic-fueled boom in old-school tabletop games, creating a separate division around the publisher of Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering.

www.wsj.com

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

And while everyone here carries on/rants about AAA games and digital stuff, DDO (D&D Online) is currently celebrating the 15th anniversary of it's release.

 

[Zardnaar]

And while everyone here carries on/rants about AAA games and digital stuff, DDO (D&D Online) is currently celebrating the 15th anniversary of it's release.

It exists but not that many people actually play it.

Server Population & Player Count - MMO Populations

World of Warcraft player count, server population, subscribers and game activity stats (aka wow).

mmo-population.com

D&DO around 32000 players a day.

Number 60.

That's what I'm saying WotC can spin it all they like but in terms of games D&D outside the RPG itself is a minnow.

That's not to say it can't be done or whatever more to say here's reality and that big hill to climb.

 

[Urriak Uruk]

I'm not sure if Star Citizen is.
1. A game.

2. A scam.

3. An example of crowd funding gone mad.

4. All of the above.

Matt Colville raves about it, and plays it a lot. But it does seem like Elite: Dangerous or even EVE: Online with more, largely extraneous, features.

 

[Zardnaar]

Matt Colville raves about it, and plays it a lot. But it does seem like Elite: Dangerous or even EVE: Online with more, largely extraneous, features.

Hey whatever floats his boat. I played the original Elite and Freelancer all those years ago.
All I know about EVE is stories about the goonswarm.

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

It exists but not that many people actually play it.

Server Population & Player Count - MMO Populations

World of Warcraft player count, server population, subscribers and game activity stats (aka wow).

mmo-population.com

D&DO around 32000 players a day.

Number 60.

That's what I'm saying WotC can spin it all they like but in terms of games D&D outside the RPG itself is a minnow.

That's not to say it can't be done or whatever more to say here's reality and that big hill to climb.

Maybe. But there is still content being generated for it. I was looking at it and they are wrapping up an expansion dealing with the Feywild and later this year there will be Saltmarsh content. So they are still making enough money from it to keep things running, while adding new content.

 

[Urriak Uruk]

Hey whatever floats his boat. I played the original Elite and Freelancer all those years ago.
All I know about EVE is stories about the goonswarm.

They all look pretty boring to me. Star Citizen seems like less a scam, and more a person who has no interest in deadlines and loves scope creep managing the whole enterprise. And those limits matter, otherwise you end up waiting years for something that's underwhelming.

 

[Zardnaar]

Maybe. But there is still content being generated for it. I was looking at it and they are wrapping up an expansion dealing with the Feywild and later this year there will be Saltmarsh content. So they are still making enough money from it to keep things running, while adding new content.

As I said it exists and presumably makes bank.

AAA is generally millions or tens of millions of players/sales. In the digitel realm D&D's basically nothing outside VTTs. They're not starting from scratch but it's been 20 odd years since you had some big hits and the last game was a dud.

The brand name alone isn't enough to cover a dud.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I don't think the entire rpg industry gets 100 million in revenue let alone profit. Less than 70 million iirc not that long ago.

People here get excited because they bought an obscure game studio.

The big companies own multiple studios and 3-4 of them might work on the same game.

IIRC Ubisoft has 7 of them just for Assassin's Creed.

That's the scale I'm talking about and one can compare directly to D&D's digital offererings. They're minnows in a very large pond is the main point. That's what a AAA game is. They might have a single studio develop the DLC alone and that DLC is the same size as a few full games.

AC Odyssey DLC took me 50 hours for two of them.

Remember that he BG3 trailer how it looked bad?

This a AAA title. 3 years old. Yes the game looks like this.

BG3 could be a big hit, graphics not everything but right here right now that's the standard they're hitting.

Coming up to 4 year old game. Same franchise.


That's what you can do with hundreds of millions of dollars.

Yeah, like I said, you're stuck in the past, and you both think that the AC games are more impressive than they are (I mean, dude, sorry but neither Odyssey nor Origins are particularly unusually good-looking games, and most of their "content" is just practically procedurally-generated junk - I say that with love, but it's true). BG3 is barely an AAA game, I'm not sure it even is. Larian are an AA company, not an AAA one. They've upstaffed, but I'm not sure they're spending quite enough to make it AAA. Maybe with all the money they get from Early Access they'll get there. By the way though, sneering about how BG3 looks is pretty silly given it's in the equivalent of alpha. It's not being paid for by WotC either, so I'm confused as to why you think it's relevant.

I don't know when "not long ago" is, but D&D has sometimes like 5x as many players now, in 2021, as it used to. That's at a minimum (assuming the same sort of player/DM/book ratio at least, no reason to think otherwise), 5x as profitable (given the relevant business model - not all business models would work out that way) as D&D previously was.

 

[Zardnaar]

Yeah, like I said, you're stuck in the past, and you both think that the AC games are more impressive than they are (I mean, dude, sorry but neither Odyssey nor Origins are particularly unusually good-looking games, and most of their "content" is just practically procedurally-generated junk - I say that with love, but it's true). BG3 is barely an AAA game, I'm not sure it even is. Larian are an AA company, not an AAA one. They've upstaffed, but I'm not sure they're spending quite enough to make it AAA. Maybe with all the money they get from Early Access they'll get there. By the way though, sneering about how BG3 looks is pretty silly given it's in the equivalent of alpha. It's not being paid for by WotC either, so I'm confused as to why you think it's relevant.

AAA games are mostly budget and how many people play them, perceived quality doesn't matter.

Eg Call of Duty love it or hate it it's AAA.

Hopefully Larian turns in something good. A D&D game worth playing would be unusual.

 

[macloud]

BuT HaSbRo Is GoiNG tO SeLL WoTc.

One should think this ought to put those silly rumors to rest.

Admittedly i thought they were gonna at most transfer it over to Avalon hill, so as to roll boards games and rpgs into one department.

But sell it? hell no, hasbro aint letting this cash cow go ever.