WotC Hasbro Bets Big on D&D

During today's 'Hasbro Fireside Chat', Hasbro's Chris Cocks, chief executive officer, and Cynthia Williams, president of Wizards of the Coast and Digital Gaming mentioned D&D, and about betting big on its name. This was in addition to the Magic: The Gathering discussion they held on the same call.

The following are rough notes on what they said.

D&D Beyond

• Leaning heavily on D&D Beyond
• 13 million registered users
• Give them more ways to express their fandom
• Hired 350 people last year
• Low attrition

What’s next for D&D

• Never been more popular
• Brand under-monetized
• Excited about D&D Beyond possibilities
• Empower accessibility and development of the user base.
• Data driven insight
• Window into how players are playing
• Companion app on their phone
• Start future monetization starting with D&D Beyond
• DMs are 20% of the audience but lions share of purchases
• Digital game recurrent spending for post sale revenue.
• Speed of digital can expand, yearly book model to include current digital style models.
• Reach highly engaged multigenerational fans.
• Dungeons and Dragons has recognition, 10 out of 10
• Cultural phenomenon right now.
• DND strategy is a broad four quadrant strategy
• Like Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings or Marvel
• New books and accessories, licensed game stuff, and D&D Beyond
• Huge hopes for D&D

What is success for the D&D Movie

• First big light up oppourtunity for 4th quadrant
• Significant marketing
• They think it’ll have significant box office
• It has second most viewed trailer at Paramount, only eclipsed by Transformers
• Will be licensed video games, some on movies
• Then follow up other media, TV, other movies, etc.
• Bullish on D&D.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

I'm glad I've banned phones at my table. Too distracting for players. I just hope that the ones buying green hair for their online mini will finance products I'll be interested in. I fear it won't be the case (but I am willing to buy pdfs).

 

[darjr]

Okay, I'll bite: what falsehoods are being made, and how are they self-serving?

Click bait is self serving.

Edited: mod note below.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I certainly agree that they could be making a lot more money with D&D, but there are many means to do so. Licensing, random merch, animation, live action, cosplay materials, events, marketing events, toys, posters, clothes, manga, video games, etc.

Books, maybe.

Licensing is probably the safest avenue for gains vs. risk. Tons of creatives out there who would love to make something along the lines of Vermintide.

Licensing is definitely under-utilized and easy way to open up the money faucet, although obviously, you need a responsible person controlling the tap.

Given their forays into online presentations, I wouldn't be surprised if they had a for-pay online convention experience at some point. I really, really enjoy playing online at GenCon Online, but have found the WotC organized online play to be a confusing mess with too few opportunities to really play with other people. I would 100% participate in online games more if WotC offered a better way to connect with gamers and could guarantee an experience at lest as good as GenCon Online delivers. (Everyone pays a nominal fee to play, which means very few players flake out and most of them, over the dozen or so games I've played in the last three years, play well with others.)

 

[overgeeked]

If DMs are 20%, that is 1 DM for every 4 players, unless you are counting the DM as a player as well (which, they are, I guess).

Yes, exactly.

Maybe they are basing this off the standard play expectation?

That would be an incredibly terrible assumption on their part.

 

[Umbran]

The only thing that makes sense to me is that some people have a desire to protect the companies they like from criticism (similar to how they would for family members), which I can understand even if I don't agree with it.

Mod Note:
If you are going to stoop to accusing folks of being fanboys, or otherwise not being as reasonable as you are, you can leave this discussion now. Because a repeat will get you tossed.

That goes for everyone - treat each other with respect, or take a hike. Taking your fears and frustrations out on fellow gamers is not acceptable.

 

[pukunui]

Fancy 3d dice with roll physics to toss around on the mobile app? Character sheet skins? Digital miniatures to use on the VTT? Some kind of character/world organizer?

The dice are already a thing. The others seem reasonable enough. I’m just not seeing how they can ruin DDB with micro-transactions.

 

[Incenjucar]

I'd actually really love to see some D&D Edutainment experiments, even a sanitized mini-setting to go with it so parents don't have to worry about kids running into detailed descriptions of rot grub attacks while learning the algebra behind barbarians.

 

[jmartkdr2]

What does the "4 quadrants" stuff refer to? I assume that's some sort of two-axis plot or something?

In movie marketing, the axes are gender and older/younger (the cutoff being 35 years old)

 

[Steel_Wind]

Microtransactions?

Yeah, they are there in DDB if you want to purchase just small pieces of content, here and there.

From my perspective, I switched from a game of PF1 and PF2 (where all of my players had purchased PDFs and often physical books) over to 5e, where only a few players had a 5e PHB.

So I bought a bunch of stuff on DDB and shared it with my players after paying the subscription fee to do that. My guess is that they see an untapped market of money there. How they will achieve that is unknown. It might be fore extra on DDB or via VTT -- it might be a simple charge of $5 per 6 months to be able to RECEIVE books shared via subscription.

I guess we'll see in the fullness of time.

 

[darjr]

I'm not a big fan of the dice. Nor the backgrounds of sheets or the character frames.

While I wouldn't mind them doing more of that, I'd mostly ignore it. Other than what they are doing now on dndbeyond I'm not sure what else they could do.

Mini's? OK maybe. But I'm not a fan of the 3d tabletop anyway. I get tokens now via avrae. Will I get the mini's for an adventure? A generic set? This area leaves me with a lot of questions.