How much would D&D cost?

[Nightfall]

*shrugs* Maybe...but that's a pretty big if in my book Moogle.

 

[Steel_Wind]

And as Ari has mentioned, most of the multimedia rights to the brand are already tied up for several years.

Worse than that - they are not doing all that great either.

The entire PC side of gaming, generally, has been poor aside from MMOs. DDO has been a large disappointment in terms of sales and active subscriptions. NWN2 has done "ok" to good. It might develop "very good" over the long haul. I don't think it will match the first one in sales though.

And above all, there has yet to be a break out title on the console side for the brand.

Throw in the fact that Atari appears to be paying its creditors and has done a reverse split to save its NASDAQ listing, it looks like the electronic rights that looked like they might revert - don't appear to be doing that in the short term.

Put that all together and shoot from the hip? 20-30 million.

Buyer on the low - seller on the high.

If Atari went under and the electronic rights reverted, I would have said all bets are off - but DDO's poor performance really hurt the brand - a lot - in the short term. I'm not sure you'd see a huge bump in value now even if the rights reverted.

Happily - computer gaming has a short attention span. Two to four years time? A whole new world of possibilities.

 

[Nightfall]

Rob,

That is true. A few years can make all the difference. Look what happened with Ninetedo and Sega for instance. Or Sega and Sony?

 

[Firebeetle]

You don't have to buy D&D.

Thanks to the OGL, you can make your own company, using a credit card, and build your own RPG empire using the same set of basic rules.

Concepts:

Next Edition- Make 4th edition before WotC does! I'm not talking "little fixes", I'm talking making a better RPG.

MMORPG/tabletop compatable- A computer game where you can freely exchange your online character at the tabletop and back again. It can be done. Imagine printing out your WoW character, playing a session with your pals, then go to the computer with unique codes that tell the computer what happened to you during the session (like an RPGA AR.)

If you do it right, you can buy the D&D brand as an afterthought.

Having said that, I've had the same fantasy of winning the lottery and purchasing D&D. Monte Cook talked once about D&D being its own company, and it is an interesting idea. If D&D was "free" of Hasbro (which means it now has to pay for services Hasbro provides, like legal, and doesn't get innovations Hasbro provides, which lead to the "special recipe" for D&D miniatures) what would it do differently?

Here would be my plan.

Buy D&D
Buy Atari or other video game manufacturer
Buy rpgnow.com
Buy my own printer
Buy Paizo
Buy digital and media rights back
Then make 4th edition
Make an OGL, everything official is updated to the OGL after a year (or whatever the sales window is) Anything printed with OGL MUST be printed by my printer, or be sold via my online presence (rpgnow or Paizo). In other words, you can make it, but I get to sell it or print it.
Make a compatible computer game, one that kicks boo-tay over the competition.
With the success of the computer game, make a TV series and finally a movie on D&D brands.

Yes, there will be an anti-trust suit. That is what lawyers are for.

 

[RFisher]

I' d say it is SIGNIFICANTLY less than 30 million for D&D itself. The 30 Mill quote was for the entirety of WOTC, not the D&D brand.

That's assuming there's value in Wizards beyond the D&D brand. (^_^)

 

[Treebore]

I don't know about the D&D license, but you could probably buy all of hasbro for 640 million dollars (US). So I would guesstimate the D&D license at less than 50 million.

Formula for estimating purchase price of company: 1 year of profits times 5. 32 million in profits first quarter, so 128 million per year, times 5, equals 640 million possible purchase price.

So if you know how much profit Hasbro makes on the D&D line alone you can estimate it from there.

 

[Imruphel]

(snip) Formula for estimating purchase price of company: 1 year of profits times 5. 32 million in profits first quarter, so 128 million per year, times 5, equals 640 million possible purchase price. (snip)

In the current business climate, a multiple of 5 times would be too low. Try between 10 and 16 times. Remember there is an absolute surplus of capital chasing too few assets. Now is not the time to be a buyer except for an exceptional deal.

 

[Baby Samurai]

I think I'll ask my father to buy a large controlling share of WotC, and than go to town on a 4th edition where the game is finally balanced around "per encounter" instead of this assumed "4 encounters a day" malarkey.

 

[mmadsen]

Formula for estimating purchase price of company: 1 year of profits times 5.

That ratio, 5x, is not constant across all companies at all times. It assumes a certain growth rate and terminal value. A small, growing company might not have any earnings -- or might have negative earnings -- and a large, mature company in a dying industry might have tremendous earnings. The two would sell for very different multiples.

 

[lurkinglidda]

I don't know about the D&D license, but you could probably buy all of hasbro for 640 million dollars (US). So I would guesstimate the D&D license at less than 50 million.

Formula for estimating purchase price of company: 1 year of profits times 5. 32 million in profits first quarter, so 128 million per year, times 5, equals 640 million possible purchase price.

So if you know how much profit Hasbro makes on the D&D line alone you can estimate it from there.

The flaw in this logic is that 32mm in Q1 will be consistent across the whole year. Hasbro is by-and-large a toy company. When do toy companies make the bulk of their revenues? They rake in the cash at the same time that most retailers do: Holiday (ie, Q4 baby!). You'd want to look at all of the past four quarters to get a good idea of how Hasbro is doing.

However, WotC is primarily a hobby company. Hobbies are popular year-round. Following that line of thought, you'd have to think that WotC, and any successful brand it runs, probably means quite a bit to Hasbro, as it most likely evens out the troughs a toy company would otherwise see during the first nine months of the year. That would make the stock much prettier, n'est pas? I'd think you'd have to factor in the pretty factor into any selling price for D&D. Stockholders like pretty.

Following all of this, and assuming I might know something about the industry & company, I'd have to say a good selling price for D&D would be:

<insert visual of Dr. Evil here>

One millllion dollars! Muh-aha-ha-ha-ha!