RPG Evolution: The Dragons Come Home to Roost

D&D has long striven to be more than a game, but a brand. Thanks to the game's surge in popularity, those plans are coming to fruition.

Hasbro’s Strategy​

Hasbro’s association with the movie industry has long been a mutually beneficial relationship, in which toy sales surge with each new movie. Star Wars and Transformers are both examples of how Hasbro’s bottom line is impacted by the release of the latest film. Unfortunately, this strategy means Hasbro is reliant on third party schedules to produce revenue, and the pandemic highlighted just how much can go wrong with the complicated process of releasing a movie. No wonder the company wants its own intellectual property that it can monetize for movies and streaming.

This is why Hasbro's strategy has moved well beyond just producing toys and games. Hasbro divides their new approach into four quadrants: Toys & Games, Digital Gaming, Licensed Consumer Products, and Media (TV, Film, Digital Shorts, Emerging Media). Hasbro previously announced plans to execute on this four quadrant strategy with all of its licenses, including My Little Pony, Transformers, Magic: The Gathering, and Dungeons & Dragons. Some of those Media plans have been easier to execute than others, with Transformer movies running out of steam, the My Little Pony series winding down, and a Magic: The Gathering series yet to launch on streaming. That leaves D&D.

WOTC’s Strategy​

Wizards of the Coast has always struggled to justify its revenue goals for Dungeons & Dragons amidst high revenue brands like Magic: The Gathering. At one point, each division was given a goal of $100 million in annual sales, a number that was not reachable through tabletop gaming channels.

The solution was digital gaming. D&D tried several times to mimic the Massive Multi-Player Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) space, which it inadvertently spawned dating all the way back to Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) and Interactive Fiction (IF). The idea was that if the company could own a slice of that digital engagement dedicated to off-brand D&D, they could reach at least $50 million.

It didn’t work. WOTC never had enough resources, the right partners, or the technical know-how to effectively launch a digital ecosystem that would last longer than a few years. Then something surprising happened: D&D became more popular than all the other Hasbro brands combined.

The Dragons Take Over​

The passing of the previous Hasbro CEO created a power vacuum quickly filled by the staff shepherding D&D into the new age. The twin factors of the pandemic and streaming made D&D uniquely suited to a much wider audience, and it didn’t take long before WOTC was responsible for 72% of Hasbro’s total operating profit. In a very short period of time, WOTC went from a barely-mentioned division on Hasbro investor calls to the darling of the company, with CEO Chris Cocks taking the reins as Hasbro’s CEO in February 2022.

So what’s next? Sure enough, WOTC is executing on Hasbro's four quadrant plan for D&D. Let’s break it down:

• Media: The juggernaut most likely to influence the other three quadrants is the upcoming D&D movie. There have been many attempts at making D&D movies that have all been commercial failures. This time around feels different, if only because there was a legal battle waged through proxies on behalf of movie-making behemoths (Universal Studios vs. Warner Bros.) for D&D’s film rights. It’s clear they think there’s a lot of money to be made with a D&D movie. Unlike other movie launches, Hasbro is supporting the movie with the full force of its license. For an example of what this might look like, see the above picture of the D&D Advent Calendar. Speaking of which...
• Licensed Consumer Products: Advent calendars are interesting products because they can contain just about anything, but that thing has to be small. They also require a lot of creativity to produce, as 25 different items is a lot to put into one package. If the D&D advent calendar is any indication, we’re going to see a lot more of beholders, displacer beasts, mimics, owlbears, and gelatinous cubes. There are stylized, iconic images of each monster repeated across everything that’s in the calendar, including stickers, gift tags, pencils, and ornaments.
• Toys & Games: D&D is a game first and foremost, so the release of the next edition (an edition that requires playtesting but holds out the promise for backwards compatibility) is the obvious prime mover in this space. In addition to the aforementioned licenses, D&D toys are starting to show up in the wild. Egg Embry wrote an overview of just some of the D&D action figures available. We can expect a slew of monster toys too.
• Digital Gaming: The big news here is One D&D, which uses D&D Beyond as its base. With 13 million registered users, WOTC is banking on D&D Beyond as a base for propagating One D&D to the masses. For better or worse, this includes changes to the OGL with the likely plan to defragment any digital content that currently resides on third-party platforms. There has been several failed attempts at establishing a digital home base for D&D, so it’s really important they get this right.

Cocks has never hidden his digital ambitions for D&D, and now with the company’s full resources at his disposal, we’re about to see a four quadrant D&D plan in action. Hasbro and WOTC are all in on this plan, with the future edition of D&D, the D&D movie, and its reinvigorated digital platform all unified in an attempt to make D&D not just a game, but a brand expression.

Will it work? Perhaps the more relevant question for current D&D fans is ... what if it does?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I see that especially with older RPGs (often already have had many editions), like the recent versions of Shadowrun I also don't like, Pathfinder 2E I look at with "Meh!(tm)" eyes, the new World of Darkness RPGs (Vampire, Werewolf, etc.) feel like they threw it all in the washer and threw in a couple of bottles of bleach for good measure, the newer RPGs in the 40k universe also feel like 'less' then the previous versions, etc.

A lot of what you're writing made sense to me, even if I don't fully agree, but this doesn't make any sense at all. I have critiques of all those products, but yours feel like they're based on broad assumptions about them based on you not having read them to me. I mean:

1) Modern Shadowrun - The main issue is simply terrible rules and book writing/editing. Like abysmal. Nigel Findley could still be with us and writing all the lore and they'd still be D- or F grade RPG books because the rules and editing/writing are just THAT bad.

2) Pathfinder 2E - This is pretty great. It's hard to see how anyone could find major fault with the setting, editing, writing, or rules apart from complexity. If you thought 3E was fine, though, I can't see it, as it's south of 3.XE/PF1 in complexity, but still has very solid rules. And whilst I don't want to be a Golarion fan, I am sort of forced to be by how well-written and together the darned setting is. I don't think my group would be up for learning it because of the complexity, but if they were, I'd seriously consider it.

3) New World of Darkness, do you mean the nWoD from 2004 or the far more recent 5th edition? Because the nWoD was 18 years ago and is now basically deceased, so being mad about that seems well, at least a decade too late. The 5th edition there's plenty of hate, but bleached and washed?! Er what? The exact opposite problem has been a lot of the problem with the 5th edition. It's absolutely anything but that, for better or worse. Beyond that it has some pretty bad rules issues, and modern Hunter is just fundamentally conceptually flawed. But shiny and clean it ain't. nWoD maybe you could argue that, but man, 18 years ago and superceded by both 20th Anniversary edition oWoD (basically "3rd edition" of the oWoD, kind of pretending a lot of Revised just never happened and sticking closer to 2E, which I presume you like), which is still being made/added to, and 5th edition.

4) 40K RPGs - I mean, the key difference is the new ones have rules that work a lot better. Other than that I'm not seeing a lot of difference. Both are very accurate to the 40K setting. Neither make any particular sacrifices I'm aware of. I am not however a Space Marine cultist so YMMV.

It feels like this might be more of an issue with your perception of RPGs, than a problem with RPGs.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I'm even more ancient (50), but am more optimistic. It will ebb and wane, as it always has (and as most things do), but I've never felt more optimistic that D&D will be evergreen for generations to come. Perhaps it is because I stepped away from gaming for most of my adult life jumping from 1e to 5e. I think this makes me less jaded than many who have been engaged in the hobby consistently for decades. But TTRPGs have a lot of power to suck you in and D&D is the gateway to that.

I got back into the hobby in 2014, when my youngest son was 5. No he's 13 and has a regular gaming group completely separate from me. I see every indication that they will continue to play through middle and high school and are getting to the age where they are a ripe target for 1DnD, the movie, etc. One other thing I've noticed that is very different from when I played in the 80s is that there a number of parents who play or at least played "back in the day" and there is a lot of support with parents helping organize game days for the kids. There is adult nurturing of the hobby that just didn't exist when I was a kid.

I only see a growing new generation of players and see things going strong for the next 5-10 years. Perhaps as this generation goes to college and enters the workforce, there will be a dip. But there are plenty of folks in their 20s and 30s who picked up the game and are or will soon be having kids. I just do not see the game ebbing back to pre-2014 levels in my lifetime.

As for your concerns about expectations setting too high of a bar. I guess I don't worry about that because my experience is more with the current middle school generation, not the millennials and early gen Zs. I don't think any of the younger kids are watching live play, much less having got into the game via live play. They are pretty much playing it pen and paper. One of the main reasons so many parents are so supportive of their kids getting into TTRPGs is that it gets them away from the computer. So long as kids are still getting into the game in middle and high school and learning from playing with friends, I'm not seeing much a risk of the game getting too far from its roots. WotC is smart enough to continue supporting traditional play and creating ways to help kids ease into the game while also offering other options to older players with more disposable income.

I definitely hope this is the right and more realistic view! Thank you for writing this. I certainly hope we see more people trying other RPGs as well.

 

[Remathilis]

Brand, brand, brand, brand. I'm so sick of hearing about the "brand" rather on actually focusing on making a good product that sells itself on its own good will.

It isn't just the advertising that bothers me (people need to know your product exists), its the incessant shoving it down one's throat and trying to sell you every variation of the product that has NOTHING to do with your product actually is.

Unfortunately, Brand is the thing that sells.

A wise man once said "Merchandising, merchandising, where the real money from the movie is made!" And that's been the truth at least all of my life (I'm about as old as Star Wars, the first real lifestyle brand that paved the way for Endless Childhood). Comics, TV shows, games, T-shirts, stuffed animals, backpacks and lunchboxes, the very notion of "brand loyalty" or "completing collections" all stem from the idea that you are interacting with your favorite brands all the time. Its absolutely not a surprise that D&D would eventually get leveraged as a lifestyle brand; the bigger question was "what took them so long?"

 

[bedir than]

Diving headfirst into video games (six game studios at once!) strikes me as exceptional hubris. It's an incredibly crowded market, with gigantic up-front costs, and they're going up against established firms with decades of institutional experience competing in this difficult space.

All this from a company whose track record with digital stuff is abysmal. M:tG Arena has been an exception, but a single success does not a full-fledged game publisher make.

I dunno. I mean, I'm all for boosting the D&D brand. But I'm worried that Hasbro is going to load D&D's balance sheet down with a lot of ill-conceived projects, and only then discover that they've hit the limits of the current expansion.

Only one or two of the studios is working on D&D. Another is Arena. One is working on GI Joe. Another is working on original sci-fi. I can't remember the sixth.

 

[Vincent55]

Looking down on others is not the path to feeling better about yourself.

Didn't say all, just many in my area for me that is, just stating a fact of where i live, this may not be the case elsewhere. And really there were fewer back in the day like this it just seems that with the influx of more playing i have seemed more other than the others having difficulty with simple problem-solving.

 

[Vincent55]

WAH! NEW PLAYRS DMUB!!

Your response tells me a lot about you.

 

[Vincent55]

Mod Note:
Please keep the insults to yourself.

Was a fact I was stating for many in my area, not an insult, as it does require some level of intelligence to play a role-playing game and understand and problem-solve.

 

[Umbran]

Was a fact I was stating for many in my area, not an insult, as it does require some level of intelligence to play a role-playing game and understand and problem-solve.

Mod Note:
It may be time for you to review the Terms and Rules.

Specifically, we don't want discussion of moderation posts to clutter up a thread, so we ask you to please take any comments you have to PMs. Thanks.

 

[Azzy]

Your response tells me a lot about you.

Yeah, it says that I find blanket derogatory statements about the younger generation terribly lacking in self-reflection and to be completely out of touch with reality. But, yes, your thinly veiled insult is noted and dismissed for all it's worth.

 

[Cyriande]

2) Pathfinder 2E - This is pretty great. It's hard to see how anyone could find major fault with the setting, editing, writing, or rules apart from complexity. If you thought 3E was fine, though, I can't see it, as it's south of 3.XE/PF1 in complexity, but still has very solid rules. And whilst I don't want to be a Golarion fan, I am sort of forced to be by how well-written and together the darned setting is. I don't think my group would be up for learning it because of the complexity, but if they were, I'd seriously consider it.

Pathfinder 2e felt to me like they were just trying to be 5e (a game I don't like) but somehow did it worse. I was sad I couldn't get into it because I love Pathfinder 1.