I expressed a lot of doubt regarding the "decline of WOTC D&D" that was being reported by YouTubers, bloggers, etc. While I think the game has lost some popularity, Hasbro crushed earnings and pointed to WOTC as being one of their brightest revenue generators:

https://investor.hasbro.com/news-releases/news-release-details/hasbro-reports-first-quarter-2025-financial-results

I suspect that what this means, is that going forward, WOTC will triple-down on the woke identity politics. Crawford, Perkins, etc. --were simply not left-wing enough and "too old" to represent the brand. They will be replaced with blue-haired, transgender authors and designers, activists, etc.

from here on out, D&D will be a "gay hobby", and the wider public will associate playing the game with homosexuality and transgenderism. Conventions will be an ocean of rainbow flags

back in the 80s, if you were a high-schooler playing D&D, the popular kids would call you a nerd or dork. Now they will call you gay, transgender, or "something else"

and I am not saying this to be provocative or make some value judgment --I am just saying that this will be the "image of the game" going forward

Not necessarily. WotC has been Atlas, holding the behemoth that is Hasbro up for some time. Dungeons and Dragons is only mentioned a few times, most notably as digital play licenses (I interpret this as not being about the VTT: I think this is some kind of residual from Baldur's Gate 3.)

You really can't talk earnings without talking Magic: The Gathering's Universes Beyond sets, because this is really where WotC is getting almost all of their money from. And there's nothing you can really say about it; WotC is quite intentionally milking their consumer base dry. The price increases are bananas and all Universes Beyond sets (which are now as frequent as core sets!) are standard legal.

The most recent data I can easily find is from 2024, and it looks like MTG was outperforming D&D by a factor of 10 to 1. Whenever you are talking finances and WotC, you are talking Magic: The Gathering, and not D&D.

Nowhere on that report is tabletop D&D singled out as a high performing revenue stream. The 46% increase refers to both WotC and Digital gaming. Had tabletop D&D performed above projections it would have been singled out to highlight that growth. If anything this report indicates tabletop D&D is performing poorly or at par with Q4 2024, which was also suspisciously ambiguous.

Yeah this is like everyone has already said before. The primary money printer for WotC is Magic. D&D barely moves it one way or the other by comparison, and they don't split categories, so it's hard to tell. Hasbro is kept afloat pretty much entirely by Magic and the phone game Monopoly Go at this point.

I would like MTG to bomb as well because of what they're doing to it, but it won't.

Quote from: Spobo on April 24, 2025, 06:47:55 PMYeah this is like everyone has already said before. The primary money printer for WotC is Magic. D&D barely moves it one way or the other by comparison, and they don't split categories, so it's hard to tell. Hasbro is kept afloat pretty much entirely by Magic and the phone game Monopoly Go at this point.

I would like MTG to bomb as well because of what they're doing to it, but it won't.

Well, it isn't like D&D produces nothing. It is a successful product line in the post 2018 Hasbro portfolio, and that is something of a big deal. The rest of Hasbro really started to go downhill when the licensed toys from The Last Jedi started to rot on shelves.

Magic has shown a positively baffling level of resistance to bad management, but money printers always fail eventually. The question is if the rest of Hasbro will get it's act together before then so the tables can turn. My guess is no. The rest of Hasbro is nowhere near being able to pull slack for a floundering WotC. Magic sales simply taking a sneeze could throw Hasbro into Chapter 11.

And now Mike Mearls, who had been one of the primary drivers of the rumor that D&D 2024 was not doing well, has posted at ENWorld that he underestimated things and it looks to be doing well and probably will do even better if the economy takes a turn for the worse.

Quote from: Spobo on April 24, 2025, 06:47:55 PMYeah this is like everyone has already said before. The primary money printer for WotC is Magic. D&D barely moves it one way or the other by comparison, and they don't split categories, so it's hard to tell. Hasbro is kept afloat pretty much entirely by Magic and the phone game Monopoly Go at this point.

I would like MTG to bomb as well because of what they're doing to it, but it won't.

D&D makes Hasbro more than Monopoly Go! As a purely licensed game, their revenue is a tiny fraction of the total revenue that game makes.

Looks roughly like D&D is up about 15%, according to Mamba breaking down the numbers as best he can. It's hard to really break it down because a lot is unclear between tabletop and digital, and it could be D&D is higher than that. But that's his best current estimate based on the numbers released.

Mike Mearls is confirming DNDBeyond usage is WAY up. More than expected.

Greetings!

I don't understand why it seems like so many people actually like to argue about whether or not WOTC is selling more or less of Nu D&D. Who cares? If WOTC goes broke, great! If WOTC sells truckloads of NuD&D to hordes of blue-haired Woke morons, great!

As far as the finer details of the finances, well, unless you are a member of WOTC's financial Accounting staff, none of you here are likely to know the truth about WOTC's finances, or what is truly going on or not. Just about any *public* data is so often massaged BS in the end. You don't learn the real truth until a company goes bankrupt, and either such data is released in court, or some financial investigator reporter does a big report on it--and brings the receipts.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Quote from: SHARK on April 25, 2025, 03:02:49 PMGreetings!

I don't understand why it seems like so many people actually like to argue about whether or not WOTC is selling more or less of Nu D&D. Who cares? If WOTC goes broke, great! If WOTC sells truckloads of NuD&D to hordes of blue-haired Woke morons, great!

As far as the finer details of the finances, well, unless you are a member of WOTC's financial Accounting staff, none of you here are likely to know the truth about WOTC's finances, or what is truly going on or not. Just about any *public* data is so often massaged BS in the end. You don't learn the real truth until a company goes bankrupt, and either such data is released in court, or some financial investigator reporter does a big report on it--and brings the receipts.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Pundit's done like four videos on the topic. That's why people post about it. Nobody would care except that Glorious Leader does these weird gloating videos based on rumor, posts them here every quarter, and then refuses to ever reconsider his position based on new facts.

Quote from: Mistwell on April 25, 2025, 03:11:09 PM

Quote from: SHARK on April 25, 2025, 03:02:49 PMGreetings!

I don't understand why it seems like so many people actually like to argue about whether or not WOTC is selling more or less of Nu D&D. Who cares? If WOTC goes broke, great! If WOTC sells truckloads of NuD&D to hordes of blue-haired Woke morons, great!

As far as the finer details of the finances, well, unless you are a member of WOTC's financial Accounting staff, none of you here are likely to know the truth about WOTC's finances, or what is truly going on or not. Just about any *public* data is so often massaged BS in the end. You don't learn the real truth until a company goes bankrupt, and either such data is released in court, or some financial investigator reporter does a big report on it--and brings the receipts.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Pundit's done like four videos on the topic. That's why people post about it. Nobody would care except that Glorious Leader does these weird gloating videos based on rumor, posts them here every quarter, and then refuses to ever reconsider his position based on new facts.

Greetings!

Ahh, I see, Mistwell. Right.

I'm just reminded of the financial news that comes out after Sears or Kmart or whoever goes bankrupt. Beforehand, whatever went on, maybe there were *hints*--but noone knows shit until the courts and real investigations reveal the truth. Companies don't let the real truth about their financial status become revealed, at any time, usually, good, bad, or otherwise. That kind of classified information has to be forced out of them, right? It just seems like so much of whatever is made "public" is just so much BS and rumor mongering.

I don't believe a fucking thing about these kinds of things, beyond the most vague and broad indications. It boggles me why anyone amongst the public would ever argue that somehow they know the "real truth" and they know the "Deep, secret knowledge!" *Laughing* Companies keep the real truth under tight control.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

And what SHARK is saying is especially true of publicly traded companies(NASDAQ: HAS) because publicly reporting doom and gloom scares off investors and panics those already owning shares in the company. Buffy and Biffy want that new yacht, not a sad story.

Quote from: Mistwell on April 25, 2025, 01:59:17 PM

Quote from: Spobo on April 24, 2025, 06:47:55 PMYeah this is like everyone has already said before. The primary money printer for WotC is Magic. D&D barely moves it one way or the other by comparison, and they don't split categories, so it's hard to tell. Hasbro is kept afloat pretty much entirely by Magic and the phone game Monopoly Go at this point.

I would like MTG to bomb as well because of what they're doing to it, but it won't.

D&D makes Hasbro more than Monopoly Go! As a purely licensed game, their revenue is a tiny fraction of the total revenue that game makes.

Looks roughly like D&D is up about 15%, according to Mamba breaking down the numbers as best he can. It's hard to really break it down because a lot is unclear between tabletop and digital, and it could be D&D is higher than that. But that's his best current estimate based on the numbers released.

Mike Mearls is confirming DNDBeyond usage is WAY up. More than expected.

I don't believe any of that for a second. Even with the license fees and marketing costs Monopoly Go is raking in money. Video games make a lot more than tabletop and they did have a temporary bump from Baldurs Gate 3.

From Forbes: "Monopoly Go, Scopely's mobile version of the 90-year-old board game owned by Hasbro HAS +0.5% , lived up to its name this year, collecting $1 billion in revenues just seven months after its debut, what the publisher said is the fastest a casual game title has ever hit that mark."

A billion in revenues in seven months? I am sure that is more than the D&D books do.

Nothing in there seems to indicate D&D is doing all that well.  Also there's no link to the Mearls quote referenced here so that can't be verified either. 

"Magic the Gathering doing great"
"Monopoly GO doing great"

Yea, sure, is that what's being discussed when people point out that 5.5 isn't doing that well?

Quote from: Venka on April 26, 2025, 12:31:17 PMNothing in there seems to indicate D&D is doing all that well.  Also there's no link to the Mearls quote referenced here so that can't be verified either.

From a quick search on ENWorld, this seems to be the post:

QuoteIt's been really interesting tracking things over the past few months. A few things I have observed:

• D&D Beyond usage is up. If you look at the forums, you can see how many people are online and how many of them have accounts. The number of active users online has been consistently high over Q1, and the number of characters created is up, too. Each PC you create is assigned an ID number, and you can estimate how many characters have been created using that.
• At Gary Con, every publisher I talked to who worked with D&D Beyond had nothing but good things to say about interacting with the platform, its management, and their sales. No one can give exact numbers, but the top question I hear from folks working on D&D compatible stuff is, "How can I get on D&D Beyond?"
• Meanwhile, we've seen four - maybe five as of this writing - TTRPG crowdfunding campaigns break $1 million.

D&D and TTRPGs traditionally do well during economic downturns. I think at the end of last year, people still had confidence in the economy. They were spending money on trips, big ticket items, and so on. As 2025 rolled in and the outlook grew murkier, I think we're seeing people who played D&D and other TTRPGs during the pandemic come back to them. I think this is going to especially help D&D.

I also think I underestimated D&D Beyond's staying power. I realized while cleaning my office that while I use D&D Beyond daily, I hadn't touched my hardcover books since I bought them. I'm running two Shadowdark campaigns and a D&D 5.5. For the D&D game I use all the functionality. For SD, I've set my adventures up in Maps and run them online using that tool.

Bigger picture, the new SRD and the commitment to update it is fantastic for anyone making third party content. If the new starter set has direct digital integration, then I think we could see a big upswing in interest in the game.

https://www.enworld.org/threads/according-to-the-hasbro-q1-earning-call-d-d-sales-are-up-substantially.713075/page-3#post-9645491