WotC Hasbro's Tabletop Is On The Up Again

After a disappointing 2023, with hobby channel sales struggling and a reported decline in Dungeons & Dragons, the latest earnings call from Hasbro, covering the first quarter of 2024, shows tabletop games starting to recover.

Total gaming sales (which includes everything from Magic: the Gathering to Monopoly) were up 6%, with Wizards of the Coast in particular showing strong growth of 7%.

• Hasbro's overall revenues: -24%
• Digital and licensed game sales: +14%
• Overall tabletop gaming: +5%
• Magic the Gathering: +4%

Overall, Hasbro showed a 24% drop in revenues, partly attributed to the sales of Hasbro's film and TV business. Tabletop sales, however, showed growth, led by Magic: the Gathering.

The report calls out the success of Baldur's Gate 3, and talks about new licensing agreements with video game studios Resolution Games and Game Loft, along with partnerships with companies like LEGO.

Magic: the Gathering is expected to be down in 2024 after a record 2024, with WotC's revenue expected to drop by 3-5%.

Also mentioned are "more exciting innovations from our D&D team later this year as we continue to scale D&D Beyond and expand the richness of tabletop gameplay to digital."

 

[Stormonu]

Let's face it, the bubble created by stay-at-home families and friends from COVID long ago burst and things are just finally normalizing for WotC. They're going to have to stop just riding the past of people looking for something to do with the extra time handed to them by COVID and actually start doing things to earn folks dollars. Especially now that costs have risen so much that non-essentials are hard to justify.

 

[Dire Bare]

Magic arena is especially rough because you get pboth. Avatars, card sleeves, alternate art.. Cosmetics that have no impact on the game.

Then you also obtain cards the same way you do in paper, by buying packs. So you're forking up real money, to gamble on a chance to get fake cards. As @FrogReaver says, you can't even trade them. There's no dust/redemption method either so you can't grind up a bunch of worthless cards into credit to craft needed ones.

It's a pretty predatory model baked into an otherwise rather great game client.

Magic Arena cards are not fake, they are digital. It is a digital game. The digital cards certainly do not hold any value outside of Arena, but why should they?

You can't trade digital Arena cards . . . but that's an aspect of the paper game I'm happy to leave behind, the secondary card market.

You can't choose to "dust" your existing Arena cards, but if the next pack you purchase pulls you a duplicate (over 4 copies), you'll get a wildcard instead, used to craft cards not yet in your collection.

Cards in your digital collection that rotate out of the current formats . . . are often available to use in Historic or other formats. Very few cards on Arena are "unusable" in the game.

Magic Arena is a collectible game, but it is hardly predatory.

 

[Deset Gled]

It's a game piece. Punishing someone for not getting in as early as someone else is 100% gatekeeping.

I don't necessarily disagree with you. But the entire MtG game is openly marketed as being "pay to play" and "pay to access premium content". In that sense "gatekeeping" is a fundamental part of the game. Picking an arbitrary dollar value where that transitions from a core mechanic to a problem seems, well, arbitrary.

YMMV.

 

[Cadence]

So you can come to a tournament with a copy and use it?
If so, I take it back. Back when I played MtG this was strictly forbidden.

It is still strictly forbidden in tournaments. In casual play, as back when, if the rest of the table is ok with it you can take a sharpy to a basic land. With printers being more common one can also print out a slip of paper and put it in the sleeve with the card for casual play. Some groups are great with that, some not so much.

Most of the tournaments are run by stores that make money selling the cards. I posit one of the reasons people are willing to pay as much for the pre-releases and buy packs/boxes is becuase the expected value of packs is a noticeable fraction of the value of the packs. If the prices for everything were small I don't think there would be any noticeable secondary market, any magic specialty shops hosting games, very few tournaments, and much less product sold. And I'm virutally certain if they were worth only the value of the paper they are printed on there wouldn't be a game that had lasted this many years.

 

[Alphastream]

It would make sense that ICv2's data which elevates the importance of die-hard gamers that shop at FLGS would see a decline related to the OGL while the general gaming population that shops at Amazon, DnDBeyond, Walmart, Target, etc would not decline because they aren't online all day every day complaining about D&D

But how would ICv2 know the reason... and now? These are Q1 '24 results, which somehow ICv2 is saying are due to an event in Q1 '23. It's a ludicrous claim. The data we have from Bookscan covers Q1 '23 and shows book sales (not counting FLGSs, granted) steady and then climbing sharply around the movie's superbowl ads and then upon movie release. If you saw an OGL effect now, you would have seen one back when it actually happened.

We've seen huge drops in most hobby aspects from the pandemic, picking up recently in some areas but not all. D&D is generally doing better than that. As I'll discuss on the Mastering Dungeons podcast next week, D&D is probably a tiny bit down, but not bad at all. And, again, this is a product line that is 10 years old, the year an updated version is coming out... being a tiny bit down is amazing!

My visits to game stores around the US also show relatively few truly hardcore gamers connected to online D&D news. The average store gamer tends to get their news from the store shelf... that's the reality. A couple in each store may be active online, but not the majority. And, we didn't see stores reporting OGL impacts last year. I doubt we are seeing any now. I am afraid this is just ICv2 again falling short.

 

[Scribe]

It is still strictly forbidden in tournaments. In casual play, as back when, if the rest of the table is ok with it you can take a sharpy to a basic land. With printers being more common one can also print out a slip of paper and put it in the sleeve with the card for casual play. Some groups are great with that, some not so much.

Most of the tournaments are run by stores that make money selling the cards. I posit one of the reasons people are willing to pay as much for the pre-releases and buy packs/boxes is becuase the expected value of packs is a noticeable fraction of the value of the packs. If the prices for everything were small I don't think there would be any noticeable secondary market, any magic specialty shops hosting games, very few tournaments, and much less product sold. And I'm virutally certain if they were worth only the value of the paper they are printed on there wouldn't be a game that had lasted this many years.

Without a doubt, and not a single shop owner I've talked to about it has said otherwise.

Without the ecosystem, the competitive aspect or organized play, and the rewards from that, there's no way despite how good game was, that it would have lasted.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

It is still strictly forbidden in tournaments. In casual play, as back when, if the rest of the table is ok with it you can take a sharpy to a basic land. With printers being more common one can also print out a slip of paper and put it in the sleeve with the card for casual play. Some groups are great with that, some not so much.

Most of the tournaments are run by stores that make money selling the cards. I posit one of the reasons people are willing to pay as much for the pre-releases and buy packs/boxes is becuase the expected value of packs is a noticeable fraction of the value of the packs. If the prices for everything were small I don't think there would be any noticeable secondary market, any magic specialty shops hosting games, very few tournaments, and much less product sold. And I'm virutally certain if they were worth only the value of the paper they are printed on there wouldn't be a game that had lasted this many years.

I don't think it needs to be the value of the paper. But 400 dollars is excessive.

So happy to see some prices fall.

 

[Scribe]

I don't think it needs to be the value of the paper. But 400 dollars is excessive.

So happy to see some prices fall.

Duals are still going to run you hundreds if not thousands each, as they are reserve list, so you miss the point here.

Over printing cards into oblivion kills engagement long term, as there is no value. Instead it drives people either out of the game, or online.

 

[Superchunk77]

Hasbro Q1 Earnings: Revenue Slides as Business Model Evolves

Furby, Peppa Pig, and Magic the Gathering continue to see growth.

toybook.com

So D&D is doing pretty well given they released nothing in Q1.

Not really.

 

[Meech17]

I don't necessarily disagree with you. But the entire MtG game is openly marketed as being "pay to play" and "pay to access premium content". In that sense "gatekeeping" is a fundamental part of the game. Picking an arbitrary dollar value where that transitions from a core mechanic to a problem seems, well, arbitrary.

YMMV.

Sure.. Setting any particular dollar amount is arbitrary. I get that. We can still just acknowledge that the hobby is too darned expensive.

The main villain in the Yu-Gi-Oh Anime was a rich guy who won by buying up all the best cards to get an unfair advantage on his opponents. The real games shouldn't be like the cartoon.

Over printing cards into oblivion kills engagement long term, as there is no value. Instead it drives people either out of the game, or online.

How does Pokèmon do it? The PTCG is nearly as old as MTG, and wildly popular with collectors, but you can play the game competitively for a fraction of the cost?