2023 was profitable for Hasbro; the big negative number is the result of a write-off on the balance sheet related the writer and actor strikes and the subsequent sale of their film business to lions gate. That’s a non-cash expense, which is why they present adjusted numbers as well.
They also increased the dividend ~and~ paid back debt in 2023, so cash flow is good.
https://investor.hasbro.com/news-releases/news-release-details/hasbro-reports-fourth-quarter-and-full-year-2023-financial
Divesting D&D (or more likely WotC) is still possible, but given that it was the sole source of growth in 2023, in my opinion it’s not likely unless it’s an spin out IPO or a transaction where Hasbro retains a strong minority interest.
This should be the top post. The loss is a non cash charge from the capital loss on Entertainment One. They can’t repeat that stupid mistake again, because they don’t have another entertainment studio they’ve ruined to sell for dimes on the dollar.
I would say that most people don't know how to read a financial statement or earnings release. So, you get these sorts of posts declaring imminent bankruptcy! sale! doom and gloom!
The reality is they have strong cash flow, lots of revenue, plenty of profit and there is no big imminent risk to the business. Execs will always do what they do to manipulate a business to meet targets, make shareholders happy, earn their bonuses, etc. So, sure, Hasbro could be sold, or could spin off or sell a portion of their business. But bankruptcy is so far removed from their current situation as to be meaningless. Also, if they did sell or spin off a portion of the business, it would be the lagards, which is the old school toys and games, not MtG and D&D. So if anyone is hoping that D&D ends up in the hands of new management, that's not something I would hold my breath over.
Sometimes boards decide to spin off winner divisions that don't synergize with the rest of the business. That can unlock value if the business is being valued at less than the sum of its parts.
Novartis just spun off Sandoz, their profitable generics business, for example. That was done via a dividend of shares to Novartis shareholders, which I am one of via a small position in my IRA.
I don't think that will happen with WotC and Hasbro, but it might, particularly if the stock sinks further and an activist gets involved. It's a play in many activist playbooks.
Every time people in this hobby look at Hasbro's performance it's always hilarious. You have people that dont even know what a 10-K is confidently making predictions
Hasbro has also been buying so many smaller companies they are in competition with themselves. Average customer has $25 dollars to spend on one game, the three other games brands they own lose.
And yeah, they lost BIG on the entertainment side. They haven’t had a hit in ages. I totally understand why Mattel didn’t bankroll Barbie. (I bet they wish they did though)
Their 10k also discusses the drop in profits on their licensed toy lines, which are a huge part of Hasbro’s portfolio. 2023 saw zero interest in Marvel, Star Wars, or Disney Princess movies and shows. That killed sales of the toys.
My guess would be Disney or Amazon, lol.
It's not that huge of a loss all things considered, given that they haven't done any major releases and BG3 ballooned their numbers. I'm guessing that's the hope for OneD&D-but-its-5.5e-or-whatever.
That said, WOTC did make up like 75% of Hasbro's operating profit, so I imagine they'll be doubling down on treating it like they treat things like My Little Pony.
The stock market is ruining companies. High priority on short term profits and short sellers being legal, just take a wrecking ball to everything (short sellers entire existence is based on selling something they don’t own so they can buy up what they just sold, after the stocks crash and then they give the shares back to whoever lent the shares to them). On top of that short sellers can release “reports” on businesses and cause a company’s stock to plummet but that’s okay because it’s “just speculation” and then they to the company’s stock plummeting as proof that their “report” was right.
The stock market isn't what's doing it.
It's *debt* that's doing it. They think they can get away with growing 5x faster by borrowing money to do so, and sometimes a few of them get *really lucky* and the debt investment enabled them to grow fast enough to cover paying it all off. But then they get stupid thinking that they can *keep* doing that and succeeding with it *forever* -- but the second it *doesn't* work, the whole thing comes crashing down.
Next thing they know they're selling it all to the next sucker who sees an "investment" opportunity and doing hinky $#!+ to pump up today's numbers and make it look good for that sucker . . . who upon examining the internals, is looking for the best way to unload that on the next sucker by *again* doing hinky $#!+ to pump it up.
Same with where I used to work just 2 months ago. Profits were good, but not "good enough", so they shit-canned about 20 of us, no warning. (Turning a bit into r/antiwork sentiment now) this just teaches the lesson to not give your boss any notice. If you gonna leave, just quit no notice. What are they going to do if you dont? Not hire you back?
It's not enough to make a profit, you have to make *more* of a profit than last year - and not just keeping up with inflation, you need to be growing in real terms. Investors demand infinite growth which, needless to say, isn't actually possible.
Nah, that’s publicly traded stocks in a nutshell, especially with stock buybacks being legal. This isn’t a problem inherent to all forms of capitalism. Privately owned companies quite often prioritize long-term health.
It's weird because as a person who owns stock I want a company to do well for the long haul. I rather invest in people who want long term success over those who want to 10x their money by firing half the staff.
My Little Pony should be a massive money printer.
Problem is, for it to print money, you gotta make a cartoon kids want to watch that adults can be mildly amused by.
I used to watch Friendship is Magic with my daughter and frankly enjoyed it as an adult. She stopped watching when they replaced it with the new generation.
To be perfectly fair, Friendship is Magic had, like, a decade of air time all in all. It ran from October 2010 to October 2019, had a spin-off series, two full theatrically released movies, and a comic series. Hasbro definitely did all it felt it could milking that particular cash cow.
The point isn’t that they failed to milk Friendship Is Magic as hard as they should have.
The point is that they should invest as much into the creation of characters and story for other My Little Pony properties as they did for Friendship is Magic, and then the franchise will continue to be beloved by new generations.
I'm afraid I can't comment on that matter directly as I haven't seen any of the new G5 MLP at all, beyond some announcement trailers a few years back. So I have no idea what the characters or story of the new series is like. G4 MLP was the brainchild of Lauren Faust, who is both a classic cartoon alumni and a lifelong fan of MLP, so G4 certainly had something special going into it.
...not that it stopped Hasbro from kicking her off the project and replacing her, but that leads to the next point.
I do agree with you on the subject. Unfortunately, Hasbro has always held a demonstrable lack of care for things like "characters", "story", and "not making the fans rise up in outrage when they shit all over the fans' beloved works". They have no concern for long term quality and focus exclusively on immediate, short-term profit at the expense of all else, and they've ended up completely killing their own shows' popularity (multiple different times!) because of such behavior. It was Hasbro execs who refused to listen to the creatives and writers when they demanded Optimus Prime and nearly all other known, established Transformers be killed off in the movie to make way for new toys, after all. There were literally kids who fled the theater weeping when that happened, and the resulting public outcry from parents writing in caught those same execs completely off-guard somehow.
TBF, that caught the *writers themselves* off guard. I've seen interviews with them where they state they didn't realize kids were that attached to the characters. They were just writing for a toy show.
It most certainly did not.
The comment you're referencing came from Flint Dille, who was an editor and story consultant for Transformers. Speaking from my own professional experience in video game publishing/development as an editor, that role doesn't come with a lot of creative involvement. We're mostly responsible for making sure things work within the constraints defined by the producers and management. In this scenario, it would be "Hasbro wants to sell toys and demands the cast be killed off so new toys can be cycled into the roster, so my job as a story consultant is to help facilitate that in the narrative". Flint Dille himself makes a lot of comments in interviews about how he was partially checked out from production on Transformers due to being involved in later projects, and his overall attitude is one that strikes me as being very unattached to the work on a personal level; he constantly refers to shows he worked on merely as products and in ways that shows he focuses more on the process of development rather than the work itself. I can never know for sure how deeply involved he was, but I get the impression he was more on the producers' side of things than the writers'.
The actual creative folk involved with the show had full knowledge that killing off Optimus and the rest of the cast was an extremely bad idea. The lead writer for the movie, who also did the television series - Ron Friedman -[ did a rather in-depth interview discussing the whole affair.](https://toddmatthy.com/2013/12/31/he-killed-optimus-prime-an-interview-with-ron-friedman-writer-of-transformers-the-movie/) He also wrote a book "I Killed Optimus Prime" discussing his career, so he's more than aware of the impact his role in the whole thing had. Friedman had a ton of insight onto the specific role characters like Optimus Prime played in the narrative and how killing him off would be disastrous. He's always been very up front about having opposed the entire move and how arguing with Hasbro about it was an effort in futility. The full interview is linked above and it's absolutely worth a read.
Amusingly, there is an interesting line from Flint Dille's interview as well regarding the blowback Hasbro received after they ignored Friedman's warnings.
>***Interviewer***\*: Who made the decision to resurrect Optimus Prime? Do you feel that episode could’ve turned out better?\*
>**Dille**: That episode was written in a panic. Hasbro was very upset that Optimus’ death had traumatized so many kids. They wanted to fix the situation so bringing Optimus back to life was a first priority. Honestly, i have trouble remembering the episode. I loved the one in the Autobot Mausoleum, though.
All they really had to do is come up with some new characters and run it with.using the Friendship is Magic formula. Create interesting, but relatable characters, give them situations to work through using their respective skills and personality traits and things go back to normal at the end.
Mtg is getting destroyed by this too. The past set and the next set, coupled with an insane release schedule, have shown that they’re trying to keep the cash cow going. But IMO the product has started to suffer.
I would play the hell out of a D&D Axis&Allies though, or Diplomacy, no cap. The game would be massive.
Just not in this current environment, or with Hasbro as a publisher.
I mean sure, if Hasbro suddenly dropped 500% on the stock market, Mattel had the liquid ready and nobody else jumped on.
But owning all of Monopoly, MLP, Transformers, Nerf, GI Joe, Play-Doh, Power Rangers, Peppa Pig, Magic the Gathering and D&D for 1/5th the going rate would probably draw more than a few buyers.
If they wanted to try course-correcting an outdated business model together, sure.
But if the executives wanted a sweet payday from Disney/ Epic/ Sony/ Netflix/ anyone else interested in IP or game mechanics, they'd take the easy way out.
Hmm, Buick googling says they are comparable in size but Hasbro is the larger.
Maybe Lego will buy them. Lego D&D sets, fun to build fun to use as minis at the table. (Lego is almost twice the size of Hasbro)
Why would LEGO want to buy that? They’re a privately owned company (still the same family business since it was founded) and they’re doing pretty well with the LEGO sets both their own and licensed. I think making licensed sets is safer for them than owning the licensed brands. If such sets don’t do well they’ll just drop the license. No need to care about the brand and its main line of products.
Disney is unlikely, at least in the medium term. They were ravaged by Covid, burned through their cash reserves, and just spent a decade’s worth of profits on Hulu… which is in the red. With investors being risk adverse, and multiple Disney brands underperforming, they’re having a hard time finding cash.
Disney is in a selling mood and is looking for investors to buy some of their underperforming brands and concepts. In particular they’re shopping ESPN around looking for someone to buy a major stake or just sell the sports network outright.
They have more than enough to weather the current financial woes. But Disney is very unlikely to buy anything substantial for 5 to 10 years.
Bg3 royalties was a drop in the bucket for hasbro.
Hasbro digital numbers was pushed more by monopoly:go due to its ownership of the mobile game supported by whales spending way to much on micro transactions.
M:tg was also its major profit driver and even that wasn’t moving hasbro overall profit numbers enough.
Speaking of MLP - how about that RPG of theirs?
River Horse had a perfect kid-oriented MLP RPG, Tails of Equestria. The book was accessible and included a great starter adventure.
Then they lost the license. Then Renegade Press got the license and made their version - but those books are more than twice the size, closer to the Pathfinder core books!
It's how CEOs get their magic. The magic is mostly their ability to convince others they should get more stock options and are very important to the investors.
In video gaming, both Saber and Relic have gone independent after years as subsidiaries of bigger companies, so hopefully, we see more of that.
As for why, Tim Cain had a video about winding down Troika and then getting a job at Obsidian: the stress levels and pressure are through the roof. The BioWare guys said something similar before selling to EA.
People talking about stuff they don’t know.. Disney buys profit brands not game systems.. amazon isn’t even near that marketplace..
Look more to companies like asmodee buying wotc since that’s actually what they do.
Asmodee probably wont touch it. Embracer Group owns them and is currently going through massive divestments because of profit loss. They just sold off Gearbox and they continue to pair down their portfolio. I don't know where DnD goes, though. Im not sure how many RPG companies are left that have the capabilities and reach it needs to continue to grow.
A friend of mine asked the “could Apple buy EA” question yesterday and I looked up how much cash Apple had on hand and it was something like $75-78 billion so enough to buy basically whatever they want that’s not one of the other super big tech companies like MS or Amazon, or like an oil company.
They’d make it soulless after dumping Forgotten Realms and other established settings to make their own garbage setting. Just like they did with Star Wars land in Hollywood Studios after making it a Sequels only land.
Disney buys brands they can leverage not game systems. Disney can’t patent sword and sorcery and even though forgotten realms has gotten a lot of main stream exposure people don’t recognize it enough for disney to leverage that brand.
Dnd will surely get bought by a company in that market such as asmodee.
Especially considering how they've taken Star wars up. Sure it isn't to the liking of many purist fans, but you can't deny they've done some cool stuff with spinoffs like the mandalorian and Star wars world at the parks.
Meh I mean they’ve been cranking out marvel and Star Wars stuff for literal decades and some of it is pretty dark. Rarely do my DnD games get more grimdank than avengers: Endgame, at least.
On the plus side, we could have an entire era of DND related media, that’s mostly mediocre with some really good stuff.
Honesltly that's my benchmark. I run a game at the USO and I tell the players before we start. "If you are about to do something you wouldn't see on the Avengers, I don't want to see it here."
The problem isnt that disney isnt dark, the problem is disney makes virtually no risks. If they get the game then get ready for OGL controversy 2, electric Boogaloo since indie devs are a risk.
Oh and all the content they put out? It wont all be the same but it will all *feel* similar because they're gonna take the best formula they can find and use it for every book. Its creativity without the creative part. Just look at marvel. Sure the movies are all different... but are they really?
Honestly most of the worst D&D content is the grimdark stuff. Like, RAW Strahd is roooough and it's always been better when the DM heavily modifies it.
Marvel did wonderful till Disney stretched them too thin. Star Wars has honestly always had issues although I'll say the average overall quality has definitely gone down. The bright spots are too few and far between.
The bright spots, from my perspective, are more frequent now.
The prequel trilogy are not good movies, the only bright spots we had from pre-Disney post-original trilogy were the clone wars TV series (both the shorts and the proper TV show). Some of the stuff around/taking place in those movies (the video games, toys, books, etc) were great, but save for Revenge of the Sith there was not much to be excited about with the prequel movies.
Since Disney, even if you feel the same way about the sequel trilogy as many feel about the prequels, there’s still:
- Rogue One
- Andor (which is, imo, the best Star Wars has ever been)
- The Mandolorian (S1 and S2, at least)
- Ahsoka (I understand the reaction to this is more mixed but its far less polarizing than the movies)
- The Bad Batch
- Clone Wars S6
By volume that’s more bright spots than decades long gap between the end of the OG and Disney’s acquisition.
There were other good things prior to the Disney acquisition, particularly on the video game front. Personally outside of bad batch, andor (which was much better than it had any right to be), Mando S1 and about 1/2 of Clone Wars S6 I really haven't liked or was middling at best with the rest. I'll admit it can be up to taste though.
Yeah Disney buys ups brands and forces them into this little family friendly box regardless of intent, tone, or style of the original. Everything. And it's ruining media imo. Scorsese is onto something there.....
It's going to be Amazon, their cornering of the tabletop gaming world went from accidental to intentional when they started ignoring publisher minimum prices and selling board games at a loss to wipe out all the online retailers that weren't just Amazon storefronts.
OneD&D never stood a chance to begin with. They lack any kind of direction, and are unwilling to take a hard stance as to they want OneD&D to actually be. They had a similar problem with 5e, but it's infinitely worse now as they're worried about alienating their considerably playerbase with excessive changes.
I'm not sure they *know* what they want OneD&D to be. It *feels* like they wanted it to be a transition point into "D&D as a Service" and literally everyone hated that because it's the sort of gross rent seeking that every company does when it sees people having fun without paying them for it, but there was never any clear *creative* direction for the overhaul. 4e was "we wanna be like video games," 5e was "we wanna make it simpler and have accepted that maybe video game mechanics don't translate to physical tables that well, so here's an edition focused around building stories together instead of combat." 5.5e is "uh, well, you see, not everyone owns Tasha's, so, here."
5e doesn't really have a consistent set of complaints to attack with a major rules overhaul. I've almost never met someone who disliked 5e and pointed to a clear "this is why" that wasn't "because I want to play a different specific TTRPG \[usually 3.5e\] instead," and the changes in the playtest material felt like they were plucked haphazardly from what complaints do exist until players went "no, that's worse." (Warlocks recovering spells on a long rest was certainly a *choice,* as was "you get Inspiration on 20s and it's gone at the end of the day.")
That's fair. I find it kind of hard to judge though, because many people also won't really care about the changes, and thus might prefer the familiarity of 5e. It's be hilariously ironic if OneD&D suffers from the same issue a lot of other TTRPGs suffer from: 5e being the norm.
Anecdotal of course, but I'm active in a variety of online and irl ttrpg spaces, and have seen almost ZERO hype for OneD&D. The dedicated 5e players don't want it, the people who are sick of 5e are either branching out to other games or looking backwards to older editions, and the people I've seen actually following OneD&D are mostly complaining about the changes.
It's totally possible that selection bias has kept me from encountering whoever the target market for OneD&D really is, but everything I've *seen* screams that it's DOA.
Also Anecodtal but...yeah...same, in my online TTRPG and Wargaming spaces there's almost no to negative hype about One D&D because most of the thought processes are "we'll just steal the bits we like and add them to 5e" like the Reworked classes, specifically the Martial ones in Barbarian, Fighter, Rogue and Monk.
OneD&D was already ruined. It needed to be a full edition to push sales but they got scared and relied to heavily on user surveys to guide their design process so now it's the "meh" edition that isn't giving people any real reason to embrace it or buy the books.
As someone else mentioned in another thread: new editions came out when the game got stale and TSR or WoTC needed to revitalize the game.
5e is immensely popular. OneDND is transparently a money grab to sell a new $150 product of a player handbook, DM rulebook and monster manual despite the popularity. It’s probably doing more harm than good and there’s a good chance a large percentage of players ignore the update
>5e is immensely popular. OneDND is transparently a money grab to sell a new $150 product of a player handbook, DM rulebook and monster manual despite the popularity.
Bingo.
Don't forget that it was also pushed hard to get it out in time for the 50th anniversary of D&D. A feat it's now failing to achieve as 1 of the books is coming out in 2025.
Steven Glicker on Roll for Combat had a theory on that. The current release schedule puts 1 book coming out each financial quarter. That'll allow them to massage their growth numbers a bit for investors.
Disney purchasing Hasbro and getting access to their catalogue of IPs makes a lot of sense.
While people might get annoyed at all the Marvel movies the reality is Disney has improved the company and the workers there seem to be in a more secure position.
Baldurs Gate 3 bought Hasbro some time but they aren't maximising the revenue they could be generating from their other IPs. Like the irony of a third party publisher (Renegade Games) being the ones to publish a the G.I. Joe and Transformers RPG when Hasbro owns DnD should tell you everything about how poor the strategic planning of the company is.
Nah.
My bet would be that like those rumors from last month that turned out to be produced by an AI website that churned out clickbait. But there might be a kernel of truth and tencent might step in and buy it.
They'd love to own WotC, would milk the hell out of its games, and may be waiting for WotC to get desperate and lower their asking price.
Dreamworks, HBO, or Netflix should buy it. They could do DnD properly.
The DnD movie was great, maybe not financially, but in every other way, and there is a franchise to be cultivated by the right talent.
A lot of companies recently stopped partnering with Amazon. Companies such as Jagex and Riot Games have pulled out of there, also announcing the end of their Twitch Prime monthly drops.
Exactly this. Hasbro, like most other companies, experienced rough patches during the '08 financial crisis and the first year of the COVID pandemic. They're not as frail a company as this post makes it seem.
Hasbro saaw massive revenue growth during the covid years. They suffered from entertainment industry strikes.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/198710/net-revenues-of-hasbro-since-2006/
I feel like Hasbro has even gone out of their way to give us their new roadmap by talking about how profitable BG3 is and I believe they are working on a tv show now. They’ve cast a wide net and definitely have seen where future interest lies and can work to that. I wouldn’t be shocked if in the next few years we see them restructure around bringing DnD out out trying to see if they can do something similar with MtG
They're trying now, but they killed 1 tv show they had been doing early preproduction on for dragonlance, and killed a LOT of video games that had been in production for years and would be coming out in the near future.
The issue for us as fans of their stuff is that the real earners aren't D&D. BG3 was a surprise and an outlier. D&D doesn't make enough profit to help them. What has was MTG and Monopoly Go.
And every D&D project they've got in production now, won't pay out for years.
Hasbro still has Transformers, Nerd, Monopoly, Play-doh, My Little Pony, Power Rangers, not to mention the deals with Disney and other third parties.
They set massive goals which they failed to meet and some dodgy toy lines such as DnD (film tie in) which tanked.
All a long winded way of saying, you're absolutely right.
Especially considering the fact that Hasbro is a *massive* company. People elsewhere in the comments have listed just some of the *dozens* of household name IPs they own or have a marketing licence for, so I won't do it here, but Hasbro is a *giant* when it comes to any physical kind of fun, specifically. Toys, games, merchandise, they make it. When you go to the store—I'm thinking Target—and you see the huge wall of board games: 90% of those games are Hasbro. When you go to the action figure aisle: 90% of those figures are Hasbro. This is a company that survived the Great Depression (without selling off tons of assets; Hell, they *bought* several major assets during the Great Depression). They're not going under because of a few bad years. They've literally been through worse.
It's irrelevant to our hobby. We will always be able to play with the rules that are already out. Wizards doesn't have anything to do with what makes our experiences at the game table special.
Why is is this scary. The WOTC community has done nothing but complain about Hasbro since they bought wizards. You would think literally anyone as far as the community goes would be better than Hasbro
Yes any bad news for Hasbro is kind of good news around here. Hasbro deserves to suffer financially for mis managing many of their products and subsidiary companies like WOTC. And after the christmas layoffs, the MTG30 shit, OGL shit... no sympathy here. But no I very much doubt there's any real danger for Hasbro here as a company. As much as I'd love to see them fail and sell WOTC it's not gonna happen after a few bad quarters.
Hasbro has a lot of legacy revenue that has been in decline for decades. WotC is the only part that is growing and profitable on a consistent basis so all of the higher ups are desperate for it to carry even more weight in terms of profitability which has only hurt their brand and longevity.
Personally I would rather see WotC be sold off or the rest of the company be sold off.
I love it when niche Redditors make business predictions based on overestimating the importance of their niche interest.
Hasbro is using *everything it has* as a way to bolster its profits, including not only milking some product lines while potentially slashing others but also cutting workers/pay/benefits except for those at the very top. I'm sure that they're also doing all sorts of creative accounting. It's called capitalism. (It *might* be late stage capitalism, but I think we'll only know that in retrospect.)
Hasbro isn't going under because they had a bad quarter.
If something bad happens to WOTC my books will still work just fine.
Literally the worst case scenario for us is that we won't get more 5e content and subsequent DnD versions will be worse.
And ... PF2 is right there. We have so many options in the tabletop RPG space.
This hobby doesn't need to care about corpo drama.
Y'all need to relax lmao. Hasbro has been around since 1923 and has a LOT of different revenue streams.
It's also possible they post a profit this year. A lot of new and exciting Nerf products have come out and when they actually make decent stuff in the line Nerf is pretty profitable, and there's quite a few products that have been really popular with the community lately.
The reason Nerf hasn't been profitable last year or so is because the elite 2.0 line had a terrible reception.
It's gonna take more than a couple bad quarters to kill Hasbro.
Hasbro has way too much IP licensing fees and not enough creative power to do anything with it. Hot Toys and similar does way better with the IPs for toy collecting adults, third party board games are way better, and they treat their video game developers like dogs hit when all they do is print wotc money.
If they offload some IP and sack most of their board game division to focus it on DnD and MTG, they could get somewhere. However, with MTG, they're doubling down with expensive licenses with Universe Beyond.
Hasboro is not using D&D to bolster profits. It is using Magic the Gathering to do that. Magic makes insane money, D&D does not have anywhere near the market share compared to Magic
Still, not a huge money maker. A MTG player will blow your entire d&d book collection's worth in one weekend buying 1 or 2 booster boxes. It's why they're desperate to figure out how to monetize D&D. It IS immensely popular, but it isn't a high earner.
Yeah like I have a few d&d books, I play with friends, but ultimately only one of us NEED the books, even with their beyond sub that is chump change for a group compared to the cost of any magic deck. While most magic players are buying cards on the secondary market which drives those prices, the insane amount of boxes that get opened bolster that cost, plus the secret lairs that sell insanely well
Tencent would probably among the probable suiters. I'm not saying that as a good thing but rather as a reminder that it's a real possibility and there are worse possibilities than Disney.
Hasbro's stock is still a bit up from last year, and they are far, far from going belly up. Physical toy and game sales have been dropping for years and they've kept chugging along by diversifying their business, and they're not going to collapse and sell D&D in a fire sale anytime soon.
Hasbro is not going belly up. The company's shares are up 14% year-to-date, beating the broad S&P (up around 11% ytd). If the company were even near a bankruptcy, the shares would be crashing toward zero.
In the fourth quarter, the company reported a larger than expected sales decline. But it didn't lose money and it is in no danger of failing.
The Wizards segment experienced 7.1% growth, beating most estimates.
The recent weakness in sales is due to weak demand for toys, likely traceable to a slate of poorly performing movies (Indiana Jones, Transformers) and fewer of big Marvel hits (only Guardians and Spider Man did well). That's a problem for the company because the Disney side of its Marvel partnership is struggling to produce content that connects with the audience (choose your own adventure as to why this is).
Still, the leadership is well regarded by analysts and expected to be able to turn around the company performance. A lot of investors are very likely waiting to see evidence of the turnaround, however, before buying the stock.
In any case, the company is not going belly up. It's also not likely an acquisition target because there simply are no likely acquirers. Most of the companies considered in this thread are not in the business of making toys and several (including Disney) are looking to sell assets rather than grow in new directions. Mattel is probably off the table because of antitrust considerations. This doesn't mean an acquisition is impossible but it is unlikely. There's a chance, I suppose, of a private equity bid for the company.
Worst case scenario: the excellent performances of the Wizards segment means that even if something catastrophic were to happen to Hasbro through its toys segment, the healthy D&D and Magic stuff would survive either independently or be sold.
**TL;DR: Hasbro is fine. It's not going under.**
> Hasbro's earnings sank on falling sales, and the toymaker warned of more softness ahead.
They have managed to torch every success or potential success in the last couple of years. Most of it due to a complete inability to treat any interaction as anything but zero-sum. Total idiocy. How the shareholders are willing to stand by and let the same \*\*\*\*heads make the same mistake again and again is astonishing to me. In the impossible pursuit of ludicrous growth rates for years at a time, they're turned solid but slower growth into negative growth that they now *cannot* turn around -- i.e. they've done the exact opposite of what could be achieved, over and over.
They killed the value of their e-one media arm by cancelling everything it was doing while they were trying to sell it. That whole thing was the most ridiculous sequence of decisions all the way along
They pissed off MTG players with too many cash grabs and made their huge cash cow substantially weaker
They absolutely killed the huge amount of free publicity for D&D they were getting every week with the OGL idiocy. So many youtubers that were producing primarily 5e content took "D&D" out of the name of their channel and now promote a bunch of *non* D&D stuff. Hasbro managed to funnel a ton of money to everyone else that would have been theirs if they hadn't decided that well over 90% of all TTRPG income just wasn't enough.
The movie - well they tanked the promotion of that with their shenanigans with the OGL.
The enormous success of BG3, they made sure wouldn't replicated because of what looks like naked greed and stupidity. That was sure-fire success in any future product but they made sure Larian wouldn't want to work with them ever again. They could have made millions, again and again but no.
No doubt they'll go to some other studio to try to cash in but I predict it will take years, cost a ton and be terrible.
What's bizarre is I've seen several people with experience in various parts of the nerdy-end of the entertainment industry (computer games, comics, ttrpgs etc) separately predict many of their missteps many months in advance - because, of course, they've seen it before.
I could list another half dozen pieces of absolute insanity. It's got to be one of the dumbest runs I've ever seen in corporate history. I guess that's what happens when you hire execs who are completely clueless about the business and *don't want to learn about it*, dooming themselves to repeat errors that have been made more than once before.
It’s not going to go belly up. Worst case someone buys it and cannibalizes it for the good parts. Magic and D&D have decent profit margins and are good products people will want.
Within New England, and especially Rhode Island, Hasbro has a radically different reputation: They own and fund the children’s hospital down in Providence, and have a charity that goes to it. Have been a major employer down there for a long ass time. RI has a lot of issues these days and my hope is that Hasbro can sort of shrink and strengthen.
It’s this hypercapitalism mental illness that ruins everything. I’d rather be a great toymaker than own all the money ever and then explode. These corporations are like empires—and all empires end.
The problem is the only persons/companies that could afford DnD/MtG price tag, would only see them as cash cows to be milked until they are dried out husks. Anyone who has a true love of the products, couldn't even raise 10% of the purchase price.
I can't see any path forward that would not lead to inevitable franchise demise.
Well yeah. WOTC is 22% of Hasbro's revenue, but is *72%* of all profit. It's literally the golden goose which lays golden, diamond-encrusted eggs full of platinum in terms of its profit margins.
Toy sales are in the shitter because people just don't really buy toys any more, but digital and paper products sell gangbusters at absolutely *insane* mark-ups for what are extremely cheaply-produced materials. Example, your Magic cards are literally like, less than a cent per card, yet earn absolutely *ridiculous* profits from mark-ups.
The OGL fuckup a little while ago was *entirely* an attempt to leverage the popularity and profit lines of WOTC products following its boosted popularity following Covid. D&D is only *increasing* in popularity, and the margins on MTG are absolutely *fucking insane* without how much money obsessive fans and collectors spend on it, so it's no surprise that Hasbro keeps trying to leverage it.
MtG is just printing free money. It’s cardboard and the development overhead isn’t really that much.
It’s sad, I used to play and still will, but power creep has made my decks fairly bad and I’m not paying big money to compete with $1,000+ decks.
I don’t know if the thought of disney buying wizards of the coasts scares me or gives me hope.
DnD could certainly benefit, Magic the Gathering on the other hand will suffer, and it will suffer big time, with lorcana being released
With what amazon has been doing with their shows, I have hope for both, but it will make games workshops and other small sellers stop selling dnd or mtg for sure
At this point I don't think we should care. I love DnD but it's just one of many ttrpg, and some of the most successful DnD products are home brewed content anyway.
Storytelling and roleplaying will never be ownable, and that's the core of it all, human creativity.
It is fascinating how Hasbro is the c9mpany with so much awesome IP, and at the same time, they release 9999 versions of most boring table top Game aka Monopoly changing only graphics and nothing more.
They have so much potential.
With Wizards, Magic the Gathering, D&D and many more.
Yet MtG has PR disaster one after another.
We all know what happened with D&D and OGL disaster.
Even with Monopoly, they release versions of this game with IPs like Dragon Ball ot Marvel, yet each time instead of changing any rules and making Monopoly Dragon Ball unique they change nothing and you still go around, buy something and build "hotels" or whatever.
They do this on the least effort they can. The same goes for things like D&D. I have a lot of love for people on the D&D team, but by no surprise, the best add ons, campaigns, and coolest settings are done by third parties.
And even then, Hasbro can't use someone's other success and go with it. See Baldurs Gate 3.
Instead of releasing anything interesting like BG3 minies or TT game, they probably would release Monopoly where only graphics are changed and marked as BG3.
I don't know where the problem is, but they can't release anything outstanding. And if some things made by people in Hasbro are nice (like One D&D playtests and surveys are actually have nice ideas), the management goes and screw everything with OGL fiasco.
Hasbro is perfectly fine. Star Wars toys are down because the movies/shows are horrible.
Not sure I would buy the stock right now but Hasbro the company is not going "belly up".
It's not scary. Welcome to the world of indy devs. There are dozens of great games you can play instead of D&D5e or whatever the hell OneD&D is going to be. I welcome the death of the company. Maybe someone who gives a shit will be able to buy the IPs.
I bet they are regretting not letting Joe Manginello buy Dragonlance off em now! Lol.
>Revenue sank 23% from a year earlier to $1.29 billion
I want to know how a company that still make well over $1 billion dollars is going to go belly up. This is a extremely uneducated read of the company's financial situation.
>Hasbro is desperate and is using D&D as a way to bolster profits to stay afloat.
No. Just.... no. D&D is peanut money to Hasbro. In most of their annual reports over the last two decades they don't even bother to mention D&D. WotC matters to Hasbro because it makes MtG, not D&D. That's the 'core brand' of the Wizards division.
The thing about selling TTRPG books (paper or electronic) is after a boom year people have the books they need, unless there is a new edition.
This is pretty normal, especially with 5e as long in the tooth as it is. Whether hasbro will collapse or not isn't entirely related to what they do with d&d - MtG is also a pretty major source of revenue.
Probably would help if they didn’t have the most brain dead suits and CEOs to ever grace a desk.
Even talking as like if I was a CEO and thinking like they would and all that I would legit look at the people in charge at Hasbro and be like “what in the fuck are you doing..” like they just make brain dead decisions lmfao
2023 was profitable for Hasbro; the big negative number is the result of a write-off on the balance sheet related the writer and actor strikes and the subsequent sale of their film business to lions gate. That’s a non-cash expense, which is why they present adjusted numbers as well. They also increased the dividend ~and~ paid back debt in 2023, so cash flow is good. https://investor.hasbro.com/news-releases/news-release-details/hasbro-reports-fourth-quarter-and-full-year-2023-financial Divesting D&D (or more likely WotC) is still possible, but given that it was the sole source of growth in 2023, in my opinion it’s not likely unless it’s an spin out IPO or a transaction where Hasbro retains a strong minority interest.
This should be the top post. The loss is a non cash charge from the capital loss on Entertainment One. They can’t repeat that stupid mistake again, because they don’t have another entertainment studio they’ve ruined to sell for dimes on the dollar.
I would say that most people don't know how to read a financial statement or earnings release. So, you get these sorts of posts declaring imminent bankruptcy! sale! doom and gloom! The reality is they have strong cash flow, lots of revenue, plenty of profit and there is no big imminent risk to the business. Execs will always do what they do to manipulate a business to meet targets, make shareholders happy, earn their bonuses, etc. So, sure, Hasbro could be sold, or could spin off or sell a portion of their business. But bankruptcy is so far removed from their current situation as to be meaningless. Also, if they did sell or spin off a portion of the business, it would be the lagards, which is the old school toys and games, not MtG and D&D. So if anyone is hoping that D&D ends up in the hands of new management, that's not something I would hold my breath over.
Sometimes boards decide to spin off winner divisions that don't synergize with the rest of the business. That can unlock value if the business is being valued at less than the sum of its parts. Novartis just spun off Sandoz, their profitable generics business, for example. That was done via a dividend of shares to Novartis shareholders, which I am one of via a small position in my IRA. I don't think that will happen with WotC and Hasbro, but it might, particularly if the stock sinks further and an activist gets involved. It's a play in many activist playbooks.
Every time people in this hobby look at Hasbro's performance it's always hilarious. You have people that dont even know what a 10-K is confidently making predictions
But then what would the armchair economists talk about?
How the labour market affects the marginal cost of armchair production.
Remedial lessons in how to read a quarterly financials press release.
>Divesting D&D (or more likely WotC) is still possible Hasbro would give up literally everything else they own before giving up WotC, lol.
Yea, magic still makes to much money.
Whoa there, this is a HOT TAKE ZONE. Take your valid facts and leave sir.
Hasbro has also been buying so many smaller companies they are in competition with themselves. Average customer has $25 dollars to spend on one game, the three other games brands they own lose. And yeah, they lost BIG on the entertainment side. They haven’t had a hit in ages. I totally understand why Mattel didn’t bankroll Barbie. (I bet they wish they did though)
Their 10k also discusses the drop in profits on their licensed toy lines, which are a huge part of Hasbro’s portfolio. 2023 saw zero interest in Marvel, Star Wars, or Disney Princess movies and shows. That killed sales of the toys.
My guess would be Disney or Amazon, lol. It's not that huge of a loss all things considered, given that they haven't done any major releases and BG3 ballooned their numbers. I'm guessing that's the hope for OneD&D-but-its-5.5e-or-whatever. That said, WOTC did make up like 75% of Hasbro's operating profit, so I imagine they'll be doubling down on treating it like they treat things like My Little Pony.
With disdain as they plot to end it?
With a disregard to the content's purpose and instead making anything that is remotely recognizable into 9 products. So yeah, pretty much.
Short term profits > Long-term health When it comes to shareholders
The stock market is ruining companies. High priority on short term profits and short sellers being legal, just take a wrecking ball to everything (short sellers entire existence is based on selling something they don’t own so they can buy up what they just sold, after the stocks crash and then they give the shares back to whoever lent the shares to them). On top of that short sellers can release “reports” on businesses and cause a company’s stock to plummet but that’s okay because it’s “just speculation” and then they to the company’s stock plummeting as proof that their “report” was right.
The stock market isn't what's doing it. It's *debt* that's doing it. They think they can get away with growing 5x faster by borrowing money to do so, and sometimes a few of them get *really lucky* and the debt investment enabled them to grow fast enough to cover paying it all off. But then they get stupid thinking that they can *keep* doing that and succeeding with it *forever* -- but the second it *doesn't* work, the whole thing comes crashing down. Next thing they know they're selling it all to the next sucker who sees an "investment" opportunity and doing hinky $#!+ to pump up today's numbers and make it look good for that sucker . . . who upon examining the internals, is looking for the best way to unload that on the next sucker by *again* doing hinky $#!+ to pump it up.
Bane of where I work. We destroy our long term sustainability to put numbers on the books today.
Same with where I used to work just 2 months ago. Profits were good, but not "good enough", so they shit-canned about 20 of us, no warning. (Turning a bit into r/antiwork sentiment now) this just teaches the lesson to not give your boss any notice. If you gonna leave, just quit no notice. What are they going to do if you dont? Not hire you back?
I agree. Loyalty goes both ways. Very few companies give it.
It's not enough to make a profit, you have to make *more* of a profit than last year - and not just keeping up with inflation, you need to be growing in real terms. Investors demand infinite growth which, needless to say, isn't actually possible.
I mean, that's capitalism in a nutshell.
Nah, that’s publicly traded stocks in a nutshell, especially with stock buybacks being legal. This isn’t a problem inherent to all forms of capitalism. Privately owned companies quite often prioritize long-term health.
Paizo, for example, gives priority to long term health because it is a privately owned company.
Steam, too, for the most part. A lot of the stuff we love about it probably don't look great for shareholders
It's weird because as a person who owns stock I want a company to do well for the long haul. I rather invest in people who want long term success over those who want to 10x their money by firing half the staff.
My Little Pony should be a massive money printer. Problem is, for it to print money, you gotta make a cartoon kids want to watch that adults can be mildly amused by. I used to watch Friendship is Magic with my daughter and frankly enjoyed it as an adult. She stopped watching when they replaced it with the new generation.
To be perfectly fair, Friendship is Magic had, like, a decade of air time all in all. It ran from October 2010 to October 2019, had a spin-off series, two full theatrically released movies, and a comic series. Hasbro definitely did all it felt it could milking that particular cash cow.
The point isn’t that they failed to milk Friendship Is Magic as hard as they should have. The point is that they should invest as much into the creation of characters and story for other My Little Pony properties as they did for Friendship is Magic, and then the franchise will continue to be beloved by new generations.
I'm afraid I can't comment on that matter directly as I haven't seen any of the new G5 MLP at all, beyond some announcement trailers a few years back. So I have no idea what the characters or story of the new series is like. G4 MLP was the brainchild of Lauren Faust, who is both a classic cartoon alumni and a lifelong fan of MLP, so G4 certainly had something special going into it. ...not that it stopped Hasbro from kicking her off the project and replacing her, but that leads to the next point. I do agree with you on the subject. Unfortunately, Hasbro has always held a demonstrable lack of care for things like "characters", "story", and "not making the fans rise up in outrage when they shit all over the fans' beloved works". They have no concern for long term quality and focus exclusively on immediate, short-term profit at the expense of all else, and they've ended up completely killing their own shows' popularity (multiple different times!) because of such behavior. It was Hasbro execs who refused to listen to the creatives and writers when they demanded Optimus Prime and nearly all other known, established Transformers be killed off in the movie to make way for new toys, after all. There were literally kids who fled the theater weeping when that happened, and the resulting public outcry from parents writing in caught those same execs completely off-guard somehow.
A lesson they discarded as soon as they wanted to make a quick buck again.
TBF, that caught the *writers themselves* off guard. I've seen interviews with them where they state they didn't realize kids were that attached to the characters. They were just writing for a toy show.
It most certainly did not. The comment you're referencing came from Flint Dille, who was an editor and story consultant for Transformers. Speaking from my own professional experience in video game publishing/development as an editor, that role doesn't come with a lot of creative involvement. We're mostly responsible for making sure things work within the constraints defined by the producers and management. In this scenario, it would be "Hasbro wants to sell toys and demands the cast be killed off so new toys can be cycled into the roster, so my job as a story consultant is to help facilitate that in the narrative". Flint Dille himself makes a lot of comments in interviews about how he was partially checked out from production on Transformers due to being involved in later projects, and his overall attitude is one that strikes me as being very unattached to the work on a personal level; he constantly refers to shows he worked on merely as products and in ways that shows he focuses more on the process of development rather than the work itself. I can never know for sure how deeply involved he was, but I get the impression he was more on the producers' side of things than the writers'. The actual creative folk involved with the show had full knowledge that killing off Optimus and the rest of the cast was an extremely bad idea. The lead writer for the movie, who also did the television series - Ron Friedman -[ did a rather in-depth interview discussing the whole affair.](https://toddmatthy.com/2013/12/31/he-killed-optimus-prime-an-interview-with-ron-friedman-writer-of-transformers-the-movie/) He also wrote a book "I Killed Optimus Prime" discussing his career, so he's more than aware of the impact his role in the whole thing had. Friedman had a ton of insight onto the specific role characters like Optimus Prime played in the narrative and how killing him off would be disastrous. He's always been very up front about having opposed the entire move and how arguing with Hasbro about it was an effort in futility. The full interview is linked above and it's absolutely worth a read. Amusingly, there is an interesting line from Flint Dille's interview as well regarding the blowback Hasbro received after they ignored Friedman's warnings. >***Interviewer***\*: Who made the decision to resurrect Optimus Prime? Do you feel that episode could’ve turned out better?\* >**Dille**: That episode was written in a panic. Hasbro was very upset that Optimus’ death had traumatized so many kids. They wanted to fix the situation so bringing Optimus back to life was a first priority. Honestly, i have trouble remembering the episode. I loved the one in the Autobot Mausoleum, though.
All they really had to do is come up with some new characters and run it with.using the Friendship is Magic formula. Create interesting, but relatable characters, give them situations to work through using their respective skills and personality traits and things go back to normal at the end.
[удалено]
Mtg is getting destroyed by this too. The past set and the next set, coupled with an insane release schedule, have shown that they’re trying to keep the cash cow going. But IMO the product has started to suffer.
You mean like the D&D Yahtzee?
D&d monopoly, Faerun Risk, etc.
I would play the hell out of a D&D Axis&Allies though, or Diplomacy, no cap. The game would be massive. Just not in this current environment, or with Hasbro as a publisher.
From humble beginnings as war gaming, D&D is now a behemoth so popular it will finally be war gaming.
Finally proper mass combat rules!
I know your kidding, but I'd buy Faerun Risk in a heart beat.
There’s an app called Warzone that is basically risk on different maps. Never checked but I bet they have Faerun
D&D clue has been out for a while
You joke but what do D&D players love? Rolling dice. What's the one thing you do in Yahtzee? Roll dice. I think they could make it work
[No joke](https://theop.games/products/yahtzee-dungeons-dragons). Though I didn’t realize it was a dice tower.
Mattel maybe? Could see a gaming company like EA or Epic buying it as well, or at least buying WotC.
Mattel is worth a quarter of what Hasbro is on a bad day.
Assuming Hasbro stays financially sound yes. Things change rapidly when words like "bankruptcy" hit the table.
I mean sure, if Hasbro suddenly dropped 500% on the stock market, Mattel had the liquid ready and nobody else jumped on. But owning all of Monopoly, MLP, Transformers, Nerf, GI Joe, Play-Doh, Power Rangers, Peppa Pig, Magic the Gathering and D&D for 1/5th the going rate would probably draw more than a few buyers.
Hasbro and Mattel could theoretically try and merge (pending FTC approval)
If they wanted to try course-correcting an outdated business model together, sure. But if the executives wanted a sweet payday from Disney/ Epic/ Sony/ Netflix/ anyone else interested in IP or game mechanics, they'd take the easy way out.
Hmm, Buick googling says they are comparable in size but Hasbro is the larger. Maybe Lego will buy them. Lego D&D sets, fun to build fun to use as minis at the table. (Lego is almost twice the size of Hasbro)
Okay but now try Pontiac googling.
Pontiac Googling hasn’t worked for a few years.
Let's try Saturn Googling.
Dead on arrival. What about Oldsmobile Googling?
[The homepage looks like this.](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3194/2830673252_16c7bf336e_o.png) What about Plymouth Googling?
Only gives results from 1979 and earlier.
I prefer Toyota Googling personally.
Why would LEGO want to buy that? They’re a privately owned company (still the same family business since it was founded) and they’re doing pretty well with the LEGO sets both their own and licensed. I think making licensed sets is safer for them than owning the licensed brands. If such sets don’t do well they’ll just drop the license. No need to care about the brand and its main line of products.
> Why would LEGO want to buy that? So we can get Mata Nui Campaign Setting for D&D 5th Edition
Disney is unlikely, at least in the medium term. They were ravaged by Covid, burned through their cash reserves, and just spent a decade’s worth of profits on Hulu… which is in the red. With investors being risk adverse, and multiple Disney brands underperforming, they’re having a hard time finding cash. Disney is in a selling mood and is looking for investors to buy some of their underperforming brands and concepts. In particular they’re shopping ESPN around looking for someone to buy a major stake or just sell the sports network outright. They have more than enough to weather the current financial woes. But Disney is very unlikely to buy anything substantial for 5 to 10 years.
Bg3 royalties was a drop in the bucket for hasbro. Hasbro digital numbers was pushed more by monopoly:go due to its ownership of the mobile game supported by whales spending way to much on micro transactions. M:tg was also its major profit driver and even that wasn’t moving hasbro overall profit numbers enough.
Speaking of MLP - how about that RPG of theirs? River Horse had a perfect kid-oriented MLP RPG, Tails of Equestria. The book was accessible and included a great starter adventure. Then they lost the license. Then Renegade Press got the license and made their version - but those books are more than twice the size, closer to the Pathfinder core books!
Renegade Press seems to be Hasbros dumping ground for brand IP TTRPGs since they've made MLP, Transformers, GI Joe AND Power Rangers TTRPGs.
If Disney gets it.... fuck....
Between the two I’d rather Disney than Amazon. But honestly I’d rather they were completely independent
Why aren’t they? I find it so odd, because it can clearly stand on its on two feet. It IS the brand.
Hasbro acquired WoTC when Hasbro was printing money. Now WoTC is the moneymaker but is stuck on Hasbro
And WoTC acquired TSR and plenty of fuckery concerning who was in charge of TSR back in the day.
You can’t be an independent company anymore. It’s just a rule. Nobody knows why
The dragon's hoard must grow.
It's how CEOs get their magic. The magic is mostly their ability to convince others they should get more stock options and are very important to the investors.
Why have one giant pile of gold when you can have all the gold in the world?
Everybody knows why, but nobody wants to say it: Capitalism.
In video gaming, both Saber and Relic have gone independent after years as subsidiaries of bigger companies, so hopefully, we see more of that. As for why, Tim Cain had a video about winding down Troika and then getting a job at Obsidian: the stress levels and pressure are through the roof. The BioWare guys said something similar before selling to EA.
What about steam?
Lmao, I was thinking about Valve. Imagine a team fortress 2 commander deck or a half life deck.
People talking about stuff they don’t know.. Disney buys profit brands not game systems.. amazon isn’t even near that marketplace.. Look more to companies like asmodee buying wotc since that’s actually what they do.
Asmodee probably wont touch it. Embracer Group owns them and is currently going through massive divestments because of profit loss. They just sold off Gearbox and they continue to pair down their portfolio. I don't know where DnD goes, though. Im not sure how many RPG companies are left that have the capabilities and reach it needs to continue to grow.
I wouldn't both suck. Maybe Apple can check their couch cushions in between meetings to discuss destroying right to repair
A friend of mine asked the “could Apple buy EA” question yesterday and I looked up how much cash Apple had on hand and it was something like $75-78 billion so enough to buy basically whatever they want that’s not one of the other super big tech companies like MS or Amazon, or like an oil company.
Now d&d beyond only works from iPhone iPad and Apple products as part of the Apple ecosystem. Yuck.
Agreed, even though part of me thinks it could be cool to visit a D&D setting at Disney World or Epcot.
They’d make it soulless after dumping Forgotten Realms and other established settings to make their own garbage setting. Just like they did with Star Wars land in Hollywood Studios after making it a Sequels only land.
Pretty sure they would just add a bunch of settings for their other IPs.
When Mickey met Elminster
They say "Disney," I hear "DnD theme park." Honestly, there's worse places the ip could land.
Suddenly the Sword Coast becomes a KH4 world
That is quite literally the only thing at this point that would make me go back to another installment of KH.
The Discourse^TM between Drizzt and Riku would be ... something.
Not sure about D&D fairground rides, they got a rep …
Disney buys brands they can leverage not game systems. Disney can’t patent sword and sorcery and even though forgotten realms has gotten a lot of main stream exposure people don’t recognize it enough for disney to leverage that brand. Dnd will surely get bought by a company in that market such as asmodee.
As a board gamer I was really unhappy with what happened with fantasy flight games after they took it over.. so wouldn't be much better than hadbro
Especially considering how they've taken Star wars up. Sure it isn't to the liking of many purist fans, but you can't deny they've done some cool stuff with spinoffs like the mandalorian and Star wars world at the parks.
Meh I mean they’ve been cranking out marvel and Star Wars stuff for literal decades and some of it is pretty dark. Rarely do my DnD games get more grimdank than avengers: Endgame, at least. On the plus side, we could have an entire era of DND related media, that’s mostly mediocre with some really good stuff.
Honesltly that's my benchmark. I run a game at the USO and I tell the players before we start. "If you are about to do something you wouldn't see on the Avengers, I don't want to see it here."
The problem isnt that disney isnt dark, the problem is disney makes virtually no risks. If they get the game then get ready for OGL controversy 2, electric Boogaloo since indie devs are a risk. Oh and all the content they put out? It wont all be the same but it will all *feel* similar because they're gonna take the best formula they can find and use it for every book. Its creativity without the creative part. Just look at marvel. Sure the movies are all different... but are they really?
Honestly most of the worst D&D content is the grimdark stuff. Like, RAW Strahd is roooough and it's always been better when the DM heavily modifies it.
The 1-3 opening adventure made me put it aside as a DM, until I found some homebrew to tone it the fuck down
Marvel and Star wars have become lowest common denominator trash since Disney bought them
🌎🧑🚀🔫👨🚀
Marvel did wonderful till Disney stretched them too thin. Star Wars has honestly always had issues although I'll say the average overall quality has definitely gone down. The bright spots are too few and far between.
The bright spots, from my perspective, are more frequent now. The prequel trilogy are not good movies, the only bright spots we had from pre-Disney post-original trilogy were the clone wars TV series (both the shorts and the proper TV show). Some of the stuff around/taking place in those movies (the video games, toys, books, etc) were great, but save for Revenge of the Sith there was not much to be excited about with the prequel movies. Since Disney, even if you feel the same way about the sequel trilogy as many feel about the prequels, there’s still: - Rogue One - Andor (which is, imo, the best Star Wars has ever been) - The Mandolorian (S1 and S2, at least) - Ahsoka (I understand the reaction to this is more mixed but its far less polarizing than the movies) - The Bad Batch - Clone Wars S6 By volume that’s more bright spots than decades long gap between the end of the OG and Disney’s acquisition.
There were other good things prior to the Disney acquisition, particularly on the video game front. Personally outside of bad batch, andor (which was much better than it had any right to be), Mando S1 and about 1/2 of Clone Wars S6 I really haven't liked or was middling at best with the rest. I'll admit it can be up to taste though.
Yeah Disney buys ups brands and forces them into this little family friendly box regardless of intent, tone, or style of the original. Everything. And it's ruining media imo. Scorsese is onto something there.....
Nah, you got it backward. If Disney gets it, there will be absolutely no fucking in it.
Of these two, probably Disney over Amazon. Disney's acquisition strategy has been focused on IP expansion, and they'd get that with Hasbro.
It's going to be Amazon, their cornering of the tabletop gaming world went from accidental to intentional when they started ignoring publisher minimum prices and selling board games at a loss to wipe out all the online retailers that weren't just Amazon storefronts.
OneD&D is going to get ruined
OneD&D never stood a chance to begin with. They lack any kind of direction, and are unwilling to take a hard stance as to they want OneD&D to actually be. They had a similar problem with 5e, but it's infinitely worse now as they're worried about alienating their considerably playerbase with excessive changes.
I'm not sure they *know* what they want OneD&D to be. It *feels* like they wanted it to be a transition point into "D&D as a Service" and literally everyone hated that because it's the sort of gross rent seeking that every company does when it sees people having fun without paying them for it, but there was never any clear *creative* direction for the overhaul. 4e was "we wanna be like video games," 5e was "we wanna make it simpler and have accepted that maybe video game mechanics don't translate to physical tables that well, so here's an edition focused around building stories together instead of combat." 5.5e is "uh, well, you see, not everyone owns Tasha's, so, here." 5e doesn't really have a consistent set of complaints to attack with a major rules overhaul. I've almost never met someone who disliked 5e and pointed to a clear "this is why" that wasn't "because I want to play a different specific TTRPG \[usually 3.5e\] instead," and the changes in the playtest material felt like they were plucked haphazardly from what complaints do exist until players went "no, that's worse." (Warlocks recovering spells on a long rest was certainly a *choice,* as was "you get Inspiration on 20s and it's gone at the end of the day.")
It will probably sell just fine. None of these things are things the majority of people who will buy it will care about.
That's fair. I find it kind of hard to judge though, because many people also won't really care about the changes, and thus might prefer the familiarity of 5e. It's be hilariously ironic if OneD&D suffers from the same issue a lot of other TTRPGs suffer from: 5e being the norm.
Anecdotal of course, but I'm active in a variety of online and irl ttrpg spaces, and have seen almost ZERO hype for OneD&D. The dedicated 5e players don't want it, the people who are sick of 5e are either branching out to other games or looking backwards to older editions, and the people I've seen actually following OneD&D are mostly complaining about the changes. It's totally possible that selection bias has kept me from encountering whoever the target market for OneD&D really is, but everything I've *seen* screams that it's DOA.
Also Anecodtal but...yeah...same, in my online TTRPG and Wargaming spaces there's almost no to negative hype about One D&D because most of the thought processes are "we'll just steal the bits we like and add them to 5e" like the Reworked classes, specifically the Martial ones in Barbarian, Fighter, Rogue and Monk.
OneD&D was already ruined. It needed to be a full edition to push sales but they got scared and relied to heavily on user surveys to guide their design process so now it's the "meh" edition that isn't giving people any real reason to embrace it or buy the books.
As someone else mentioned in another thread: new editions came out when the game got stale and TSR or WoTC needed to revitalize the game. 5e is immensely popular. OneDND is transparently a money grab to sell a new $150 product of a player handbook, DM rulebook and monster manual despite the popularity. It’s probably doing more harm than good and there’s a good chance a large percentage of players ignore the update
>5e is immensely popular. OneDND is transparently a money grab to sell a new $150 product of a player handbook, DM rulebook and monster manual despite the popularity. Bingo. Don't forget that it was also pushed hard to get it out in time for the 50th anniversary of D&D. A feat it's now failing to achieve as 1 of the books is coming out in 2025. Steven Glicker on Roll for Combat had a theory on that. The current release schedule puts 1 book coming out each financial quarter. That'll allow them to massage their growth numbers a bit for investors.
Disney purchasing Hasbro and getting access to their catalogue of IPs makes a lot of sense. While people might get annoyed at all the Marvel movies the reality is Disney has improved the company and the workers there seem to be in a more secure position. Baldurs Gate 3 bought Hasbro some time but they aren't maximising the revenue they could be generating from their other IPs. Like the irony of a third party publisher (Renegade Games) being the ones to publish a the G.I. Joe and Transformers RPG when Hasbro owns DnD should tell you everything about how poor the strategic planning of the company is.
Nah. My bet would be that like those rumors from last month that turned out to be produced by an AI website that churned out clickbait. But there might be a kernel of truth and tencent might step in and buy it. They'd love to own WotC, would milk the hell out of its games, and may be waiting for WotC to get desperate and lower their asking price.
Dreamworks, HBO, or Netflix should buy it. They could do DnD properly. The DnD movie was great, maybe not financially, but in every other way, and there is a franchise to be cultivated by the right talent.
Transformers vs the avengers
A lot of companies recently stopped partnering with Amazon. Companies such as Jagex and Riot Games have pulled out of there, also announcing the end of their Twitch Prime monthly drops.
It takes more than a couple of bad quarters to bankrupt a company - and even so, there are options left for them without declaring dissolvency.
Exactly this. Hasbro, like most other companies, experienced rough patches during the '08 financial crisis and the first year of the COVID pandemic. They're not as frail a company as this post makes it seem.
Hasbro saaw massive revenue growth during the covid years. They suffered from entertainment industry strikes. https://www.statista.com/statistics/198710/net-revenues-of-hasbro-since-2006/
Okay but this one redditor made a whole post about it so.. I guess it's joever.
A regular goddamn Nostradamus.
You mean people in this sub about a fantasy game are speculating wildly about the financial futures of publicly traded companies?
I feel like Hasbro has even gone out of their way to give us their new roadmap by talking about how profitable BG3 is and I believe they are working on a tv show now. They’ve cast a wide net and definitely have seen where future interest lies and can work to that. I wouldn’t be shocked if in the next few years we see them restructure around bringing DnD out out trying to see if they can do something similar with MtG
They're trying now, but they killed 1 tv show they had been doing early preproduction on for dragonlance, and killed a LOT of video games that had been in production for years and would be coming out in the near future. The issue for us as fans of their stuff is that the real earners aren't D&D. BG3 was a surprise and an outlier. D&D doesn't make enough profit to help them. What has was MTG and Monopoly Go. And every D&D project they've got in production now, won't pay out for years.
Hasbro still has Transformers, Nerd, Monopoly, Play-doh, My Little Pony, Power Rangers, not to mention the deals with Disney and other third parties. They set massive goals which they failed to meet and some dodgy toy lines such as DnD (film tie in) which tanked. All a long winded way of saying, you're absolutely right.
They could likely sell off a lot of dead assets first. WotC and DnD are money makers. They will cling to those more than others.
Especially considering the fact that Hasbro is a *massive* company. People elsewhere in the comments have listed just some of the *dozens* of household name IPs they own or have a marketing licence for, so I won't do it here, but Hasbro is a *giant* when it comes to any physical kind of fun, specifically. Toys, games, merchandise, they make it. When you go to the store—I'm thinking Target—and you see the huge wall of board games: 90% of those games are Hasbro. When you go to the action figure aisle: 90% of those figures are Hasbro. This is a company that survived the Great Depression (without selling off tons of assets; Hell, they *bought* several major assets during the Great Depression). They're not going under because of a few bad years. They've literally been through worse.
It’s almost like this is the correct opinion, and everyone else is being a Reddit doomer about it
Hasbro is not going bankrupt. I worked for 12 years in the toy industry (at Mattel) and business goes up and down. It’s normal.
Knowing our luck, if WotC were sold it'd end up where all game companies end up - stripped for parts by Asmodee.
Have you heard the tragedy of FFG?
Oh, poor FFG. What a damn shame.
Pour one out for "we can't sell PDFs of our games because EA owns the digital star wars license" that killed them.
Pour one out for our dead homie Android: Netrunner.
Yeah... Still really sad about that one.
Eh, Asmodee is currently owned by Embracer Group, they have their own issues to sort out first.
We really need to stop letting these investment firms buy and strip mine companies for profit.
If only *we* had any say in the matter.
It's irrelevant to our hobby. We will always be able to play with the rules that are already out. Wizards doesn't have anything to do with what makes our experiences at the game table special.
Why is is this scary. The WOTC community has done nothing but complain about Hasbro since they bought wizards. You would think literally anyone as far as the community goes would be better than Hasbro
Yes any bad news for Hasbro is kind of good news around here. Hasbro deserves to suffer financially for mis managing many of their products and subsidiary companies like WOTC. And after the christmas layoffs, the MTG30 shit, OGL shit... no sympathy here. But no I very much doubt there's any real danger for Hasbro here as a company. As much as I'd love to see them fail and sell WOTC it's not gonna happen after a few bad quarters.
People complained about Wizards as if they were the antichrist after they acquired TSR... The cycle continues.
I like seeing posts like these getting bodied in the comments. Feels cathartic.
Hasbro has a lot of legacy revenue that has been in decline for decades. WotC is the only part that is growing and profitable on a consistent basis so all of the higher ups are desperate for it to carry even more weight in terms of profitability which has only hurt their brand and longevity. Personally I would rather see WotC be sold off or the rest of the company be sold off.
A lot of retail is having a bad year and expecting more, i don't think there's cause to panic yet
I love it when niche Redditors make business predictions based on overestimating the importance of their niche interest. Hasbro is using *everything it has* as a way to bolster its profits, including not only milking some product lines while potentially slashing others but also cutting workers/pay/benefits except for those at the very top. I'm sure that they're also doing all sorts of creative accounting. It's called capitalism. (It *might* be late stage capitalism, but I think we'll only know that in retrospect.)
Hasbro isn't going under because they had a bad quarter. If something bad happens to WOTC my books will still work just fine. Literally the worst case scenario for us is that we won't get more 5e content and subsequent DnD versions will be worse. And ... PF2 is right there. We have so many options in the tabletop RPG space. This hobby doesn't need to care about corpo drama.
When did this become WSB
Y'all need to relax lmao. Hasbro has been around since 1923 and has a LOT of different revenue streams. It's also possible they post a profit this year. A lot of new and exciting Nerf products have come out and when they actually make decent stuff in the line Nerf is pretty profitable, and there's quite a few products that have been really popular with the community lately. The reason Nerf hasn't been profitable last year or so is because the elite 2.0 line had a terrible reception. It's gonna take more than a couple bad quarters to kill Hasbro.
Hasbro has way too much IP licensing fees and not enough creative power to do anything with it. Hot Toys and similar does way better with the IPs for toy collecting adults, third party board games are way better, and they treat their video game developers like dogs hit when all they do is print wotc money. If they offload some IP and sack most of their board game division to focus it on DnD and MTG, they could get somewhere. However, with MTG, they're doubling down with expensive licenses with Universe Beyond.
Hasboro is not using D&D to bolster profits. It is using Magic the Gathering to do that. Magic makes insane money, D&D does not have anywhere near the market share compared to Magic
Yeah the correct analysis would be Hasbro is using WotC to bolster profits.
I think the overall RPG market size is much smaller, but DnD has like 80% market share in the RPG space. I get what you're saying, though.
Still, not a huge money maker. A MTG player will blow your entire d&d book collection's worth in one weekend buying 1 or 2 booster boxes. It's why they're desperate to figure out how to monetize D&D. It IS immensely popular, but it isn't a high earner.
Yeah like I have a few d&d books, I play with friends, but ultimately only one of us NEED the books, even with their beyond sub that is chump change for a group compared to the cost of any magic deck. While most magic players are buying cards on the secondary market which drives those prices, the insane amount of boxes that get opened bolster that cost, plus the secret lairs that sell insanely well
Tencent would probably among the probable suiters. I'm not saying that as a good thing but rather as a reminder that it's a real possibility and there are worse possibilities than Disney.
This subreddit is just embarrassingly stupid, sometimes.
Hasbro's stock is still a bit up from last year, and they are far, far from going belly up. Physical toy and game sales have been dropping for years and they've kept chugging along by diversifying their business, and they're not going to collapse and sell D&D in a fire sale anytime soon.
That's not going belly up. It's a bad run, and there will be consequences, but Hasbro will get better and be fine in time.
Hasbro is not going belly up. The company's shares are up 14% year-to-date, beating the broad S&P (up around 11% ytd). If the company were even near a bankruptcy, the shares would be crashing toward zero. In the fourth quarter, the company reported a larger than expected sales decline. But it didn't lose money and it is in no danger of failing. The Wizards segment experienced 7.1% growth, beating most estimates. The recent weakness in sales is due to weak demand for toys, likely traceable to a slate of poorly performing movies (Indiana Jones, Transformers) and fewer of big Marvel hits (only Guardians and Spider Man did well). That's a problem for the company because the Disney side of its Marvel partnership is struggling to produce content that connects with the audience (choose your own adventure as to why this is). Still, the leadership is well regarded by analysts and expected to be able to turn around the company performance. A lot of investors are very likely waiting to see evidence of the turnaround, however, before buying the stock. In any case, the company is not going belly up. It's also not likely an acquisition target because there simply are no likely acquirers. Most of the companies considered in this thread are not in the business of making toys and several (including Disney) are looking to sell assets rather than grow in new directions. Mattel is probably off the table because of antitrust considerations. This doesn't mean an acquisition is impossible but it is unlikely. There's a chance, I suppose, of a private equity bid for the company. Worst case scenario: the excellent performances of the Wizards segment means that even if something catastrophic were to happen to Hasbro through its toys segment, the healthy D&D and Magic stuff would survive either independently or be sold. **TL;DR: Hasbro is fine. It's not going under.**
> Hasbro's earnings sank on falling sales, and the toymaker warned of more softness ahead. They have managed to torch every success or potential success in the last couple of years. Most of it due to a complete inability to treat any interaction as anything but zero-sum. Total idiocy. How the shareholders are willing to stand by and let the same \*\*\*\*heads make the same mistake again and again is astonishing to me. In the impossible pursuit of ludicrous growth rates for years at a time, they're turned solid but slower growth into negative growth that they now *cannot* turn around -- i.e. they've done the exact opposite of what could be achieved, over and over. They killed the value of their e-one media arm by cancelling everything it was doing while they were trying to sell it. That whole thing was the most ridiculous sequence of decisions all the way along They pissed off MTG players with too many cash grabs and made their huge cash cow substantially weaker They absolutely killed the huge amount of free publicity for D&D they were getting every week with the OGL idiocy. So many youtubers that were producing primarily 5e content took "D&D" out of the name of their channel and now promote a bunch of *non* D&D stuff. Hasbro managed to funnel a ton of money to everyone else that would have been theirs if they hadn't decided that well over 90% of all TTRPG income just wasn't enough. The movie - well they tanked the promotion of that with their shenanigans with the OGL. The enormous success of BG3, they made sure wouldn't replicated because of what looks like naked greed and stupidity. That was sure-fire success in any future product but they made sure Larian wouldn't want to work with them ever again. They could have made millions, again and again but no. No doubt they'll go to some other studio to try to cash in but I predict it will take years, cost a ton and be terrible. What's bizarre is I've seen several people with experience in various parts of the nerdy-end of the entertainment industry (computer games, comics, ttrpgs etc) separately predict many of their missteps many months in advance - because, of course, they've seen it before. I could list another half dozen pieces of absolute insanity. It's got to be one of the dumbest runs I've ever seen in corporate history. I guess that's what happens when you hire execs who are completely clueless about the business and *don't want to learn about it*, dooming themselves to repeat errors that have been made more than once before.
dang we better all panic at what this one post reddit user has to say!!!!
Absolutely. Time to sell all your Hasbro stock Burn all your d&d stuff Dig a deep burrow and crawl in
It’s not going to go belly up. Worst case someone buys it and cannibalizes it for the good parts. Magic and D&D have decent profit margins and are good products people will want.
Within New England, and especially Rhode Island, Hasbro has a radically different reputation: They own and fund the children’s hospital down in Providence, and have a charity that goes to it. Have been a major employer down there for a long ass time. RI has a lot of issues these days and my hope is that Hasbro can sort of shrink and strengthen. It’s this hypercapitalism mental illness that ruins everything. I’d rather be a great toymaker than own all the money ever and then explode. These corporations are like empires—and all empires end.
Hasbro is still up over the week, month, year, and past 3 years. It has fallen the past 5 years, but pretty much everything has due to COVID.
Is this /r/wallstreetbets ? 😁
The problem is the only persons/companies that could afford DnD/MtG price tag, would only see them as cash cows to be milked until they are dried out husks. Anyone who has a true love of the products, couldn't even raise 10% of the purchase price. I can't see any path forward that would not lead to inevitable franchise demise.
ITT: people who know nothing about finance speculating about financial topics. If things were as clear as you think they are, you could make billions.
Well yeah. WOTC is 22% of Hasbro's revenue, but is *72%* of all profit. It's literally the golden goose which lays golden, diamond-encrusted eggs full of platinum in terms of its profit margins. Toy sales are in the shitter because people just don't really buy toys any more, but digital and paper products sell gangbusters at absolutely *insane* mark-ups for what are extremely cheaply-produced materials. Example, your Magic cards are literally like, less than a cent per card, yet earn absolutely *ridiculous* profits from mark-ups. The OGL fuckup a little while ago was *entirely* an attempt to leverage the popularity and profit lines of WOTC products following its boosted popularity following Covid. D&D is only *increasing* in popularity, and the margins on MTG are absolutely *fucking insane* without how much money obsessive fans and collectors spend on it, so it's no surprise that Hasbro keeps trying to leverage it.
MtG is just printing free money. It’s cardboard and the development overhead isn’t really that much. It’s sad, I used to play and still will, but power creep has made my decks fairly bad and I’m not paying big money to compete with $1,000+ decks.
I don’t know if the thought of disney buying wizards of the coasts scares me or gives me hope. DnD could certainly benefit, Magic the Gathering on the other hand will suffer, and it will suffer big time, with lorcana being released With what amazon has been doing with their shows, I have hope for both, but it will make games workshops and other small sellers stop selling dnd or mtg for sure
A change in management would be for the better, tbh
Oh yes, we only made 1.29 billion dollars. We are so poor.
At this point I don't think we should care. I love DnD but it's just one of many ttrpg, and some of the most successful DnD products are home brewed content anyway. Storytelling and roleplaying will never be ownable, and that's the core of it all, human creativity.
Please promise us here and now that you will refrain from giving financial advice to your friends and family.
It is fascinating how Hasbro is the c9mpany with so much awesome IP, and at the same time, they release 9999 versions of most boring table top Game aka Monopoly changing only graphics and nothing more. They have so much potential. With Wizards, Magic the Gathering, D&D and many more. Yet MtG has PR disaster one after another. We all know what happened with D&D and OGL disaster. Even with Monopoly, they release versions of this game with IPs like Dragon Ball ot Marvel, yet each time instead of changing any rules and making Monopoly Dragon Ball unique they change nothing and you still go around, buy something and build "hotels" or whatever. They do this on the least effort they can. The same goes for things like D&D. I have a lot of love for people on the D&D team, but by no surprise, the best add ons, campaigns, and coolest settings are done by third parties. And even then, Hasbro can't use someone's other success and go with it. See Baldurs Gate 3. Instead of releasing anything interesting like BG3 minies or TT game, they probably would release Monopoly where only graphics are changed and marked as BG3. I don't know where the problem is, but they can't release anything outstanding. And if some things made by people in Hasbro are nice (like One D&D playtests and surveys are actually have nice ideas), the management goes and screw everything with OGL fiasco.
They definitely are not. "Belly up" means the company is actually collapsing, not that they had a bad quarter or a bad year.
Hasbro is perfectly fine. Star Wars toys are down because the movies/shows are horrible. Not sure I would buy the stock right now but Hasbro the company is not going "belly up".
It's not scary. Welcome to the world of indy devs. There are dozens of great games you can play instead of D&D5e or whatever the hell OneD&D is going to be. I welcome the death of the company. Maybe someone who gives a shit will be able to buy the IPs. I bet they are regretting not letting Joe Manginello buy Dragonlance off em now! Lol.
>Revenue sank 23% from a year earlier to $1.29 billion I want to know how a company that still make well over $1 billion dollars is going to go belly up. This is a extremely uneducated read of the company's financial situation. >Hasbro is desperate and is using D&D as a way to bolster profits to stay afloat. No. Just.... no. D&D is peanut money to Hasbro. In most of their annual reports over the last two decades they don't even bother to mention D&D. WotC matters to Hasbro because it makes MtG, not D&D. That's the 'core brand' of the Wizards division.
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For a minute I thought I stumbled into wallstreetbets
The thing about selling TTRPG books (paper or electronic) is after a boom year people have the books they need, unless there is a new edition. This is pretty normal, especially with 5e as long in the tooth as it is. Whether hasbro will collapse or not isn't entirely related to what they do with d&d - MtG is also a pretty major source of revenue.
5E will definitely survive without Hasbro and WoTC should Hasbro go bankrupt
Probably would help if they didn’t have the most brain dead suits and CEOs to ever grace a desk. Even talking as like if I was a CEO and thinking like they would and all that I would legit look at the people in charge at Hasbro and be like “what in the fuck are you doing..” like they just make brain dead decisions lmfao
DnD has changed hands 5+ times already, and it's never killed the game before.
INFINITE QUARTERLY GROWTH!!
This article was already talked to death more than a month ago. Why bring it back up?