![]() Peter Jackson’s three-film adaptation of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings earned nearly $3 billion at the worldwide box office, won 17 Academy Awards and has a prequel series streaming on Amazon Prime. While D&D plodded modestly along, any number of other fantasy properties leapt off the page and into mainstream culture. But while it was the basis of a 1980s cartoon and a mixed bag of video games, D&D remained at its heart a publishing business, selling a set of lavishly illustrated hardcover rulebooks supplemented by novels and prewritten adventures. Tolkien’s novels of the mid-20th century- D&D introduced a modern generation to fantasy worlds of swords and sorcery. 900) to the medieval tales of King Arthur-not to mention J.R.R. Steeped in canonical Western literature from Beowulf (c. JAMEL TOPPIN FOR FORBESĭespite those impressive numbers, Dungeons & Dragons looks just as much like a missed opportunity. Wizards of the Coast's Seattle-area office features fantastical murals. … when I got a look at the numbers, I was like, ‘Yeah, this is a business I want to be a part of.’” “When Chris and I had our first conversation about this role,” says Williams, who replaced Cocks at Wizards in February, “I thought they had passionate fans, and that’s a good place to start from. An activist campaign by Alta Fox Capital Management this year unsuccessfully sought to spin off Wizards. “ D&D is, I think, the poster child for our brand blueprint strategy,” says Chris Cocks, who provided one signal of the division’s importance when he was promoted from Wizards president to Hasbro CEO early this year. And it is part of a phenomenally profitable unit, with Wizards accounting for 72% ($547 million) of Hasbro’s operating profit for 2021. But D&D is growing fast, with revenue up a reported 35% in 2020 from 2019 and more introductory D&D products sold in 2021 than when they were released in 2014. That is a small slice of the $1.3 billion in net revenue that Wizards of the Coast posted last year and looks even more modest next to Hasbro’s $6.4 billion. Arpiné Kocharyan, a UBS analyst, estimates that D&D is now responsible for $100 million to $150 million in annual revenue. ![]() In all, Wizards of the Coast estimates that 50 million people have played the game since 1974, and while Hasbro does not break out D&D as a segment in its public filings, it noted that 2021 represented the game’s ninth consecutive year of growth. ![]() Both properties sport official D&D licenses from Wizards of the Coast. Next year will see the release of a blockbuster D&D video game in Baldur’s Gate III-the latest in a series that has sold more than 5 million copies-plus a big-budget movie in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, starring Chris Pine and Michelle Rodriguez. Celebrities including Joe Manganiello, Deborah Ann Woll and Vin Diesel have sung the game’s praises, and D&D books frequently pop up on bestseller lists. Helped along by a prominent role in the hit Netflix series Stranger Things, 24% of D&D players are between 20 and 24 years old, with 18% in the 25-to-29 bracket and another 18% 30 to 34. And surprisingly for a game that’s about to turn 50, the players skew young. In fact, around 40% of D&D players are now female, according to a 2020 study Wizards of the Coast conducted with market research firm Newzoo. ![]()
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