Hasbro Needs To Respect Magic: The Gathering Way More
Every quarter, Hasbro does its usual earnings conference call. Most of it is incredibly boring, full of dimensionalising the verticals of proper revenue throughstreams or whatever it is investors talk about when they’re not busy Scrooge McDucking it. But every once in a while, you’ll get a neat little tidbit – and usually, for Hasbro, that tidbit is the sheer size of the Magic: The Gathering brand.
We’ve known how huge Magic is for a while. It’s regularly been listed as one of Hasbro’s biggest-sellers alongside Monopoly, beating out even Transformers and My Little Pony in revenue. We didn’t know until the latest earnings call that Magic accounts for approximately 70-80 percent of Wizards of the Coast’s revenue, completely eclipsing the cultural monolith Dungeons & Dragons in terms of profits and sales.
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This begs one question: if Magic is so much bigger than Transformers, My Little Pony, and even Dungeons & Dragons, why hasn’t Hasbro franchised the shit out of it? Why does it still feel like the nerdier, more obscure Dandy to D&D’s Beano?
D&D has a long history of massively popular games like Planescape Torment, Neverwinter Nights, and Baldur’s Gate. It’s had numerous TV shows (including this year’s Amazon exclusive Critical Role: The Legend of Vox Machina), and is even getting a movie, Honor Among Thieves, starring Chris Pine next year. It’s managed to thoroughly worm its way into the zeitgeist through the likes of Stranger Things, to the point where everybody has at least heard of Dungeons & Dragons. Not even a dead fish like last year’s Dark Alliance was enough to derail our collective enthusiasm for D&D.
In comparison, Magic gets almost
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