By Nathan Stone 

Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) is the largest name in tabletop role-playing games. It brings in millions of dollars annually and has a devoted following around the world. The game has enjoyed a resurgence in cultural relevance over the past decade that’s led to an explosion in popularity.  

It’s not enough.  

For the game’s parent company, Hasbro, D&D is still a brand mired in underachievement. As the former Wizards of the Coast CEO Cynthia Williams infamously said, the brand is “under monetized”. 

A ridiculous statement when discussing a game so popular it has a near monopoly in the role-playing game market. The utterance betrayed a deep lack of understanding about what D&D is, and more importantly what it isn’t.  

William’s complaint was made in 2022, but Hasbro’s latest quarterly report (Q3 2024) shows that the company may be no closer to figuring out how to grow D&D’s profit or popularity. Net revenues from Hasbro’s “Franchise Brands,” which includes D&D, Magic: The Gathering, Nerf, and others, declined year-over-year. 

The report lumps D&D together with Magic: The Gathering in all its revenue calculations. It is lucky then that Magic’s sales were up, as it papers over D&D’s stalled growth.  

The company’s frustration with D&D stems from a remarkably simple problem that is brutally difficult to solve. Players don’t need to pay to play. 

A group of five players need three books shared between them, dice, pencils, and access to a printer to play D&D for the rest of their lives. From this group of five, Hasbro is making about $180 US, once.  

With the help of friends, a player can play D&D for their entire life without spending a penny. 

Outside of D&D, the tabletop role-playing space is primarily a cottage industry of small publishers. There are hard limits to how much you can monetize a game that revolves around the imagination of its players. Eventually those players realize that they don’t need many (or any) of your products to run their games and tell their stories.  

A further headache for Hasbro is that their core D&D offerings, the rule books, are evergreen content. There are large communities revolving around playing older versions of D&D from the game’s first edition onwards. These players want and need nothing to keep playing the games they love.  

Hasbro’s leadership has tried to overcome these challenges by growing the brand in different directions. They’ve plastered the D&D name and logo over every conceivable item that a player might want to enhance their gaming experience. They’ve also tried to expand into the lifestyle brand territory with offerings including clothing, plushies, and decor. 

The largest and most successful of the company’s attempts to grow the game’s revenue is D&D Beyond. A subscription based digital service that offers rules, toolsets, and interactive virtual maps for players. This live service is the last best shot that D&D has to become the profit driver that Hasbro wishes it to be.  

At a July 2024 investor meeting, Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks said that D&D beyond contributes “over half” of D&D’s total revenue. An accomplishment, considering the company only acquired D&D Beyond in 2022. 

The subscription service, while a success, isn’t solving all of Hasbro’s problems with D&D. It is a product for established players and doesn’t grow the game in any meaningful way. The service is far more of a luxury than a necessity, even for groups that play online, and there is plenty of competition in the virtual tabletop space already. It also cannibalizes the sale of physical products, but it’s likely the company is fine with this, as digital distribution is far cheaper.  

Perhaps the largest issue with the D&D brand is that it couldn’t hold on to the momentum of its recent golden era, the pandemic. The Covid-19 lockdowns accidentally created the perfect conditions for interest in D&D to explode. Millions of people suddenly stuck at home and bored suddenly discovered (or rediscovered) an interest in role-playing.  

This period also coincided with the phenomenon of Critical Role, a YouTube show that features actors playing D&D live. The charismatic cast and interesting stories further enhanced the game’s popularity.  

During this time, D&D was in the mainstream spotlight in a way that it had never been. The game reached a bigger and more diverse audience than ever. With that came record profits. 

Not all the attention was positive. Hasbro made serious missteps in managing the game’s development. None more so than the Open Game License (OGL) scandal of early 2023. In brief, Hasbro sought to restrict the ability of third-party developers to create products that were compatible with D&D by changing the terms of a longstanding license. Amid a fan revolt, Hasbro scrapped the changes. 

Adding to Hasbro’s own missteps, the game has also been dragged into the seemingly endless online culture war. Accused of being too “woke” by a segment of its community. Some of that hate stems from edits made to the game changing existing lore and axing long existing content that was argued to be racist or sexist. 

This politicization has negatively affected discussion around the game. Injecting it with the same modern-day toxicity that many play D&D to escape.  

By 2023 the shine was coming off the D&D brand, but Hasbro still had dreams of breaking into the club of pop-culture behemoths alongside titans like Marvel, Star Wars, and Pokémon, with the movie Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Amongst Thieves.  

The dream of a franchise of films and related merchandise had dollar signs dancing in the eyes of Hasbro execs, but despite mostly positive reviews, D&D: Honour Amongst Thieves was a flop. Reportedly not making enough to cover its budget plus marketing. Fans of the game enjoyed it, but mainstream audiences didn’t care. 

Baldur’s Gate 3, a video game based in the D&D universe, released in summer of 2023 to universal acclaim. Hasbro, through its subsidiary Wizards of the Coast, pocketed around $90 million dollars from the licensing deal. A boost that couldn’t quite shore up its books that year due to a 15% overall drop in revenue. 

Although entirely based on D&D in plot and gameplay, Baldur’s gate seems to have done little to boost the popularity of the tabletop game’s brand, rather it became its own cultural force.  

Today, D&D has returned to the status quo. It is the biggest and most popular roleplaying game in the world but serves a niche community and has seemingly limited opportunities for growth or monetization.  

Hasbro has tried to turn D&D into something it just isn’t. It’s not a Marvel-esque movie franchise, players want their own characters in the spotlight.  It’s not a live service; the game exists in your imagination. It’s certainly not a coffee mug with a fancy ampersand or any other branded junk.  

D&D is an experience, a story you tell with your friends through your collective imaginations, a way to socialize and step out of the world for a while. 

That’s true of all role-playing games, and part of what makes them special is that they are cheap (or free) but powerful tools to help us build shared stories and memories that can last a lifetime.  

Hasbro wants D&D to be a money printing machine like their cardboard darling Magic: The Gathering, or a live service pseudo-video game through D&D Beyond. They refuse to see the game for what it is, instead they try to twist it to fit money making schemes that have worked for other brands in other industries. 

The company will always be disappointed, because at the end of the day, the players create the game, its stories, and characters. They create the experience. Ultimately D&D belongs to its players in an organic way that most other products don’t.  

Hasbro keeps finding out that it is extremely hard to continuously sell people something that already belongs to them.