| Welcome to Bw Daily, the Bloomberg Businessweek newsletter, where we'll bring you interesting voices, great reporting and the magazine's usual charm every weekday. Let us know what you think by emailing our editor here! If this has been forwarded to you, click here to sign up. And here it is … The role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons has done many things. It's brought together millions of people since its invention in 1974, defined a whole demographic group (nerds, mostly), popped its head periodically into pop culture (like the Netflix hit "Stranger Things") and helped multiple generations of creative people find an outlet for their imagination in the attics, garages and basements of America and the world.  Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks at his home in Providence, Rhode Island. Photographer: Tony Luong for Bloomberg Businessweek One thing it hasn't done is make much money for its corporate owner, Hasbro. The struggle to properly monetize the hit game is the subject of this week's Businessweek cover story. Reporters Felix Gillette and Thomas Buckley take a deep dive into how and why D&D exists as an entity with a sizable and devoted fanbase in an era where fandoms fuel the entertainment industry, and yet, the toy company Hasbro has seen declining prospects in recent years. (It cut its workforce by 15% in January, and its shares are down 40% in March from the year before.) To wit: Hasbro is now trying to replicate with D&D what it did with its geeky corporate sibling, Magic: The Gathering. It built the fantasy card game into its first billion-dollar brand, thanks in part to an aggressive expansion into mobile gaming, media licensing agreements and ancillary products. Today, Hasbro makes about $4 billion a year from toys, $1 billion from entertainment and $1.3 billion from its Wizards of the Coast and Digital Gaming division. The company doesn't break out D&D-specific numbers for investors, but Arpine Kocharyan, an analyst at UBS, has estimated that D&D generates more than $150 million in annual sales. In October 2022, the toy company set a goal of increasing its overall profit by 50% over the next three years, noting that D&D would be "a major growth priority."
The first step is the release of its movie. On March 31, Hasbro will kick off a D&D blitz, starting with the release of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. It's a big-budget, CGI-laden spectacle co-produced by Paramount Pictures and Hasbro's in-house EOne Studio, starring Chris Pine and Michelle Rodriguez as a couple of wisecracking, world-saving thieves. In August, Baldur's Gate III, the latest sequel in a popular series of video games based on D&D, is set to go on sale, followed by the release of a live-action D&D TV series being developed for Paramount+. And sometime next year, Hasbro is expected to unveil One D&D, the next iteration of the tabletop game.
But—but!—there's a group standing in the way of Hasbro's D&D money factory. And that's D&D fans themselves. It turns out that a generative role-playing game community is not going to, say, roll over and let a corporation make money off the back of what they see as their contributions to the game itself, enabled by a specific licensing deal that allowed for legal use of the game's characters. When Hasbro, under new leadership, tried to change that—a veritable war ensued.  Source: Paramount To learn who's really rolling the 20-sided die, you will, of course, have to read the whole piece. Let's just say that the current feature film isn't the first time executives have tried to make a Dungeons & Dragons movie. That honor belongs to a then-19-year-old named Courtney Solomon who, posing as an economics student, somehow convinced roomfuls of people to give him the film rights to the franchise in the early 1990s. The horribly reviewed 2000 movie, directed by Solomon himself, grossed $35 million worldwide. In the next few years, a few little fantasy projects based on books would also see the screen. Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter spawned sequels that collectively made more than $850 million apiece. Oops. —Reyhan Harmanci, Businessweek | 
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