Hasbro’s annual earnings came out this week, so I took a look. It is truly staggering how much Wizards of the Coast has changed the company since they were acquired; when looking at unadjusted earnings the Wizards of the Coast and Digital Games division was the only one that turned a profit in the entire company. Not only that, but Wizards is responsible for roughly 47% of the entire company’s revenue and over 90% of all revenue growth over the last year. That’s over 2 billion dollars in revenue; roughly $1.7 billion is attributable to Magic: The Gathering and the rest is attributable to Dungeons and Dragons.
Dungeons and Dragons is obviously the largest, most popular roleplaying game, but $400 million in revenue is staggering. If this was all books, it would be eight million copies. It’s not all books of course; one of the reasons D&D is growing (though perhaps not as fast as Magic is) is the continued expansion of digital services like D&D Beyond, products with high margins and minimal variable costs. This is the future, not because it makes for a better gaming experience, but because it makes for a better balance sheet.
Happy new year, and welcome to the first Crowdfunding Carnival of 2026! Creators are warming up their engines after the holiday season, and we’ve got a range of things to look at.
Let’s talk 2025 first. The year had a fair share of challenges for creators, not the least of which were tariffs and other economic challenges. At least one project, Magpie’s hotly anticipated trio of card-based RPGs, fell victim to this uncertainty; while the impact is certainly greater for board games and others which have physical components, it makes planning a project harder even if the physical release is secondary to getting the game into the world.
Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for September! We’re seeing the post-GenCon movement begin, and several of the big publishers are starting their engines up again with new campaigns. At the same time, there are a number of good indies out there which are worthy of your attention. Let’s get to it.
Ah, GURPS. One of the most comprehensive toolkits on the RPG market, GURPS and its plethora of supplements offer the ability to play in almost any genre at almost any complexity level. The tradeoff here is that when you open the GURPS Basic Set for the first time, you are dazzled and overwhelmed by a vast range of options to select, dials to adjust, and levers to pull. Coming from a game like D&D, a GM starting with GURPS isn’t going to know where to, ahem, start. Steve Jackson Games realized that, and recruited two GURPS veterans to write How To Be A GURPS GM. While this slim volume is thin on generalizable GMing advice (with admittedly good reason), it does exactly what it says on the tin, and provides some guidance on how to actually make GURPS do what you want it to do.
Cannibal Halfling Gaming 