Tag Archives: Wizards of the Coast

Articles, Weekend Update

Weekend Update: 2/14/2026

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Welcome to the Cannibal Halfling Weekend Update! Start your weekend with a chunk of RPG news from the past week. We have the week’s top sellers, industry news stories, something from the archives, and discussions from elsewhere online.

DriveThruRPG Top Sellers for 2/14/2026

  1. Cyberpunk RED: Interface RED Volume 5
  2. ICRPG Power Tools: Game Mastery Book
  3. Halls of Arden Vul: The Thicket
  4. Proteus Sector: A Gazetteer for Stars Without Number
  5. Delta Green: The New Age

Top News Stories

WotC Continues D&D’s Advance To Digital First Brand: We talked about the Hasbro earnings release quite a bit this week, but other investor materials and presentations continue to add more context. In the earnings call, CEO Chris Cocks confirmed the growth was part of a strategy to move to a digital-first company, compounding the growth from earlier calls where it was stated that 60% of D&D’s revenue was digital. When taking these most recent results with WotC’s decision to add digital-only content earlier this year, it’s becoming clear that the company intends to migrate more D&D activity to their exclusive digital platform.

From the Archives

There are few game mechanics which have gone from popular to cringeworthy as quickly as parallel Merits and Flaws. While many modern games have embraced some nuance about how to dole out discrete character merits, GURPS is still rocking Advantages/Disadvantages from 2004, when 4e was released and when the mechanic hadn’t fallen from grace. From the archives we have a System Hack look at GURPS Disadvantages to provide a few ideas to modernize the system.

Discussion of the Week

A disaster is presently unfolding vis-à-vis the official Neopets tabletop RPG: Licensed games are interesting; they can both provide more engagement to existing fans of the property while opening the gate to the TTRPG hobby as well. This requires that the licensed game not only be decent, but also provide an experience aligned to what fans are looking for. In order to provide that experience, a game designer has to, among other things, pay the freelancers he’s working with. The licensed Neopets RPG has apparently failed on all of these counts, looking to be such a disaster that it both induces schadenfreude and could even get me to say that the Fallout TTRPG wasn’t all that bad.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

Five Tiers of RPG Publishing

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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.

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