D&D General Mike Mearls sits down with Ben from Questing Beast

Sorcerers Apprentice said:
A 1% decline for a public company is a big deal as stockholders expect constant growth. The fact revenue was growing for years doesn't matter, since stockholders care about what their stock will be worth tomorrow, not what it was worth 2 years ago.

A CEO who delivers flat revenue several years in a row will soon be looking for a new job.
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Compare Consolidated Revenue of Hasbro in 2023 to 2024. WotC staying flat is saving Hasbro's butt
 

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Zardnaar said:
In real terms it's also a decline. Ideally your growth rate is above inflation.

Acouple of years or 3 of -1%can take years to recover from.
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Yes a 1% decrease is a real decline, but if it comes after a 100%+ growth spurt it is a simple Return to the Mean and not necessarily indicative of future performance. Also while growth rate is ideally above inflation and constantly high, that is highly industry dependent. Not every industry can grow every year in all markets.

CEOs are not judged based on metrics that absolute and context free, but also on industry benchmarks:
And while in a white room calculation, growth can maybe seem stagnant, HAS is pretty much crushing its comparables in the toy industry.

1741035774754.png

So please, design-wise there is lots to criticize about both DND and MTG. But the business end looks stronger than ever.
 

KYRON45 said:
Board meetings and Accountants.
You too can be bored to death by corporate financial statements. Part of verisimilitudinous well balanced gaming diet.
Coming soon to a FLGS near you. 🥳
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1741036521052.jpeg

Can you believe they are updating the Core Rulebooks again? Like I love a good errata and layout reformatting but this stuff is getting ridiculous... Well at least the SRD is public...
 

aiouh said:
View attachment 398556
Can you believe they are updating the Core Rulebooks again? Like I love a good errata and layout reformatting but this stuff is getting ridiculous... Well at least the SRD is public...
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You want to talk about non-gaming book revisions and how necessary or not they are? Two words.

Academic.

Textbooks.
 




Hussar said:
Oh come on.

You started this tangent by talking about how Magic was on the downslide. You got shown to be 100% wrong about that. Instead of actually dealing with facts, you continously try to massage the message by pointing to irrelevant things. At this point, what would actually make you admit that you were wrong here? MtG is not losing money. Hasbro, while it's PROFITS are down, is not losing money and is actually looking very strong according to every single metric in the industry.
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no, I started by saying that 'Their need to generate ever more money is not working so great on the MtG side' and given that MtG is basically flat is in line with that from my perspective.

It would take me being wrong to admit that I am wrong, you seem to have a different understanding of what I did say from what I actually did write however. At no point did I say that MtG is losing money, it probably is responsible for the majority of Hasbro (not just WotC) profits.

Can you name those metrics that make Hasbro look strong, and are you talking all of Hasbro, incl. WotC or Hasbro excluding WotC? I agree that WotC is doing pretty well, as to the rest of Hasbro, I am not seeing it. That is also what I meant by the 'Hasbro side of things keeps shrinking'.

Here are some numbers from Hasbro's Q4 reports of the last few years

2019: Net Revenues +3%, WotC not mentioned separately
2020: Net Revenues -8%, WotC not mentioned separately
2021: Net Revenues +17%, WotC +42% (which probably means all growth was on the WotC side)
2022: Net Revenues -9%, WotC +3%
2023: Full Year revenues down 15%, WotC +10%
2024: Total Hasbro Revenue decline of 17%; Revenues declined 7% excluding the eOne divestiture, WotC +4%

So as I said even WotC staying flat would mean they take up an ever bigger slice of overall Hasbro, and as far as profits go they are now almost all profits of Hasbro. WotC in 2024 was 632M vs Hasbro's combined 690M.

So I am not sure where you see Hasbro (- WotC) beating the metrics.

Not sure what all the Mearls stuff has to do with what I wrote. To me it is unrelated.
 

Hussar said:
Oh come on.

You started this tangent by talking about how Magic was on the downslide. You got shown to be 100% wrong about that. Instead of actually dealing with facts, you continously try to massage the message by pointing to irrelevant things. At this point, what would actually make you admit that you were wrong here? MtG is not losing money. Hasbro, while it's PROFITS are down, is not losing money and is actually looking very strong according to every single metric in the industry.

This is just getting sillier by the minute. And, again, it's why it's so hard to have anything like a serious conversation when one side continuously refuses to actually acknowledge facts.

Look ,I cannot possibly be the only one here thinking this. Mike Mearls has been on the tour lately promoting his new books and whatnot. Fantastic. Got no problem with that. But, let's look at the timeline of things for just a second:

2015- Mearls is the absolute darling of the industry. Can do no wrong. He is the face of D&D. Every single announcement, every single time WotC talks about anything, Mearls is right there in the front because he's the guy who saved D&D. Fastforward a couple of years. Mearls steps on a social media landmine and it blows up. Seriously blows up. Now, he says that he moved over to Magic because it was a good career move. I'll buy that. Beats getting fired outright. He goes from being a huge presence in the gaming sphere to complete radio silence. Vanishes from sight. Is never heard from at all. Then Covid hits and Hasbro, like every other toy maker, makes money hand over fist and they hire a bunch of people to keep up with this new growth. Makes sense. Covid ends and things slow down again. So, Hasbro, no longer riding this huge wave of demand, starts to lay people off. Lots of people. Yet, in 2023, WotC lays off some 30 (ish) people, who, other than Mearls and Dan Dillon were all marketing and art department. IOW, the first chance WotC had to kick Mearls to the curb, they took it.

Now, shock and surprise, the first version of D&D since the release of 4e in 2008 which doesn't have any input from Mr. Mearls, is released and he doesn't seem to care for it. Once he was released from WotC he made a rocketing come back to the online world, with a new website, new Patreon, new products and a Kickstarter. One would wonder why he was radio silent for so long, only to suddenly jump back in the second he no longer works for WotC. Almost like there might have been some sort of, I dunno, reason that he was radio silent for so long. I have no idea what that reason is.

I cannot possibly be the only one smelling sour grapes here. Someone trying to ride the wave of fans with an axe to grind with WotC in order to promote their product? No one would ever do that right? That's just inconceivable.
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Have you listened to or watched the video?
 


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