$800,000,000

 So, thanks to Janice for the link to this story that shows just how amazingly popular, and profitable, our hobby has become.  

It turns out that Wizards of the Coast, which includes Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons, is the most profitable part of Hasbro. As in, it brought in eight hundred million ($800,000,000) last year. So much money, in fact, that it's attracting serious investors who'd like to see the ccg/rpg spun off as its own company.

This extreme profitability is all the more believable in that it might explain something that's puzzled me for years. Hasbro has a history of buying highly profitable companies, hollowing them out, and then shutting them down. It looked like they were about to do that to TSR/WotC in 2002, then they seemed to have changed plans and not followed through.  Now I wonder if that had indeed been the plan, but they'd had to call it off once they realized that D&D was, in the words of a TSR vice president back in Lake Geneva days, "a license to print money".  So much so that it's now being picked up to be used on NPR in a segment explaining proxy battles.

And we find we live in a world in which D&D and MtG sales are creeping up in a way that makes me wonder if it'll hit the billion dollar mark.

Have to keep an eye out to see if there's a follow-up piece after the actual shareholders meeting, schedules for June 8th.

Here's the link.

https://www.npr.org/2022/05/31/1102294858/an-epic-proxy-battle-comes-to-hasbro

--John R.

--current reading: still T. H. White