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Wizards of the Coast | HearLore
Common questions
When was Wizards of the Coast founded and by whom?
Wizards of the Coast was founded by Peter Adkison in 1990 outside Seattle. The company began as a small operation in a basement before growing into a corporate powerhouse following the success of Magic: The Gathering.
What date did Wizards of the Coast acquire TSR and Dungeons & Dragons?
Wizards of the Coast announced the purchase of TSR on the 10th of April 1997 for 25 million dollars. This acquisition brought the Dungeons & Dragons franchise under the same roof as the collectible card game giant and fundamentally altered the landscape of tabletop gaming.
When did Wizards of the Coast stop publishing the Pokémon Trading Card Game?
Wizards of the Coast published the Pokémon Trading Card Game until 2003 when The Pokémon Company began producing a new edition on the 30th of September 2003. The companies resolved their legal action in December 2003 without going to court.
When was Wizards of the Coast purchased by Hasbro and for how much?
Toy manufacturer Hasbro bought Wizards of the Coast in September 1999 for about 325 million dollars. This acquisition brought the gaming giant under the umbrella of a massive toy conglomerate and led to the consolidation of Wizards of the Coast into Hasbro's game division in August 2001.
When was the 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons released and what were the sales figures?
The 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons was released on the 15th of July 2014 with the Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set. Sales of the Starter Set reached 126,870 units in 2014 and rose to 306,670 units in 2018.
Wizards of the Coast
In July 1993, a game called Magic: The Gathering sold out its entire initial print run of 2.5 million cards within a single month, transforming a small operation in a basement into a corporate powerhouse. This was not a planned explosion of success but the result of a gamble taken by Peter Adkison, who founded Wizards of the Coast in 1990 outside Seattle. Adkison had originally named his company after a guild of wizards in a role-playing game he was playing, and he was struggling to find a product that could sustain a business. When Richard Garfield approached him with a board game called RoboRally, Adkison rejected it as too expensive to produce. Instead, he asked Garfield to invent something portable and quick-playing, which led to the creation of the collectible card game that would define the next three decades of gaming history. The game debuted at the Origins Game Fair in Dallas, and by the following month at Gen Con, the demand was so overwhelming that the company had to scramble to meet it. Within two years, the company grew from a handful of employees working out of Adkison's basement to 250 employees in their own offices, generating revenue that would eventually surpass 65 million dollars annually by 1995. The success of Magic: The Gathering was so profound that it won the Mensa Top Five Mind Games award and multiple Origins Awards, establishing Wizards of the Coast as a dominant force in the industry almost overnight.
The Acquisition That Shook The Industry
On the 10th of April 1997, Wizards of the Coast announced the purchase of TSR, the makers of Dungeons & Dragons, for 25 million dollars, a move that fundamentally altered the landscape of tabletop gaming. This acquisition brought the legendary role-playing game franchise under the same roof as the newly minted collectible card game giant, creating a monopoly on the most popular fantasy gaming systems of the era. As part of the sale, TSR employees were offered the chance to relocate from Wisconsin to the west coast, and the company continued to use the TSR brand name until 2000. Between 1997 and 1999, Wizards of the Coast spun off several TSR campaign settings, including Planescape, Dark Sun, and Spelljammer, to focus the business on the more profitable Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms lines. The company revisited the concept of a third edition of Dungeons & Dragons soon after the purchase, releasing it in 2000 with the d20 System. This new edition won multiple Origins Awards, including Best Roleplaying Game, and introduced the Open Game License, which allowed other companies to make use of those systems. The release of the third edition was a pivotal moment that opened the floodgates for a boom in the RPG industry, with Wizards of the Coast positioning itself as the gatekeeper of the new standard. The company also released the Eberron campaign setting in 2004, which won the 2004 Origins Award for Best Role-Playing Supplement, further cementing their dominance in the role-playing game market.
When did Wizards of the Coast stop localizing Magic: The Gathering for Portuguese?
Wizards of the Coast stopped localizing Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons for Portuguese in March 2024. This decision received a negative reaction and led to the resignation of Cynthia Williams at the end of April 2024.
On the 2nd of August 1997, Wizards of the Coast was granted rights to produce collectible card games, and in January 1999, they began publishing the Pokémon Trading Card Game after acquiring the rights in August 1998. The game sold nearly 400,000 copies in less than six weeks, selling ten times more units than initial projections, and won the National Parenting Center's 1999 Seal of Approval. The success of the Pokémon game was so immense that some sports card series were discontinued in 1999 because so many printers were producing Pokémon cards. Within a year, Wizards of the Coast had sold millions of copies of the Pokémon game and released a new set that included an instructional CD-ROM. The company continued to publish the game until 2003, when Nintendo's affiliate, The Pokémon Company, began producing a new edition for the game one day after the last of its agreements with Wizards expired on the 30th of September 2003. The following day, Wizards of the Coast filed suit against Nintendo, accusing it of abandoning a contract and using Wizards-patented methods to manufacture the games itself. The companies resolved the legal action in December 2003 without going to court. Following the success of the Pokémon game, Wizards of the Coast acquired and expanded The Game Keeper, a US chain of retail gaming stores, eventually changing its name to Wizards of the Coast. The company's gaming center in Seattle was closed in March 2001, and in December 2003, Wizards of the Coast announced it would close all of its stores to allow it to concentrate on game design. The stores were closed in early 2004, marking the end of the company's direct retail presence and a shift in focus back to product development.
The Hasbro Takeover And The Digital Shift
In September 1999, toy manufacturer Hasbro bought Wizards of the Coast for about 325 million dollars, bringing the gaming giant under the umbrella of a massive toy conglomerate. Avalon Hill, which Hasbro had purchased in mid-1998, was made a division of Wizards of the Coast in late 1999. On the 1st of January 2001, Peter Adkison resigned from Wizards of the Coast, and in August 2001, the company, which had been a semi-independent division of Hasbro, was consolidated into Hasbro's game division. This consolidation was seen as a loss of autonomy for Wizards of the Coast by most, although the company continued to operate out of its Seattle offices. Between 2001 and 2002, Hasbro sold Origins Game Fair to Game Manufacturers Association and in May 2002, it sold Gen Con to Peter Adkison. In 2002, Wizards of the Coast's periodicals department was spun off, and the company outsourced its magazines by licensing Dungeon, Dragon, Polyhedron, and Amazing Stories to Paizo Publishing. The license expired in September 2007, and Wizards of the Coast began publishing the magazines online. In 2003, the company released Dungeons & Dragons miniatures, collectible, painted, plastic miniature games. In 2004, the company added a licensed Star Wars line, and in April 2004, Loren Greenwood succeeded Huebner as the subsidiary's president. The company also began to explore the digital space, releasing the fourth edition of Dungeons & Dragons on the 6th of June 2008, and introducing fourth-edition online content in Dragon and Dungeon magazines. By 2008, the company employed over 300 people and went through a restructuring, signaling a shift towards a more corporate and digital-focused future.
The Fifth Edition And The Rise Of Streaming
In 2012, sales of Dungeons & Dragons products had slumped, prompting Wizards of the Coast to announce a public playtest to develop a new edition of Dungeons & Dragons called D&D Next. The 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons was released on the 15th of July 2014, with the Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set. In 2014, 126,870 units of the Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set were sold, and in 2018, 306,670 units of the product were sold. The release of the 5th edition marked a turning point, with sales rising 41 percent in 2017 compared to the year before, and in 2018 rising another 52 percent. The company published more than twenty Dungeon & Dragons books, including new rulebooks, campaign guides, and adventure modules. According to The Seattle Times, 2017 had the most number of players in its history. Writing for Bloomberg, Mary Pilon reported that nine million people watched others play D&D on the video-sharing platform Twitch. In 2016, Wizards of the Coast partnered with OneBookShelf to create an online community-content platform called Dungeon Masters Guild that allowed creators to make and sell content using Wizards of the Coast's properties. Users of Dungeon Masters Guild could also purchase earlier editions of Dungeons & Dragons as PDFs and as print-on-demand books. In 2016, Chris Cocks replaced Greg Leeds as president of Wizards of the Coast, and in 2019, Wizards of the Coast became a member of the Entertainment Software Association. The company also announced the appointment of gaming-industry veteran James Ohlen as the head of its new studio in Austin, Texas, which was revealed to be Archetype Entertainment in January 2020. The company also worked with Anthony and Joe Russo to create an animated series based on the mythology of Magic: The Gathering, with the Russo brothers as executive producers. By 2019, Magic: The Gathering was part of Hasbro's franchise brands, accounting for 2.45 billion dollars in net revenue, with Magic accounting for a meaningful portion of that sum.
The Controversy And The Backlash
On the 1st of June 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, Wizards of the Coast released a statement in support of its Black fans, employees, and community members, which provoked a backlash. Multiple open letters criticized the company for its treatment of people of color, and the New York Times, Polygon, and Kotaku reported that Wizards of the Coast banned seven Magic: The Gathering cards that were deemed racially offensive from tournament-sanctioned play. The Dungeons & Dragons team announced it would be changing portions of its fifth-edition product line that fans had criticized for being insensitive, such as racist portrayals of a fictional people known as the Vistani, and races characterized as monstrous and evil. The company also announced plans to change character creation to broaden the range of character types and adding a sensitivity disclaimer to some legacy products that include cultures inspired by Asia, Mesoamerica, and the Middle East. The Washington Post reported that the tabletop community has widely approved of these changes, although Wired criticized some of the change attempts as often feeling like lip service. In 2021, Wizards of the Coast opened a new video-game studio, whose first project was a high-budget game based on the G.I. Joe franchise. In 2022, Chris Cocks became CEO of Hasbro and Cynthia Williams replaced him as president of Wizards & Digital. In June 2022, Hasbro defeated a board challenge from activist investor Alta Fox Capital Management LLC, which had wanted to spin out Wizards of the Coast into a separate company. In July 2022, Wizards of the Coast announced it was establishing another new video-game studio called Skeleton Key, which would focus on AAA games and would be headed by Christian Dailey, formerly of BioWare. The company also acquired the digital toolset and game companion D&D Beyond from Fandom in April 2022, and transferred control to Wizards of the Coast the following month. In October 2022, it was announced that Dan Rawson, former chief operating officer of Microsoft Dynamics 365, was appointed to the newly created position of Senior Vice President for the Dungeons & Dragons brand to act as head of the franchise.
The License War And The Layoffs
Between November and December 2022, there was speculation based on unconfirmed leaks that Wizards of the Coast was planning to discontinue the Open Game License for Dungeons & Dragons. Following a Wizards of the Coast response to the speculation, the company released limited details of an update to the Open Game License the following month. Linda Codega, writing for Io9, reported on the details from a leaked full copy of the Open Game License 1.1 on the 5th of January 2023. Codega said that every single licensed publisher would be affected by the new agreement, and the main takeaway from the leaked document was that Wizards of the Coast was keeping power close at hand. Following this leak, numerous news-and-industry-focused outlets reported on negative reactions from fans and professional content creators. TheStreet said that Wizards of the Coast's main competitors quickly moved away from the Open Game License in the time it took Wizards of the Coast to settle on a response. Both Kobold Press and MCDM Productions announced upcoming new open tabletop RPG systems, and Paizo announced a new Open RPG Creative License, a system-agnostic license, and other publishers joined the development of this new license. TheStreet also said that Wizards of the Coast had united its player base against it, and both TheStreet and Io9 noted the movement to boycott D&D Beyond and mass subscription cancellations. In the following weeks, Wizards of the Coast reversed changes to the Open Game License and solicited public feedback before moving away from the Open Game License and releasing the System Reference Document 5.1 under an irrevocable creative commons license. In January 2023, Wizards of the Coast canceled at least five unnamed video-game projects, and fewer than 15 people at Wizards of the Coast would lose their jobs, but the reorganization would land hard for several independent studios. In December 2023, TechCrunch reported that paperwork Hasbro filed with the SEC contained information announcing layoffs of 1,100 employees, 20 percent of their entire workforce across all divisions, effective immediately. A wide range of Wizards of the Coast employees were laid off, and the full extent of this culling remains to be seen.
The Future Of A Gaming Giant
In March 2024, Wizards of the Coast stopped localizing Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons for Portuguese, and the company received a vampetaço in retaliation. Cynthia Williams resigned at the end of April 2024 and was replaced that summer by John Hight, who left his long-time role at Blizzard Entertainment to take the job. The 3D virtual tabletop Dungeons & Dragons simulator Sigil launched as part of D&D Beyond in March 2025. Later that month, approximately 90 percent of the development team were laid off by Wizards of the Coast, and in an internal communication, Hasbro Direct senior vice president Dan Rawson stated that their aspirations for Sigil as a large, standalone game with a distinct monetization path will not be realized. Following the release of core rulebooks for the 2024 revision of Dungeons & Dragons, Creative Director Chris Perkins and Game Director Jeremy Crawford announced their departures from the company in April 2025. Christian Hoffer, for Screen Rant, highlighted that both have been part of the Dungeons & Dragons design team for decades and were two of the lead designers of Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition. The company continues to face challenges as it navigates the balance between corporate interests and community expectations, with the future of the brand hanging in the balance. The company has also been involved in various legal battles, including a lawsuit against a Magic: The Gathering YouTuber in April 2023, where private detectives from the Pinkerton agency were sent to the YouTuber's house to demand he destroy cards from an unreleased set he had been accidentally sent, and to remove videos from his channel, otherwise he and his wife would face a 200,000 dollar fine and imprisonment. The game's players subsequently initiated a boycott in response, highlighting the ongoing tension between the company and its fanbase. Despite these challenges, Wizards of the Coast remains a dominant force in the gaming industry, with a rich history of innovation and a commitment to creating new and exciting experiences for players around the world.