Disclaimer: I am not a financial expert and this is not intended as any kind of financial analysis. I’m also not concerned with Hasbro as a whole and will only be listing interesting notes about Magic specifically from either the presentation or the earnings call, which I have listened to in full to ensure I have as much context as possible.
Q1 2025 Presentation
Wizards had a total revenue increase of 45% over last year, broken down as follows:
+37% from Tabletop (Magic and D&D physical product)
+1% Digital (Arena and DnD Beyond)
+8% Digital Licensing
-1% FX (This has to do with foreign currency exchange)
I’m not sure how much of the +45% number has to do with D&D, but it’s very clear the vast majority of this is Magic, as D&D came up very little over the course of the presentation.
Some interesting Magic specific demographic notes:
The average tabletop player is around 30 years old
The average player tenure is 5+ years
There are around 7,500 Wizards Play Network stores
In-store event attendace is up 16% vs 2023
Earnings Call
The bulk of this conversation had to do with the impact of tariffs. Regarding Wizards manufacturing specifically, they said that some of it happens in Europe and Japan, but the majority of it takes place in North Carolina and Texas. They expect Wizards to be minimally affected, with the only notable manufacturing taking place in China happening with D&D box sets.
They’ve increased the expected growth of Wizards for the year, due to “strong demand signals” for the Final Fantasy, Spider-Man, and Avatar sets. Chris Cocks provides a fantastic pull quote when he says, “…Final Fantasy will be the best selling set of all time on Day 1. It already is.”
Cocks says that Magic has historically been very economically macro-resilient, citing the ’08 & ’09 recessions as times Magic grew at double digits despite the economic downturn. He credits this to Magic being a passion-based game where the collectors aren’t really tied to how the S&P 500 is doing.
The store count is up around 20% over where it was 18 months ago, which Cocks says has a lot to do with how the Universes Beyond strategy as increased the overall active player base both in terms of lapsed players coming back to the game and new players joining the game.
When asked why they think Magic is overperforming so much, Cocks says the strength of Innistrad Remastered, the backlist doing “…very, very well…” and early ordering for Tarkir: Dragonstorm being very strong are large contributers. He goes on to say that it’s hard to point to any one specific thing, and that the expansion of the player base, which is something they expect to increase as the year goes on, is really the biggest contributing factor.
There was also some talk scattered throughout the call about how they expect Q2 and Q3 to look a little weird for a number of reasons, mostly due to when they have to factor in licensing costs that didn’t exist last year.
