So are we gonna are we gonna use spells or just well we were working on this episode. Our supervising producer Vicky Ergolina told us her twelve year old son, who loves video games, was having friends over for a game session. But the game they were excited to play didn't require a VR headset or even a controller. It wasn't Fortnite or Destiny or Minecraft. Now. They wanted to play a fantasy game that's almost fifty years old and all you need to play is a pen, a piece of paper, and many sided dice. Yeah, you got it. They were playing Dungeons and Dragons. When you're playing video games, you can't really see your friends and actually like interact interact with them. And with D and D you can like look at your friends and you can like talk the situation out and like what you're gonna do to like save your friend or like slay a monster or something. It's like an open world, like you can go whever you want, and like, I like like some of the monsters and like, yeah, it's fun most of the time. I'm the DM, so I really like making the stories. But about playing DUD, I really like working with my teammates and just like finding ways to beat the monsters in like clever ways. It's freedom, the way that you can just go wherever you want, make any decisions you want, and the fact that like the decisions you make, you're just free completely and dandy. Literally, look it's one. I got a lore I you from Bloomberg News and I Heeart Radio. It's the big take. I'm West Cosova today. Dungeons and Dragons is a massive game? Can it become a massive business? Too? Generations of players old and young, As we just heard there has spent untold hours playing D and D. Now, the game's company, Hasbro, is hoping to cash in on that popularity with a big budget movie and an array of D and D products intended to hook players and keep them paying for more. Business Week correspondent Felix Gillette is here to explain why that might be a risky bet. This did not go over well with the D and D world, and later in the show, you know you'll sit down at a table with them, and the entire conversation you're going to realize is going to be stories and experiences that they had in their game. We hear from a store owner who caters to the D and D crowd. Felix. Today we're talking about something I never thought we'd do an episode about. But in the BusinessWeek story you've written with Thomas Buckley, you say people are looking to make Dungeons and Dragons, of all things, into a big moneymaker. Why now after all these years? Yeah, I mean Dungeons and Dragons is kind of the classic role playing game that was invented in nineteen seventies, so it's coming up on its fiftieth birthday. For those who haven't played before. You basically create a character according to these set of rules, and then you sit around with a group of friends. One person serves as the dungeon Master, and they kind of guide the players through these group adventures. A lot of it is based on your imagination, and then there's these books that have endless rules for like how you fight and the monsters and how you engage with them and spells you can use. And it's really fun, and it's going through this enormous resurgence in the last couple of years where it's probably more popular now than it's ever been, and that's because of a number of different factors. I think part of it is a generational thing. There's all these people like myself who played as a kid who are now grown up and have more spending power and have gotten their kids into it. It's been very prominent on the Netflix hit show Stranger Things, which has introduced a whole new group of people to this game. Shadow girls on the wall behind you, swallowing you in darkness, It is almost here. What is it? But Jesus were so screwed if it's not an army of trauga that's charge into the chamber. And there's also this whole new crew of D and D influencers. So if you go on YouTube you can watch shows, there's D and D podcasts, TikTok, the whole thing. And it's a game that lends itself very well to live streaming. It's kind of a mix of fantasy, imagination, storytelling, improvisation and comedy. And if you have a bunch of funny people doing it, it's pretty entertaining to watch. And so the thing behind it really is this story that the story is unfolding in real time. You don't really know which direction it's gonna go. Yeah, there's just a bunch of obstacles that come out. Usually players will have an adventure module that will kind of provide a setting and the large goal and some of the monsters that you might encounter along the way. But it's very much up to the dungeon master to turn that loose structure of a campaign into a linear series of events and challenges, and it's up to the players to try and solve the problems and get their characters to the end. And there's an element of chance in this, yes, and a lot of it. It's all basically determined through rolling of dice, and the classic D and D cultural icon is the twenty sided die, which if you have ever played it just has a certain feel that twenty side is amazing. I just love it, even to this day. I haven't played Dungeons and Dragons myself for more than thirty years, but even so, you pick up one of those twenty sided dice and it's just it's sweet. So you were at Dungeons and Dragons kid, Oh? Yeah. We had this great babysitter when I was in late elementary and early junior high school who had this babysitter, Pip Pippa Potter, who introduced me and my brother and our best friend to it, and she was an amazing dungeon master, and we played for years every time she came over to babysit us. Eventually, Pippa went to college and then we realized we would have to do it ourselves, and my brother, who was older than May, became the dungeon master, but me and my friend Daniel really could never accept his authority and it fell apart from there. Back in the day, I mean, I remember when I was a kid, I was not a D and D kid, but a lot of friends who played in like some of their parents thought this was a terrible influence on their lives. Yeah, in the nineteen seventies, as this was gaining popularity, there was all this stuff about don't let your kids play Dungeons and Dragons, it's going to ruin their brain. On the one hand, I think it actually drew players in and increase the popularity of the game among teenagers in particular. On the other hand, it made it difficult for Dungeons and Dragons owners, the businesses that were trying to make money from this game. I think over the years it really has hurt D and d's ability to kind of branch out and become a broader, more mainstream, family friendly brand, which has kind of been the goal of its owners for like almost a half century now, and now all these years later, that's exactly what some big companies are trying to do. Try to take this game that was once seen as edgy and now kind of looks a little wholesome and make it into a really big brand. Yeah. So, Dungeons and Dragons is now owned by Hasbro, which is one of the largest toy companies in the world. They have monopoly, they have scrabbled, they have toggled, they have transformers, all these different toys in games in their portfolio of brands. And during the last couple of years, as there's been this huge surge in interest in playing Dungeons and Dragons, Hasbro has looked at this and they've said, Wow, this is like a great opportunity to really make a lot more money from this brand. And last year Hasbro set this aggressive growth goal and they said, we're gonna increase our profits by fifty percent over the next three years. And as they laid out their strategy for doing this, they pointed to Dungeons and Dragons. They said, that's really an under monetized brand, and we see it as a big potential growth sector for us. So what's kind of fascinating now is we're really at the forefront of Hasbro's blitz to really make more money from Dungeons and Dragons. So over the next year you're going to see all these D and D brand extensions coming down the pipeline. And the first really big one is Hasbro's E one studio and Paramount Pictures recently premiered Dungeons and Dragons Honor among Thieves, which is this big, CGI laden blockbuster movie, comedy adventure movie. Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Hugh Grant all star in this movie. I think exactly that you bring to this. I'm a planner. I make plants. You've already made the plant, so the existing plan fails. I make a new plant, so you make plants that fail. He also plays the loot not relevant. So this is one of their big investments. There's also Balter's Gate three, which is a video game based on Dungeons and Dragons that's coming out later this year. They've announced that Paramount Plus the streaming service is working on a live action D and D series, and next year they're going to be rolling out one D and D, which is the next iteration, the next edition of the classic tabletop game. In addition to new rule sets and new books, they're also promising fans that this is going to be a more digitized experience, and it's going to come with all these new digital add ons, including a virtual tabletop, which is basically a three D environment. Hasbro really for years has been looking at Dungeons and Dragons and thinking, how can we make this more of a digital experience, because, frankly, the classic tabletop role playing industry is pretty small. It's one hundred and fifty million dollars of retail sales in the US and Canada, which, when you think about it, is less than the studio can make from a single hit movie or a single video game. So part of the effort to grow Dungeons and Dragons is, okay, what can we do that's something in between a game you play around a table with your friends and not quite a video game. And when the pandemic hit in twenty twenty, it sort of accelerated the process, right because suddenly you couldn't get together with your friends and sit around a table, and so you started seeing a real uptick and you know, okay, well, let's get together over zoom or discord. Traditionally, you would keep track of your character's evolution on a piece of paper with a pencil. While we can't really see each other's characters, like, maybe there's an app. There was an app called D and D Beyond that allowed you to do this digitally. People started playing a lot of times with D and D Beyond open on their phone, and that service, which at the time was independent, that got a lot of growth. Upsurged during the early months of the pandemic. So Hasbro was watching all of this and they were thinking, Okay, the evolution is happening. We want to get involved in this, we want to get ahead of this. So last year they went out and they acquired D and D Beyond. They paid close to one hundred and fifty million dollars, and now they're essentially saying they're going to make this the center of the D and D experience. I think what they ideally would like is for D and D players to use the D and D Beyond app while they're playing the game. They'd like people to go on to the D and D Beyond forums to chat with their friends, and even more so, they would like people to start gathering virtually in this virtual tabletop that's coming out and once they're there, I think their ideas, Okay, well, how are we going to make more money for the game. And they're kind of looking at this model that's very popular in the video game world, which is like, we'll give away the digital experience, either for free or for a low cost, but once you're in there, we're going to lure you with all the potential add ons for your characters, so you can get you a cool outfit for your wizard or like a new spell that lights up the screen or something, and you'll pay us like a couple of dollars here and there. And they're hoping that all these micro transactions will add up to a lot more money over time when we come back. Can Hasbro get people to pay for a game that's been nearly free for decades. My name is Eric and I'm from Cincinnati, Ohio. I think the beautiful thing about DND is that's a game where you can see yours and the other players in the tables. Decisions and choices impact the world, the story, and the characters. In another medium like video games, you can really only solve a problem in a way that the designer planned for you to be able to solve, whereas in D and D you're able to address problems these creative, out of the box solutions that maybe you're the only person that would have thought of to try it that way, but then you're able to see that scenario play out and how that would impact the world and the story Felix. Hasbro is trying to turn what's always been is very face to face analog game into something more digital, which makes sense. But you had mentioned earlier that there's been this resurgence in playing D and D, and a lot of that, is you right, was based on the fact that it wasn't digital. It was almost like proudly antidigital. Are people going to accept what Hasbro is trying to get them to do. I think it's going to be a tough sell. I think that part of the appeal, as you said, of Dungeons and Dragons is that it is this analog experience, and I think it's a way of getting together with friends where you don't have to deal with all the trappings of digital life, social media feedback, you know, cameras, microphones, Like it's a really great feeling to get back and just sit around at a table with people, and I think that's been part of the appeal. Then I think it's also been really fascinating to watch now because the concern of parents almost universally, is like, our kids are spending too much time on the screens, right, They're just always playing video games, looking at social media, watching their streaming shows, and this huge desire to get them off the screens and to do anything else. And I think D and D has been great and very appealing for that very reason. So now you see parents really wanting their kids to go play D n Z. Go down in the basement, Hey, get the dice out. You know, you guys will have fun. And I think ironically that's been part of the multigenerational boom that D and D has been experiencing in popularity is its appeal as an analog product. So I think that's part of the challenge that hasro is going to have. The other big part of the challenge is that historically, part of the reason that Dungeons and Dragons has been a difficult business for its various owners over the years to monetize is because of something about the fan base itself and anything that reeks of kind of unfettered commercialization or dumming down the game. They get very very vocal that, like, this is not a good thing. Hasbro actually found themselves in this huge controversy with its fan base. Basically what happened is that twenty three years ago, the original company that owned Dungeons and Dragons, they sold the business to Wizards of the Coast, which was this hobby company outside of Seattle, which had this hit game called Magic the Gathering, and they were flush with cash. They go out they buy D and D and so what they did, and this was very smart, probably the best decision that's been made in the fifty year history of Dungeons Dragons, as they said, we're going to adopt this open game light and it was essentially saying, if you're a fan of the game, if you like to play it, and you want to create a little add on feature, you want to write an adventure module that you could take your friends through and it's really fun, and you decide you want to sell it, that's great. You don't have to ask us for permission and go start selling it. Yourself. It's kind of been taken for granted that that's how the D and D world works. And the other thing that was great about this open licensing framework is it really broadened the types of people. The groups of people that were playing Dungeons and Dragons initially was a lot of boys in the Midwest, men in the Midwest playing This is kind of the community that grew out of Now you suddenly you have more women coming in, you have more people of color, and allowed people to make characters and adventures that appealed to them and their friends, and it was this great diversifying effect on the broader Dungeons and Dragons community. Felix, why do I feel like there's a big butt coming here? Yeah. But then late last year, Hasbro started reaching out to people in the role playing game community and saying, oh, you know what, we have this new contract that's going to replace the open game license. We're going to update it. And when people took a look at it, all help broke loose. I mean, people were so pissed off because essentially what it signaled in many small ways was that the open Dungeons and Dragons era was coming to an end, and it was going to be replaced with something else, in which Hasbro was much more tightly controlling the ecosystem around Dungeons and Dragons. If you were a publisher and you were making more than fifty thousand dollars a year from D and D related products, you'd have to go to them and say exactly what it was you were selling and to who. If you were making more than seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, then it would kick in a licensing fee, and this did not go over well with the D and D world, huge controversy in that world. So by the end of January, Hasbro essentially capitulated. They apologize we're going to keep the open gaming license in place and we want everyone to participate. They did not really say too much about the future. So to what degree third party creators are going to be able to create supplemental materials in this new hybrid digital Dungeons and Dragons world. That's very much something that D and D fans and creators and community members are wondering about. In all of this, there's nothing that keeps people from just using the old books they use when they were kids. Are the ones that are still out there and just doing their own games. It's not like you have to be part of the Hasbro ecosystem now to plate Dungeons and Dragons. Correct. You could go back and play the original Dungeons Dragons, you could play Vance Dungeons and Dragons. You could play the second edition, the third edition, the fourth edition. There are all these books circulating, rule sets circulating over the years. I think the difference is that, especially if you're kind of watching the Dungeons and Dragons influencers on Twitch, and you're you know, going on YouTube and watching people talk about the game, and you're listening to D and D podcasts, I think all of that has added an element of currency and wanting to be part of the new version because you know, the old versions work, but the rules are different, and this is really just there's no board game involved with Dungeons Dragons. It's really the rules. And so I think, if anything, this broader ecosystem of Dungeons and Dragons fans that's built up has put more emphasis on being part of the era. And like I said, I think that's part of the reason that the current edition, which is the fifth edition, is the most popular in the game's history. I think the question becomes how many of those devoted happy fifth edition players is Hasbro going to be able to move over to this new version? And is there some risk of as you're trying to broaden this, as you're trying to make it more digital, as you're trying to make it more appealing to non players, do you lose something and do you potentially risk alienating this group of existing fans that are playing it happily now? So what do you think the answer is? Hasbro is putting a big bet on this game. It's still a really complicated game, is still sort of a niche game. Do you think that they can build this into a mass market success? I think it's going to be really difficult. I think the nature of Dungeons and Dragons is that the most important element is the imagination of the people who are playing in the group, and that's a very hard thing to turn into a product. So, Felix, after writing the story, has it rekindled your childhood love of D and D? Are you going to start playing again? It has? I'm very game to start playing again. I want to get my kids into it. We've been playing a stripped down role playing game that's much simpler, that's kind of geared for younger kids called Hero Kids, that similarly uses a lot of the conventions of Dungeons and Dragons. But I think it's a feeling like it might be time to graduate them up to Dungeons and Dragons. Felix, thanks for coming on a show My pleasure. After the break, we meet a store owner who makes a living serving these gamers. My name is Raven and I'm from eastern Pennsylvania, growing up in a religious community. D and D was something that I had heard foreign tails of, this strange game that people would partake in, and I didn't really know where, understand a whole lot about it, only that I was dissuaded from playing it. So as an adult, coming to D and D was interesting. I'm a person who's very involved in the arts, so the idea of being able to make up a story and live in that story was very appealing. We wanted to talk to someone who's deeply familiar with Dungeons and Dragons and the people who play it, and also what it takes to make D and D a business. Our producer Michael Falero called up Lauren Bolanco she's the co owner of twenty Sided that's a board game retail store and event space in Brooklyn. Can you describe how you would explain your business to folks if they asked, like, what do you do? What is twenty sided do? How do you explain it? Twenty Sided Store and twenty Sided event Space has been going on for twelve years. The detail side of things, we sell games on the secondary market, so we sell a lot of board games, everything from party games to heavy strategy games. We started off as an event space and the retail kind of grew out of that. When we started, we were running Magic the Gathering events and then started picking up Wizards of the Coast, Dungeons and Dragons, organized play kits, all kinds of ways for people to come together and meet other people. I think over the twelve years, we've really realized that that's been kind of the key is, you know a lot of people are looking for other people who are into this hobby and they want to find other people to play with. What we do at twenty sided is we create an environment where people can come and learn how to play as they're playing. So we started off right away with that kind of being the foremost of it, we would have pregenerated characters that you could play, and then as you sort of got a little bit more familiar with it, we'd have opportunities for our dispense to create their own characters and bring those characters back. But then there's also now these experiences where you know, people want to watch other people play games. Because there were people who constantly were like, I'm new to this, I'm really afraid to try this out. Is there any way that I could watch? But then eventually I thought, oh, you know what if we have people that are willing to be on stage and want to perform this for other people, then this is a way that we could have an audience for somebody who walks off the street. You've described kind of this learning how to make a character, learning how to start playing, which can be an overwhelming but a very fun experience. If someone walks in during one of these nights where you have an of these events going out, what are they most likely to see? Are they sitting down at a table with other folks like paying us a picture? Yeah, it all starts off with you know, you just preregister on our website for either one session or I like to kind of group it into smaller, more palatable ways for people to register for an event. You know, we're all adults and lives are busy, So if we do campaigns, I will have people sign up maybe for four weeks at a time, and so there's always an opportunity to kind of take a break or come back. And then for the individual sessions, we try to write things in a way where each of the storylines can have an end, even if they're just a one shot. But if you keep bringing that character back for a series of one shots, they are all still sort of set in the same world where you can keep bringing that character back. And I've started creating my own world for this experience. Even though we've got a huge, huge selection of role playing games that we sell and different games that we run at the store, Dungeons and Dragons is still probably our best seller and the one that most people want to play and learn how to play. You've had this business for twelve years. You just had your anniversary recently. Just describe in a few words, like how has the D and D scene at your store changed in those twelve years. It's changed a lot, you know, for the most part, now almost everybody has a better idea of how to play and what it is. And I think that's because they're watching other people play. There's a lot more resources out there for people to watch, right, Like, can I just see how this is done? How do people do this? So back when we were first running games, I think a lot of it was people came to it realizing that they were an equal participant in the process. And I think now there's more of this expectation of this entertainment value. So for an audience like hours that I would imagine most of them haven't played D and D. Could you explain, you know, what is the appeal of the game for everyone? What can the appeal be? You know, we get to develop a world and create a character and play in this fantasy environment that is super fun. And I think for people who play in ongoing campaigns, you know, you'll sit down at a table with them and the entire conversation you're going to realize is going to be stories and experiences that they had in their game. They're memorable, you know, these things that happen because you are part of the storytelling process that you create something. The support and the encouragement from everybody around you helps you create things that you never thought you could do, to come up with ideas that you never thought you could ever have, And that's where I think you get these memorable experiences that stick with you for life. So you know, it's wild. Lauren Blanco, thanks so much for coming on the show. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. This was a pleasure. Thanks for listening to us here at The Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio. For more shows from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen, and we'd love to hear from you. Email us questions or comments to Big Take at Bloomberg dot net. The supervising producer of The Big Take is Vicky Virgolina. Our senior producer is Catherine Fink. Our producers are Michael Flero and Mo Barrow. Raphael m Seely is our engineer. Our original music was composed by Leo Sidrin. I'm West Kasova. We'll be back on Monday with another Big Take. Have a great weekend.

So are we gonna are we gonna use spells or just well we were working on this episode. Our supervising producer Vicky Ergolina told us her twelve year old son, who loves video games, was having friends over for a game session. But the game they were excited to play didn't require a VR headset or even a controller. It wasn't Fortnite or Destiny or Minecraft. Now. They wanted to play a fantasy game that's almost fifty years old and all you need to play is a pen, a piece of paper, and many sided dice. Yeah, you got it. They were playing Dungeons and Dragons. When you're playing video games, you can't really see your friends and actually like interact interact with them. And with D and D you can like look at your friends and you can like talk the situation out and like what you're gonna do to like save your friend or like slay a monster or something. It's like an open world, like you can go whever you want, and like, I like like some of the monsters and like, yeah, it's fun most of the time. I'm the DM, so I really like making the stories. But about playing DUD, I really like working with my teammates and just like finding ways to beat the monsters in like clever ways. It's freedom, the way that you can just go wherever you want, make any decisions you want, and the fact that like the decisions you make, you're just free completely and dandy. Literally, look it's one. I got a lore I you from Bloomberg News and I Heeart Radio. It's the big take. I'm West Cosova today. Dungeons and Dragons is a massive game? Can it become a massive business? Too? Generations of players old and young, As we just heard there has spent untold hours playing D and D. Now, the game's company, Hasbro, is hoping to cash in on that popularity with a big budget movie and an array of D and D products intended to hook players and keep them paying for more. Business Week correspondent Felix Gillette is here to explain why that might be a risky bet. This did not go over well with the D and D world, and later in the show, you know you'll sit down at a table with them, and the entire conversation you're going to realize is going to be stories and experiences that they had in their game. We hear from a store owner who caters to the D and D crowd. Felix. Today we're talking about something I never thought we'd do an episode about. But in the BusinessWeek story you've written with Thomas Buckley, you say people are looking to make Dungeons and Dragons, of all things, into a big moneymaker. Why now after all these years? Yeah, I mean Dungeons and Dragons is kind of the classic role playing game that was invented in nineteen seventies, so it's coming up on its fiftieth birthday. For those who haven't played before. You basically create a character according to these set of rules, and then you sit around with a group of friends. One person serves as the dungeon Master, and they kind of guide the players through these group adventures. A lot of it is based on your imagination, and then there's these books that have endless rules for like how you fight and the monsters and how you engage with them and spells you can use. And it's really fun, and it's going through this enormous resurgence in the last couple of years where it's probably more popular now than it's ever been, and that's because of a number of different factors. I think part of it is a generational thing. There's all these people like myself who played as a kid who are now grown up and have more spending power and have gotten their kids into it. It's been very prominent on the Netflix hit show Stranger Things, which has introduced a whole new group of people to this game. Shadow girls on the wall behind you, swallowing you in darkness, It is almost here. What is it? But Jesus were so screwed if it's not an army of trauga that's charge into the chamber. And there's also this whole new crew of D and D influencers. So if you go on YouTube you can watch shows, there's D and D podcasts, TikTok, the whole thing. And it's a game that lends itself very well to live streaming. It's kind of a mix of fantasy, imagination, storytelling, improvisation and comedy. And if you have a bunch of funny people doing it, it's pretty entertaining to watch. And so the thing behind it really is this story that the story is unfolding in real time. You don't really know which direction it's gonna go. Yeah, there's just a bunch of obstacles that come out. Usually players will have an adventure module that will kind of provide a setting and the large goal and some of the monsters that you might encounter along the way. But it's very much up to the dungeon master to turn that loose structure of a campaign into a linear series of events and challenges, and it's up to the players to try and solve the problems and get their characters to the end. And there's an element of chance in this, yes, and a lot of it. It's all basically determined through rolling of dice, and the classic D and D cultural icon is the twenty sided die, which if you have ever played it just has a certain feel that twenty side is amazing. I just love it, even to this day. I haven't played Dungeons and Dragons myself for more than thirty years, but even so, you pick up one of those twenty sided dice and it's just it's sweet. So you were at Dungeons and Dragons kid, Oh? Yeah. We had this great babysitter when I was in late elementary and early junior high school who had this babysitter, Pip Pippa Potter, who introduced me and my brother and our best friend to it, and she was an amazing dungeon master, and we played for years every time she came over to babysit us. Eventually, Pippa went to college and then we realized we would have to do it ourselves, and my brother, who was older than May, became the dungeon master, but me and my friend Daniel really could never accept his authority and it fell apart from there. Back in the day, I mean, I remember when I was a kid, I was not a D and D kid, but a lot of friends who played in like some of their parents thought this was a terrible influence on their lives. Yeah, in the nineteen seventies, as this was gaining popularity, there was all this stuff about don't let your kids play Dungeons and Dragons, it's going to ruin their brain. On the one hand, I think it actually drew players in and increase the popularity of the game among teenagers in particular. On the other hand, it made it difficult for Dungeons and Dragons owners, the businesses that were trying to make money from this game. I think over the years it really has hurt D and d's ability to kind of branch out and become a broader, more mainstream, family friendly brand, which has kind of been the goal of its owners for like almost a half century now, and now all these years later, that's exactly what some big companies are trying to do. Try to take this game that was once seen as edgy and now kind of looks a little wholesome and make it into a really big brand. Yeah. So, Dungeons and Dragons is now owned by Hasbro, which is one of the largest toy companies in the world. They have monopoly, they have scrabbled, they have toggled, they have transformers, all these different toys in games in their portfolio of brands. And during the last couple of years, as there's been this huge surge in interest in playing Dungeons and Dragons, Hasbro has looked at this and they've said, Wow, this is like a great opportunity to really make a lot more money from this brand. And last year Hasbro set this aggressive growth goal and they said, we're gonna increase our profits by fifty percent over the next three years. And as they laid out their strategy for doing this, they pointed to Dungeons and Dragons. They said, that's really an under monetized brand, and we see it as a big potential growth sector for us. So what's kind of fascinating now is we're really at the forefront of Hasbro's blitz to really make more money from Dungeons and Dragons. So over the next year you're going to see all these D and D brand extensions coming down the pipeline. And the first really big one is Hasbro's E one studio and Paramount Pictures recently premiered Dungeons and Dragons Honor among Thieves, which is this big, CGI laden blockbuster movie, comedy adventure movie. Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Hugh Grant all star in this movie. I think exactly that you bring to this. I'm a planner. I make plants. You've already made the plant, so the existing plan fails. I make a new plant, so you make plants that fail. He also plays the loot not relevant. So this is one of their big investments. There's also Balter's Gate three, which is a video game based on Dungeons and Dragons that's coming out later this year. They've announced that Paramount Plus the streaming service is working on a live action D and D series, and next year they're going to be rolling out one D and D, which is the next iteration, the next edition of the classic tabletop game. In addition to new rule sets and new books, they're also promising fans that this is going to be a more digitized experience, and it's going to come with all these new digital add ons, including a virtual tabletop, which is basically a three D environment. Hasbro really for years has been looking at Dungeons and Dragons and thinking, how can we make this more of a digital experience, because, frankly, the classic tabletop role playing industry is pretty small. It's one hundred and fifty million dollars of retail sales in the US and Canada, which, when you think about it, is less than the studio can make from a single hit movie or a single video game. So part of the effort to grow Dungeons and Dragons is, okay, what can we do that's something in between a game you play around a table with your friends and not quite a video game. And when the pandemic hit in twenty twenty, it sort of accelerated the process, right because suddenly you couldn't get together with your friends and sit around a table, and so you started seeing a real uptick and you know, okay, well, let's get together over zoom or discord. Traditionally, you would keep track of your character's evolution on a piece of paper with a pencil. While we can't really see each other's characters, like, maybe there's an app. There was an app called D and D Beyond that allowed you to do this digitally. People started playing a lot of times with D and D Beyond open on their phone, and that service, which at the time was independent, that got a lot of growth. Upsurged during the early months of the pandemic. So Hasbro was watching all of this and they were thinking, Okay, the evolution is happening. We want to get involved in this, we want to get ahead of this. So last year they went out and they acquired D and D Beyond. They paid close to one hundred and fifty million dollars, and now they're essentially saying they're going to make this the center of the D and D experience. I think what they ideally would like is for D and D players to use the D and D Beyond app while they're playing the game. They'd like people to go on to the D and D Beyond forums to chat with their friends, and even more so, they would like people to start gathering virtually in this virtual tabletop that's coming out and once they're there, I think their ideas, Okay, well, how are we going to make more money for the game. And they're kind of looking at this model that's very popular in the video game world, which is like, we'll give away the digital experience, either for free or for a low cost, but once you're in there, we're going to lure you with all the potential add ons for your characters, so you can get you a cool outfit for your wizard or like a new spell that lights up the screen or something, and you'll pay us like a couple of dollars here and there. And they're hoping that all these micro transactions will add up to a lot more money over time when we come back. Can Hasbro get people to pay for a game that's been nearly free for decades. My name is Eric and I'm from Cincinnati, Ohio. I think the beautiful thing about DND is that's a game where you can see yours and the other players in the tables. Decisions and choices impact the world, the story, and the characters. In another medium like video games, you can really only solve a problem in a way that the designer planned for you to be able to solve, whereas in D and D you're able to address problems these creative, out of the box solutions that maybe you're the only person that would have thought of to try it that way, but then you're able to see that scenario play out and how that would impact the world and the story Felix. Hasbro is trying to turn what's always been is very face to face analog game into something more digital, which makes sense. But you had mentioned earlier that there's been this resurgence in playing D and D, and a lot of that, is you right, was based on the fact that it wasn't digital. It was almost like proudly antidigital. Are people going to accept what Hasbro is trying to get them to do. I think it's going to be a tough sell. I think that part of the appeal, as you said, of Dungeons and Dragons is that it is this analog experience, and I think it's a way of getting together with friends where you don't have to deal with all the trappings of digital life, social media feedback, you know, cameras, microphones, Like it's a really great feeling to get back and just sit around at a table with people, and I think that's been part of the appeal. Then I think it's also been really fascinating to watch now because the concern of parents almost universally, is like, our kids are spending too much time on the screens, right, They're just always playing video games, looking at social media, watching their streaming shows, and this huge desire to get them off the screens and to do anything else. And I think D and D has been great and very appealing for that very reason. So now you see parents really wanting their kids to go play D n Z. Go down in the basement, Hey, get the dice out. You know, you guys will have fun. And I think ironically that's been part of the multigenerational boom that D and D has been experiencing in popularity is its appeal as an analog product. So I think that's part of the challenge that hasro is going to have. The other big part of the challenge is that historically, part of the reason that Dungeons and Dragons has been a difficult business for its various owners over the years to monetize is because of something about the fan base itself and anything that reeks of kind of unfettered commercialization or dumming down the game. They get very very vocal that, like, this is not a good thing. Hasbro actually found themselves in this huge controversy with its fan base. Basically what happened is that twenty three years ago, the original company that owned Dungeons and Dragons, they sold the business to Wizards of the Coast, which was this hobby company outside of Seattle, which had this hit game called Magic the Gathering, and they were flush with cash. They go out they buy D and D and so what they did, and this was very smart, probably the best decision that's been made in the fifty year history of Dungeons Dragons, as they said, we're going to adopt this open game light and it was essentially saying, if you're a fan of the game, if you like to play it, and you want to create a little add on feature, you want to write an adventure module that you could take your friends through and it's really fun, and you decide you want to sell it, that's great. You don't have to ask us for permission and go start selling it. Yourself. It's kind of been taken for granted that that's how the D and D world works. And the other thing that was great about this open licensing framework is it really broadened the types of people. The groups of people that were playing Dungeons and Dragons initially was a lot of boys in the Midwest, men in the Midwest playing This is kind of the community that grew out of Now you suddenly you have more women coming in, you have more people of color, and allowed people to make characters and adventures that appealed to them and their friends, and it was this great diversifying effect on the broader Dungeons and Dragons community. Felix, why do I feel like there's a big butt coming here? Yeah. But then late last year, Hasbro started reaching out to people in the role playing game community and saying, oh, you know what, we have this new contract that's going to replace the open game license. We're going to update it. And when people took a look at it, all help broke loose. I mean, people were so pissed off because essentially what it signaled in many small ways was that the open Dungeons and Dragons era was coming to an end, and it was going to be replaced with something else, in which Hasbro was much more tightly controlling the ecosystem around Dungeons and Dragons. If you were a publisher and you were making more than fifty thousand dollars a year from D and D related products, you'd have to go to them and say exactly what it was you were selling and to who. If you were making more than seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, then it would kick in a licensing fee, and this did not go over well with the D and D world, huge controversy in that world. So by the end of January, Hasbro essentially capitulated. They apologize we're going to keep the open gaming license in place and we want everyone to participate. They did not really say too much about the future. So to what degree third party creators are going to be able to create supplemental materials in this new hybrid digital Dungeons and Dragons world. That's very much something that D and D fans and creators and community members are wondering about. In all of this, there's nothing that keeps people from just using the old books they use when they were kids. Are the ones that are still out there and just doing their own games. It's not like you have to be part of the Hasbro ecosystem now to plate Dungeons and Dragons. Correct. You could go back and play the original Dungeons Dragons, you could play Vance Dungeons and Dragons. You could play the second edition, the third edition, the fourth edition. There are all these books circulating, rule sets circulating over the years. I think the difference is that, especially if you're kind of watching the Dungeons and Dragons influencers on Twitch, and you're you know, going on YouTube and watching people talk about the game, and you're listening to D and D podcasts, I think all of that has added an element of currency and wanting to be part of the new version because you know, the old versions work, but the rules are different, and this is really just there's no board game involved with Dungeons Dragons. It's really the rules. And so I think, if anything, this broader ecosystem of Dungeons and Dragons fans that's built up has put more emphasis on being part of the era. And like I said, I think that's part of the reason that the current edition, which is the fifth edition, is the most popular in the game's history. I think the question becomes how many of those devoted happy fifth edition players is Hasbro going to be able to move over to this new version? And is there some risk of as you're trying to broaden this, as you're trying to make it more digital, as you're trying to make it more appealing to non players, do you lose something and do you potentially risk alienating this group of existing fans that are playing it happily now? So what do you think the answer is? Hasbro is putting a big bet on this game. It's still a really complicated game, is still sort of a niche game. Do you think that they can build this into a mass market success? I think it's going to be really difficult. I think the nature of Dungeons and Dragons is that the most important element is the imagination of the people who are playing in the group, and that's a very hard thing to turn into a product. So, Felix, after writing the story, has it rekindled your childhood love of D and D? Are you going to start playing again? It has? I'm very game to start playing again. I want to get my kids into it. We've been playing a stripped down role playing game that's much simpler, that's kind of geared for younger kids called Hero Kids, that similarly uses a lot of the conventions of Dungeons and Dragons. But I think it's a feeling like it might be time to graduate them up to Dungeons and Dragons. Felix, thanks for coming on a show My pleasure. After the break, we meet a store owner who makes a living serving these gamers. My name is Raven and I'm from eastern Pennsylvania, growing up in a religious community. D and D was something that I had heard foreign tails of, this strange game that people would partake in, and I didn't really know where, understand a whole lot about it, only that I was dissuaded from playing it. So as an adult, coming to D and D was interesting. I'm a person who's very involved in the arts, so the idea of being able to make up a story and live in that story was very appealing. We wanted to talk to someone who's deeply familiar with Dungeons and Dragons and the people who play it, and also what it takes to make D and D a business. Our producer Michael Falero called up Lauren Bolanco she's the co owner of twenty Sided that's a board game retail store and event space in Brooklyn. Can you describe how you would explain your business to folks if they asked, like, what do you do? What is twenty sided do? How do you explain it? Twenty Sided Store and twenty Sided event Space has been going on for twelve years. The detail side of things, we sell games on the secondary market, so we sell a lot of board games, everything from party games to heavy strategy games. We started off as an event space and the retail kind of grew out of that. When we started, we were running Magic the Gathering events and then started picking up Wizards of the Coast, Dungeons and Dragons, organized play kits, all kinds of ways for people to come together and meet other people. I think over the twelve years, we've really realized that that's been kind of the key is, you know a lot of people are looking for other people who are into this hobby and they want to find other people to play with. What we do at twenty sided is we create an environment where people can come and learn how to play as they're playing. So we started off right away with that kind of being the foremost of it, we would have pregenerated characters that you could play, and then as you sort of got a little bit more familiar with it, we'd have opportunities for our dispense to create their own characters and bring those characters back. But then there's also now these experiences where you know, people want to watch other people play games. Because there were people who constantly were like, I'm new to this, I'm really afraid to try this out. Is there any way that I could watch? But then eventually I thought, oh, you know what if we have people that are willing to be on stage and want to perform this for other people, then this is a way that we could have an audience for somebody who walks off the street. You've described kind of this learning how to make a character, learning how to start playing, which can be an overwhelming but a very fun experience. If someone walks in during one of these nights where you have an of these events going out, what are they most likely to see? Are they sitting down at a table with other folks like paying us a picture? Yeah, it all starts off with you know, you just preregister on our website for either one session or I like to kind of group it into smaller, more palatable ways for people to register for an event. You know, we're all adults and lives are busy, So if we do campaigns, I will have people sign up maybe for four weeks at a time, and so there's always an opportunity to kind of take a break or come back. And then for the individual sessions, we try to write things in a way where each of the storylines can have an end, even if they're just a one shot. But if you keep bringing that character back for a series of one shots, they are all still sort of set in the same world where you can keep bringing that character back. And I've started creating my own world for this experience. Even though we've got a huge, huge selection of role playing games that we sell and different games that we run at the store, Dungeons and Dragons is still probably our best seller and the one that most people want to play and learn how to play. You've had this business for twelve years. You just had your anniversary recently. Just describe in a few words, like how has the D and D scene at your store changed in those twelve years. It's changed a lot, you know, for the most part, now almost everybody has a better idea of how to play and what it is. And I think that's because they're watching other people play. There's a lot more resources out there for people to watch, right, Like, can I just see how this is done? How do people do this? So back when we were first running games, I think a lot of it was people came to it realizing that they were an equal participant in the process. And I think now there's more of this expectation of this entertainment value. So for an audience like hours that I would imagine most of them haven't played D and D. Could you explain, you know, what is the appeal of the game for everyone? What can the appeal be? You know, we get to develop a world and create a character and play in this fantasy environment that is super fun. And I think for people who play in ongoing campaigns, you know, you'll sit down at a table with them and the entire conversation you're going to realize is going to be stories and experiences that they had in their game. They're memorable, you know, these things that happen because you are part of the storytelling process that you create something. The support and the encouragement from everybody around you helps you create things that you never thought you could do, to come up with ideas that you never thought you could ever have, And that's where I think you get these memorable experiences that stick with you for life. So you know, it's wild. Lauren Blanco, thanks so much for coming on the show. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. This was a pleasure. Thanks for listening to us here at The Big Take. It's a daily podcast from Bloomberg and iHeartRadio. For more shows from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen, and we'd love to hear from you. Email us questions or comments to Big Take at Bloomberg dot net. The supervising producer of The Big Take is Vicky Virgolina. Our senior producer is Catherine Fink. Our producers are Michael Flero and Mo Barrow. Raphael m Seely is our engineer. Our original music was composed by Leo Sidrin. I'm West Kasova. We'll be back on Monday with another Big Take. Have a great weekend.