Hasbro, parent company of Wizards of the Coast (WotC), has released its Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2024 Financial Report which states tabletop gaming sales for Wizards of the Coast (WotC) were down three percent for the year and Magic: The Gathering sales were down one percent for the year.
Despite Magic sales dipping slightly in 2024 due to the lap of The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth, WotC and the Digital Gaming segment saw a revenue increase of four percent thanks to strength in Licensed and Digital Gaming (Monopoly Go! was a major factor in Licensed and Digital Gaming increasing by 22 percent). The Q4 sales saw a dip of seven percent due to the lap of the Holiday release of The Lord of the Rings set.
Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks noted that the solid performance of Magic was key in the growth of the Licensed and Digital Gaming segment. He also predicts more growth in 2025 as active player count continues to go up, MagicCon attendance numbers grow, and stronger sales of sets like Foundations all lead into a year stacked with three Universes Beyond sets that include Final Fantasy, Spider-Man, and Avatar: The Last Airbender. In the earnings conference call, Cocks said that Final Fantasy could become the best-selling set in Magic history.
“Final Fantasy has a good chance of taking the crown of best-selling Magic set in history,” Cocks said. “Just the other day we launched preorders for gift bundles for Final Fantasy and Commander gift sets — for Lord of the Rings those took a week to sell out, for Final Fantasy, it took an hour to sell out. So, we think Final Fantasy will do pretty well.”
Cocks continued to hype up 2025 with the upcoming Spider-Man set, but he did reveal that the first major Marvel-based set will, surprisingly, not have Commander Decks as part of the product lineup.
“Final Fantasy and Lord of the Rings had Commander Decks, which usually constitute a fairly big hunk of a set’s total volume. Spider-Man will be standard-only cards, there won’t be any kind of precon decks, so that’ll make it a bit smaller,” Cocks said. “But again, when we did our first Secret Lair drops for Marvel in December, those things sold out within minutes. So, we think both of these releases have very strong innate demands, both from existing Magic players — and just as importantly — adjacent fans who we think can be new to Magic, and that’s what we think the real power of Universes Beyond is, which is building the Magic installed base.”
The Q4 and 2024 Full Year Earnings presentation also included info about the Magic player base in its 2025 release cadence slide. Notably, the average age of a tabletop player is 30 and the average player tenure is more than five years.
Read the press release from Hasbro.