when I was around 10 or 11 in my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio, at my best friend Han Schroeder’s house. His older brother, Thad, introduced it to us. Then I started playingmy junior year of college, about a year or so after it came out. My girlfriend moved away to medical school, andcards moved into my dorm to help fill the void. Being able to come on board to a company like Wizards has been such a big part of my life.also helped inspire me to get into the video game industry in the late ‘90s.
with our partners at Paramount. They also do a host of non-Hasbro IP entertainment for screens both big and small. They have hit reality series like, and most recently,Now I feel like I should buy eOne. Let me rummage around the couch and see if I can find enough change to pick this up from you.Fair enough. I do want to come back to why you’re thinking about selling it, because there has been a lot of news around that and what you’re planning to do with it.
Well, I think it’s a couple things. First and foremost, when Wizards was a $450 million company — just to use my own personal experience — our brands were big, but by gaming blockbuster standards they were relatively smaller scale and had relatively constrained audiences. As we’ve doubled and tripled the size of those businesses and those brands, it has become apparent that those brands are bigger than just the primary game expressions they have.
No. Obviously, we took a lot of feedback from both that activist investor as well as from our investors as a whole. I wouldn’t say that our organization was led by any one particular piece of investor feedback or activist feedback. Our organizational model was led based on what our strategy is, and our strategy goes back to this idea of a blueprint.
Is there a room full of secret toys you get to go into and just be like, “That one, that one, not that one”?If I was the CEO, I’d be like, “Once a quarter, I’m just going to look at all the toys.” Maybe in three years, but right now it’s still a lot of humans. So basically, the brand insights platform is a fancy way of saying how we put together all of our data analytics and market research.Well, you have to have data analysts, you have to commission market research, you have to pay outside firms to help recruit people to come in for focus groups and playtests, and you have to pay various analysts externally to help you understand what trends look like.
It’s amazing to think of a toy company that has a data analyst group that employs its own software developers to figure out what toys to make. At the end of the day, that’s what you’re trying to do here: make more products that people want. Let’s put that into practice a little bit. You’ve had a busy year, and there have been some bumps in the road. Let’s start with. A lot of new card sets were released last year, and there was a lot of flak from people saying, “Okay, we’re devaluing some of the legendary cards.” One of our writers called it the Willy Wonka effect, where you never knew if you might get the golden ticket, you might get the rare card. Now it’s pay to play.
Well, yeah. Bank of America certainly had their opinion in that report, which was done by an analyst who had covered the brand for about three months. Just to give it a little bit of perspective, the brand has grown for 13 out of the last 14 years. Going back to the data point, we will typically poll tens of thousands of players per year on a brand likeare probably all the mom-and-pop game stores around the world that do relatively modest business.
The last thing you have to realize is that you’re starting to measure your player base in the tens of millions of active fans, particularly for a game like, which is so hyper-engaged and for which the tenure of players can be so long — you have some players actively playing today who have never stopped playing since they first picked up a card in the late ‘90s or early 2000s.
You backed off of that, but part of that was obviously because, “We’re worried about NFTs.” Right? That was part of the rationale there. “We need to change this license to get ready for a world of digital scarcity.” Is that on your mind? Is scarcity an important part of the project?and the open game license was two things. First off, very fairly, our fans have a high bar for how we represent the brand and the fandom of the brand.
My dad was an ER doctor, and he was like, “When you were little, I just let you stick your finger in the outlet, because you have to learn somehow.” He’s very confident., and then I want to wrap up with entertainment. It does seem like one of the things you could do without a license that is more restrictive is to keep the NFT companies and the metaverse companies outside of this brand. Just keep them at bay, and you can put out your own NFTs.
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