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- [00:01]
David Brown
Wonder.
- [00:08]
I'm david brown, and this is business wars.
- [00:30]
It's been 50 years since Dungeons and Dragons was first published, but this cult favorite is experiencing a resurgence. What used to be a niche game for fantasy nerds has become a global phenomenon. YouTube channels like Critical Role generate millions of views on their livestreamed D and D campaigns.
- [00:48]
Ryan Dancy
And Thursday nights, all eight founders will.
- [00:51]
David Brown
Be returning for Campaign 4, which will.
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Ryan Dancy
Still be nerdy ass voice actors playing Dungeons and Dragons.
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David Brown
And we can't forget about the Netflix series Stranger Things, right? Final season just dropped not too long ago. In fact, in season one, the D and D demon prince gets a pretty big cameo. A shadow grows on the wall behind.
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Ryan Dancy
You, swallowing you in darkness. It is almost here.
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Indira Varma
What is it?
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Ryan Dancy
What if it's the Demogorgon? Oh, Jesus, we're so screwed if it's the Demogorgon.
- [01:17]
David Brown
It's not the Demogorgon. This newfound popularity has launched Dungeons and Dragons into what some are calling a golden age. Yet despite the buzz, D and D only generates a small slice of the profits for Wizards of the coast, the studio that manages the game for its parent company, Hasbro. So how can they build on D D's popularity and continue to expand beyond the tabletop? Guiding us through this quest is Ryan Dancy. He's the chief operating officer for Alderac Entertainment Group, a company specializing in tabletop games. Before that, he was a VP at Wizards of the coast, where he helped restructure D D's rules for the third edition in 2000. Today, Ryan is walking us through how the game became mainstream and what Wizards of the coast is doing to bring D and D into the digital world. And Ryan's going to provide a quick overview of how this complicated game is actually played, just in case you'd like to stir up a campaign of your own. Sharpen your quill, steady your dice, and get ready to embark on the quest of a lifetime. All that's coming up.
- [02:25]
Lindsey Graham
Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondery's American Scandal. In our latest series, three teenage boys from West Memphis, Arkansas, are accused of a vicious triple homicide. There's no real evidence linking them to the crime except rumor and fear, and that'll be enough to convict them. Listen to American Scandal on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [02:45]
James Austin Johnson
Mom and dad, mom and mom, dad and dad. Whatever. Parents. Are you about to spend five hours in the car with your beloved kids this holiday season? An old granny's house. I'm setting the scene. I'm picturing screaming, fighting Back to back hours of the K Pop Demon Hunter soundtrack on repeat. Well, when your ears start to bleed, I have the perfect thing to keep you from rolling out of that moving vehicle. Something for the whole family. He's filled with laughs, he's filled with rage. The OG Green Grunk. Give it up for me. James Austin Johnson as the Grinch. And like any insufferable influencer these days, I'm bringing my crew of lesser talented friends along for the ride with a list guests Mike Gronk, Mark Hamill, and the Jonas Brothers, whoever they are. There's a little bit of something for everyone. Listen to Tis the Grinch Holiday podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
- [03:43]
David Brown
Ryan Dancy, welcome to Business Wars.
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Ryan Dancy
Oh, I'm really glad to be here. Very excited.
- [03:48]
David Brown
Hey, what was your earliest experience playing Dungeons and Dragons? Do you remember?
- [03:52]
Ryan Dancy
Yes. I found Dungeons and Dragons when I was in the sixth grade, which would have been around 1980. I learned from a thing that we called the Blue Book, which is one of the early editions of Dungeons and Dragons. I played with a group of kids in my neighborhood. I played regularly until I was in high school. And then in 1991, after my daughter was born, my family, my wife and I, we decided to reboot our old D and D campaign and and start playing again as a way to have a cheap hobby.
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David Brown
That's great. Did your, Were your parents cool with that? I know there was a lot of stuff going around about Dunge and Dragons back in the day.
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Ryan Dancy
Yeah, I lived through what the industry calls the Satanic panic, but it didn't really affect my household at all. I don't think my parents even knew.
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David Brown
They didn't even know. What was it about the game that drew you in in the first place?
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Ryan Dancy
That is a great question. I think it was partly the feel of the ability to be a creative person, to create interesting things that other people could interact with. And it's really complicated and I've always been drawn to very complicated things.
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David Brown
Let's talk a little bit about how this game is played because some of us have had a little experience, others not so much. They sort of hear second and third hand, how do you play it? Can you set the scene for us?
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Ryan Dancy
Sure. Traditionally, one person assumes the role of the referee, which is colloquially known as the Dungeon Master or the dm. And that person's job is running the game. They enforce the rules, they play the parts of non player characters. They decide what the monsters will do in combat. They narrate using imagination. They create the world for the Players. The rest of the players assume the role of one or more characters. The characters are enumerated on a character sheet that quantifies their skills and abilities and their wealth, their inventory, aspects of their morality, their ethics. There's a bunch of dice and charts and tables, little miniature figures. But it's mostly a game you play in your mind. It's a game about imagination.
- [05:53]
David Brown
Is it hard to keep up with all the rules? Because it seems like to me, I would have trouble remembering, okay, this person has this much power and these sorts of vulnerabilities and all that. And then you've got to sort of keep up with that in real time too. Because you're playing against other people.
- [06:10]
Ryan Dancy
Yeah, for sure. There is a very high cognitive load, especially on the Dungeon Master. In the beginning, when you're learning how to play, you try to keep things very simple and you'll be reusing the same kinds of monsters and the characters will be doing the same kinds of actions pretty repetitively.
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David Brown
Right.
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Ryan Dancy
And so the complexity of the game kind of grows over time. The more you play it and the more comfortable you become with it, the more you're able to access more and more complex parts of the game. But it is insanely complicated.
- [06:40]
David Brown
And of course, in most games you're using dice. Here you're talking about, I guess, what, a 20 sided die. Is it very much sort of driven by people taking turns with the die?
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Ryan Dancy
Yes, there are a lot of dice in Dungeons and Dragons. Not just the 20 sided dice, but dice of all different sizes. The reason the 20 sided dice gets so much attention is that it is the dice that you are typically rolling when the most important things happen in the game.
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David Brown
Oh, okay.
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Ryan Dancy
A roll of that die could decide whether your character lives or dies.
- [07:14]
David Brown
Literally. Yeah. Okay. All right. So correct me if I'm wrong, but it strikes me that there's a kind of person who's drawn to Dungeons and Dragons. This isn't for everybody.
- [07:23]
Ryan Dancy
You know, when I started playing, it was definitely not for everybody. But today there is a much broader interest in this hobby and many, many, many more people play it. It has become a lot more mainstream. And I think that has a lot to do with the fact that life has become more complicated and people are. Their entertainment choices now involve a wide variety of really complicated things. People who play Pokemon or video games, they're playing fairly complicated games. And so a role playing game isn't that weird anymore in terms of its level of complexity. We joke in the industry that Dungeons and Dragons is 20 minutes of fun. Packed into four hours. And that is both true and a little bit of a joke. Like you are usually having fun for the whole four hours, but a lot of that fun is just interacting with your friends, not necessarily engaging directly with the rules of the game.
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David Brown
When you're looking at tabletop roleplay, What's D&D's biggest competition, what would you say?
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Ryan Dancy
You know, on some level, I would say that Dungeons and Dragons doesn't have any competition really. There are lots of other tabletop role playing games, but in terms of their number of players and the revenue they generate annually, they are nothing compared to Dungeons and Dragons. The entire rest of the industry combined might be 10% the size of D and D, but there are a lot of other games and there is a big enough audience that even a small percentage of D D's audience is still enough people to allow hundreds of people to have a full time job making a role playing trick.
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David Brown
Interesting. That's really fascinating to me. I want to go back to something that you said because I think there's something important and maybe revealing in this idea that a lot of people who haven't played D and D, I think that there's this idea that, you know, at least once upon a time it was considered to be a kind of nerdy game. And I'm curious about the culture of Dungeons and Dragons players. Does it tend to be more insular or does it tend to be open? For instance, I've gone into like a comic book store and seen people playing in the back and kind of wanted to learn more about it, but I didn't know whether or not I'm kind of an invader or, or whether someone would be open to sort of teach me how to play in the course of a game. What was the culture like?
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Ryan Dancy
I think you would find it very receptive. My experience is that most people would be more than happy to tell you at length about their role playing game experiences. They're hobbyists and like any hobbyists, they're enthusiasts and they love to share that enthusiasm. And now here in 2025, it isn't kind of a strange thing that no one's ever heard of before. It's got a lot more mainstream accessibility to it. So it isn't, it has never been and isn't now the kind of thing where people are interested in hiding it or hiding away. It's mostly a question of where are you going to find them and are they going to have an opportunity to teach you something or talk to you about that game. And my experience is that most people would love to.
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David Brown
My sense of it, too, is that there are a lot of people who'd love to break that barrier and sort of get in, especially since, you know, we've seen the game sort of amplified in, you know, in other media. As part of the Big Bang Theory, it was featured in the sitcom community. You know, we've seen it come up in Stranger Things. Right. I mean, it seems like there's a lot of buzz that's sort of getting built up around this. Is it still drawing in new players or not so much. What's your sense of it?
- [11:00]
Ryan Dancy
It's definitely drawing in new players. This is a golden age for Dungeons and Dragons. It is bigger today than it has ever been, really, by maybe a whole order of magnitude. And I think that is attributable in large measure to the fact that it's getting so much mainstream exposure.
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David Brown
Who's playing it these days? I mean, it's certainly more than just the people I was talking about in the comic book store, right?
- [11:21]
Ryan Dancy
Yeah. I think the biggest change over the lifetime of Dungeons and Dragons is the gender ratio. It used to be that there were very few women playing these games, but today, I would say that number is probably close to 50. 50, and in some places, there's probably more women playing it than men. That's a relatively new development, and it's something that our industry is still kind of grappling to understand. But anecdotally, that definitely seems to be the trajectory that at least achieving gender parity has probably already happened.
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David Brown
I remember, you know, we were talking a little bit about, you know, how it's popularity's been picking up online. And there was this web series called Critical Role, which was launched in 2015 on Twitch with live streams of Dungeons and Dragons campaigns and that sort of thing. And a couple of years later, there was a podcast called Not Another D and D Podcast, and several others after that. Do you think that that's had, or how much do you think that these sorts of shows have helped boost the game's profile, or is this mostly for people who are already playing, do you think?
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Ryan Dancy
My intuition is that those programs have done more to grow Dungeons and Dragons than anything else that has happened in the last 20 years. Yes. And the reason is that they provide a model for people to understand what it is that you do when you play the game. So a lot of people have heard about Dungeons and Dragons, but they've no idea how to play it. And if you sit down and you watch the critical role people play for an hour, you'll get a pretty good sense of what this thing is and how it works and, and that just demystifies it and makes it so much more accessible. And they are professionals. They are great at what they do. So when you watch those people play Dungeons and Dragons, you are watching like the best version of Dungeons and Dragons. It's like watching Tiger woods play golf. Yeah, I'm not going to go to the links and play like Tiger, but I have seen what it looks like when it is golf is played at the highest level. So when I watch a group like Critical Role Play, I am aspirationally seeing what I could get to maybe someday if I applied myself and practiced and really got into the hobby.
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David Brown
Now in the real world, though, how does that translate when it comes to sales? Does that line up linearly with an increase in sales for D and D?
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Ryan Dancy
All of the data that we have, and none of that data is very public, is that sales of Dungeons and Dragons are bigger today than they have ever been by a lot. And that is kind of not surprising when you consider how much more exposure the game has than it has ever had. Those two things should correlate, and I think that they do.
- [14:06]
David Brown
Hey, let's take a short break. Our guest is Ryan Dancy. He's a gaming executive who oversaw Dungeons and Dragons while at the game studio Wizards of the Coast. When we come back, we're going to be hearing more about the hasbro acquisition and DND's struggle to make a profit. Stay with us.
- [14:24]
Lindsey Graham
In 1993, three 8 year old boys were brutally murdered in West Memphis, Arkansas. As the small town local police struggled to solve the crime. Rumors soon spread that the killings were the work of a satanic cult. Suspicion landed on three local teenagers, but there was no real evidence linking them to the murders. Still, that would not protect them. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of wondery show American Scandal. We bring to life some of the biggest controversies in US Presidential lies, environmental disasters, corporate fraud. In our latest series, three teenage boys are falsely accused of a vicious triple homicide. But their story doesn't end with their trials or convictions. Instead, their plight will capture the imagination of the entire country and spark a campaign for justice that will last for all almost two decades. Follow American Scandal on the Wonder Ya or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of American Scandal. The West Memphis three early and ad free right now on Wondery.
- [15:23]
Steve Nash
Hey, basketball fans. Steve Nash here. Ready to elevate your basketball iq? I'm teaming up with Lebron James to bring you the latest season of Mind the Game. And we're about to take you deeper into basketball than you've ever gone before. We're breaking down the real game, the X's and O's that actually matter. In every episode, we'll share elite level strategy, dive into career defining moments, and explain the why behind plays that changed a game, a team, or a championship. LeBron and I have lived this game at the highest level for decades. We've been in those pressure moments and made those game changing decisions and learned from the greatest basketball minds in history. Now we're pulling back the curtain and sharing that knowledge with you. Time to go beyond the highlights and get into the real heart of basketball. Watch Mind the game now on YouTube Prime Video or listen wherever you get your podcasts.
- [16:22]
David Brown
Welcome back to Business Wars. Our guest is Ryan Dancy. He was a VP at Wizards of the coast back in the 1990s when Hasbro acquired the brand and oversaw Dungeons and Dragons at the time. Ryan, I'm curious. How did you get involved with Dungeons and Dragons in a professional capacity? Did you imagine that you'd be doing this when you grew up?
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Ryan Dancy
I did.
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David Brown
You did? That's great.
- [16:45]
Ryan Dancy
I did. I am unbelievably fortunate that something that I told people I wanted to do when I was a little kid is something I actually grew up to do, and that is to publish Dungeons and Dragons. And. And that story is a story of strange plot twists and lucky occurrences and kind of being in the right place at the right time. But in the late 1990s, I found myself being asked to take over and run the Dungeons and Dragons business at Wizards of the Coast.
- [17:16]
David Brown
That's crazy. They just happened. They knew that you were an ace at it or what.
- [17:20]
Ryan Dancy
I was a part of a company that brokered the transaction for Wizards of the coast to buy tsr. TSR is the company that published Dungeons and Dragons before Wizards of the Coast. And I had known the senior leadership at Wizards of the coast for a long time. Peter Akison, who was the CEO at that time, and I were friends and he knew that I had a significant interest in Dungeons and Dragons. And I think that he thought that he could trust me to execute his vision for what he wanted Dungeons and Dragons to be after Wizards bought it. And I hope that I delivered on that vision for him.
- [17:58]
David Brown
Something that struck me in the course of putting together our story around the rise of Dungeons and Dragons is how important it was to almost all of the central players in the trajectory of the game. How Important it was that it be in the right hands, that it be nurtured. You know what I mean? And it's clear that that's part of the story of your rise. I know that your team at Wizards of the coast famously restructured the rules for the game's third edition to make it more accessible. Could you say something about those changes? And it must have been tough, I guess, in some respects, knowing how much the longtime players revered the game. And now you're going to institute changes that some might have felt like, well, this is really upsetting our. Our universe in a sense. No.
- [18:48]
Ryan Dancy
Yes, absolutely. Everybody who becomes involved with the business of publishing Dungeons and Dragons accepts a very high degree of responsibility towards the community to do their best to make the game as good as it can be. I think everybody who has ever sat in that chair or had those jobs has felt that sense of responsibility. And I certainly definitely felt that. When Wizards of the coast bought TSR and acquired Dungeons and Dragons, there had already been a plan to make a new version of the game that TSR had been planning. And Peter Akisson, who is the CEO of Wizards, definitely wanted to make a new version of the game. The game at that time, this is the late 1990s, was in its second edition. And the second edition of Dungeons and Dragons was kind of a sprawling mess. There were hundreds of source books and adventures and rule books that had been published, novels, video games. It was all over the place. And game design had evolved quite a bit since the last time the rules had been refreshed. And Wizards of the coast was a very important part of the evolution of the art and science of game design. The people who worked at Wizards were very interested in trying to make the best version of D and D that they could make. My team was the brand and business management team, and our job was to guide the brand and set the strategy and help develop the community. And I partnered with a guy named Bill Slavicek, who was the head of the tabletop RPG, R&D division at Wizards, and his team was responsible for actually writing those rules and creating those products. And Bill and I had a very collegial and very good relationship. We were on the same page about what we wanted to do and how we wanted to do it. And Peter was there every step of the way to make sure that his vision for what the game should be was coming to fruition. And he had a very strong vision, and he's a very good leader. So there was a lot of people who were involved in making the third edition and I think the third edition of Dungeons and Dragons succeeded like it. It's a great version of the game. So I'm very, very happy to have my name in those books.
- [20:58]
David Brown
Now, you famously advocated for D and D to pivot toward the ogl, the Open Gaming License, which I know was originally met with some pushback within the company. Could you say that time period there and why you were so certain that was the best way forward?
- [21:15]
Ryan Dancy
Yes, I can. The Open Gaming License is a solution to a business problem. And the business problem is how do you upgrade the core rules of the game when you have a giant population of players who have added to those core rules all sorts of material that has been published in the past 30 years, there's no way that Wizards of the coast could possibly have written new versions of all that content. So by creating a mechanism by which the community could create their own versions and their own content for Dungeons and Dragons, we basically unleashed thousands of people's creativity and allowed them to contribute directly back to the. To the community itself via the mechanism of the license. The Open Gaming License is based on the idea of free Software and Open Source software.
- [22:13]
I was born and raised in Seattle, and Wizards of the coast is based in Seattle, and we are surrounded by people who are in the tech industry. And so the idea about Open Source software was very well understood, I think, by everybody.
- [22:26]
David Brown
It was in the air.
- [22:26]
Ryan Dancy
Yeah, for sure, it was in the air. Absolutely. And, yeah, it was a little bit of a conceptual leap to say, can we apply this idea to a game? But Dungeons and Dragons as a game is a lot like a piece of computer software. So it wasn't really that weird when we kind of got into it and started to work on how to make it happen. I was very privileged to work with a guy named Brian Lewis, who was the general counsel at Wizards of the Coast. And Brian structured the license in a way that achieved our objectives and basically made that license the de facto system for people who wanted to work in this part of tabletop gaming for 25 years.
- [23:07]
David Brown
I know that there was a point where a decision was made because there was a need to increase revenue. Wizards of the coast was considering revoking the Open Gaming License, or if not revoking, monetizing it in a way that outraged a lot of fans. What was your take as the guy who implemented that policy in the first place?
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Ryan Dancy
Yeah, I was pretty unhappy that.
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David Brown
That's.
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Ryan Dancy
That's saying it pretty lightly.
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David Brown
Sounds like. Yeah, I was going to say it sounds like understatement there.
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Ryan Dancy
Yeah. First of all, let me say that the license is constructed in such a way that it cannot be deauthorized or revoked, no matter what Hasbro wants to say about it. It cannot be. It's permanent. It's forever. They have their reasons for what they tried to do, and I don't think they were very honest with the community about what those reasons were. And they certainly didn't go about trying to make changes to the license in a way that had community support. And the end of all of that was they sacrificed a billion dollars of future value. They alienated core members of their community, and in the end, they ended up with no change. And you could argue there's even less legal protections around Dungeons and Dragons today than there was before they started with that attempt.
- [24:23]
David Brown
But do you think that the brand has earned back players trust? I mean, that's sort of core to what this is going at.
- [24:31]
Ryan Dancy
There are people now who will never trust Wizards of the coast because of this. It's unfixable. Really?
- [24:35]
David Brown
Really.
- [24:35]
Ryan Dancy
Is that a huge percentage of the community? Probably not a huge percentage, but when you damage a relationship like that, for some people, it is just unfixable. And that's unfortunate. Wizards had earned a lot of really strong community engagement over the years that they've. They've owned Dungeons and Dragons and they squandered a fair bit of it.
- [24:56]
David Brown
We've sort of skipped over a part of the history of Dungeons and Dragons that I think we need to dig into a little bit more. What do you remember from the Hasbro acquisition of Wizards of the Coast? What was the team sentiment at the time?
- [25:09]
Ryan Dancy
Yeah, it was fascinating. So Hasbro is a Fortune 500 company. They have been in the toy and game business for decades. They're based in Rhode Island. They have a very east coast mentality about things. Wizards was a pure startup. It was owned by its employees, and it had come out of Peter's basement literally to become a, you know, global successful enterprise. Yeah, and there were really good reasons to support that acquisition. If you worked at Wizards of the coast, there were a lot of people at Wizards who had shares that they were able to liquidate and take, you know, life changing money. As somebody who was there during and after the acquisition, I can say that Hasbro treated Wizards of the coast very well. I had very good relations with the people at Hasbro that I dealt with. They were aware that they were buying something pretty special and unique. They didn't treat it cavalierly, but there were, not surprisingly, you know, big cultural issues between startups basement company from Seattle and decades old industrial company from Rhode Island.
- [26:18]
David Brown
Yeah, yeah. Did you have your own misgivings about it? I mean, especially given your love of the game going back to childhood?
- [26:25]
Ryan Dancy
I didn't really have any problem with the acquisition. Really, at that point, I didn't. Partly because of the open gaming license. The open gaming license ensures that Dungeons and Dragons will be available to be used by anybody who wants it forever. So, coincidentally, the emergence of open gaming coincided with the purchase of the business by a Fortune 500 company. They were complimentary.
- [26:50]
David Brown
How much does Hasbro make from Wizards of the Coast's games? Do you have any idea?
- [26:55]
Ryan Dancy
Yes. This is, in my opinion, one of the great business stories of the 21st century.
- [27:02]
David Brown
Really?
- [27:02]
Ryan Dancy
And it deserves its own book like it is a big deal. Wizards of the coast is an enormously profitable company. The Gathering, which is the flagship brand at Wizards of the coast, generates over a billion dollars of revenue a year at very high margins. And unlike a lot of businesses in the toy industry, the Gathering makes money year round. It doesn't just make money at Christmas. Dungeons and Dragons is a much, much, much smaller business. In its very best years, it probably makes between 75 and 100 million dollars. And in an average year now, it's probably making 25 to 50 million dollars. So D and D is not a big contributor to Hasbro's bottom line, But Magic the Gathering makes more profit than all of the rest of Hasbro's businesses combined. Wow. For a very long time, Hasbro was very careful to never talk about Wizards of the coast and Magic the Gathering. But the lack of disclosure eventually became so weird and challenging that they were forced to start making disclosures about the business in their quarterly and annual financial statements. And now you can see in their public numbers just how much profit that business generates. And it is hundreds of millions of dollars a year. The Gathering had a release this year for a set of magic cards that were based on the Final Fantasy franchise that made $200 million one day.
- [28:33]
David Brown
Gee, that's incredible. That is incredible. For people who don't understand the structure there, how are they generating those kinds of revenues in a single day?
- [28:44]
Ryan Dancy
So Magic the Gathering is a collectible card game. It is just cards, like baseball cards, and consumers buy them in packs. In order to collect all the cards in a set, you might have to buy a couple hundred packs at a fairly high dollar value. $15 a pack.
- [29:02]
David Brown
Right.
- [29:02]
Ryan Dancy
And a lot of those cards have a secondary value. They are sold between players and between players and retailers, sometimes for hundreds of dollars, sometimes thousands of dollars. It's a gigantic ecosystem. So when magic releases a new successful set, that product goes out in the world and collectors just jump on it and they buy as much of it as they can, as fast as they can.
- [29:22]
David Brown
So now that magic, the gathering numbers are kind of out there in a sense, how does that reality show up in in the way D and D is treated by top brass at Hasbro?
- [29:34]
Ryan Dancy
The current CEO of Hasbro is a guy named Chris Cox. And Chris is the first CEO of Hasbro who did not come either from the Hassenfeld family or the toy division. He used to be the president of Wizards of the Coast. So Hasbro's top level now reflects the profitability of the company. Wizards of the coast is now represented in the top seat. And Chris has an understanding of Dungeons and Dragons. I know that he plays in a Dungeons and Dragons game, so I think that he certainly is capable of understanding the value of the brand in its community. But he also has an obligation to the rest of Hasbro's stakeholders and their shareholders to not get distracted by D and D and lose focus on magic. But Wizards of the coast is a company that has loved and cherishes Dungeons and Dragons. There is a lot of positive D and D energy in that building. So I think the current configuration of management are good stewards for the brand.
- [30:34]
David Brown
We have to take a short break here. Our guest is Ryan Dancy, COO at Alderac Entertainment Group and former VP at Wizards of the Coast. More on D D's venture into the digital realm when we return. Stay with us.
- [30:47]
In just a few years, Ozempic has gone from a diabetes drug to a global phenomenon. But behind the miracle claims, another battle is raging. Demand is exploding. Supply can't keep up. And as drug maker Novo Nordisk scrambles to produce more, its rival, Eli Lilly is racing to take the crown. Meanwhile, a darker market is emerging. Shady online sellers are offering cheap, unregulated knockoffs. Now millions are injecting mystery vials with no FDA oversight. I'm David Brown, host of Business Wars. In our latest season, we're diving into the the race to Ozempic and the billion dollar showdown between big pharma's biggest players. Can they close the supply gap before one bad vial destroys everything? Make sure to follow Business wars on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of Business wars early and ad free right now on Wondery.
- [31:42]
Indira Varma
I'm Indira Varma. And in the latest season of the Spy who We open the file on Oleg Gordiev, the spy who outran the kgb. A rising star in the heart of Soviet power, Gordievsky is secretly feeding MI6 the Kremlin's deadliest secrets. For 11 years, he walked a razor's edge, exposing KGB threats that hastened the Cold War's end and helped prevent nuclear annihilation. But the KGB have a mole of their own. When they discover the truth, Gordievsky's world collapses. MI6 hatch a desperate, high stakes plan to smuggle him out of Moscow. An escape that could rewrite history. Follow the Spy who on the Wondery app or wherever you listen to podcasts. Or you can binge the full season of the Spy who Outran the KGB early and ad free with Wondery.
- [32:51]
David Brown
Welcome back to Business Wars. Ryan Dancy is COO at Alderac Entertainment Group, which specializes in tabletop games. And we're talking about the evolution of Dungeons and Dragons. Let's focus in a little bit more on Hasbro CEO Chris Cox, who you mentioned is an avid D and D player himself. I know recently he invested something like a billion dollars into digital initiatives for Dungeons and Dragons. What does that mean? Spell that out. As you understand it, there have been.
- [33:24]
Ryan Dancy
Video game versions, digital versions of Dungeons and Dragons, all the way back into the 90s.
- [33:29]
David Brown
Yeah.
- [33:29]
Ryan Dancy
And those games have a very mixed track record. Some of them have been very, very, very successful. Many of them have have been not so successful.
- [33:42]
So if you looked at the profit generated from the Dungeons and Dragons brand over its lifetime, the amount of profit that has been sent to the owner of D and D in the form of licensing for video games is easily more than the total revenue that Dungeons and Dragons has generated.
- [33:59]
David Brown
Wow.
- [34:00]
Ryan Dancy
It is an enormously successful thing to do, a successful D and D video game. One of the most successful games in the last couple of years is a game called Baldur's Gate 3. That is a Dungeons and Dragons game, And it's the third sequel to a game called Baldur's Gate 1, which was a very successful game when I was at Wizards of the coast 25 years ago. So it's, it's definitely something worth pursuing. They're on record saying that they have invested over a billion dollars in digital gaming initiatives, most of which are focused in some way or another on Dungeons and Dragons. They spent over $100 million buying one of their licensees, a company called D and D. Beyond that produces tools that gamers use to play Dungeons and Dragons. There has always been a desire, I think, on the part of the ownership of D and D, no matter which company it was or what time frame they're in, to own that, to be the publisher of the digitalized versions of D and D. And I think that's unlikely to ever really happen.
- [35:00]
David Brown
Why is that? Is it hard to get return on investment or what?
- [35:04]
Ryan Dancy
Yeah, I think the culture of the kinds of companies that make successful video games is just not the culture of a Fortune 500 company. The really big companies that make video games, Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, Electronic Arts, they are mostly either in the business of making a new version of an established franchise, or they act like venture capitalists. They spread their money around in various studios, and they. They hope to get another hit. Hasbro is not a company like that. And it's hard to imagine that Hasbro can get the right people in the right environment with the right incentives to succeed in making a really successful version of Dungeons and Dragons that's digital. And the other thing I think that is a challenge is that they really don't want that. What they want is to transform the tabletop version of the game that's played with dice and books and miniatures into something that's digital that you pay for with a subscription and microtransactions. And the reason is that there are almost as many people, maybe more people who play Dungeons and Dragons as who play the Gathering. But D and d makes a 20th as much money as magic makes. And if you could figure out a way to change the business model of Dungeons and Dragons to be more like Magic the Gathering, you potentially could make magic the Gathering numbers from Dungeons and Dragons.
- [36:22]
David Brown
But could. Could that work? I mean, as a. As a. In the real world, how do you change that business model?
- [36:28]
Ryan Dancy
Yeah, can it work is the big question. And I frankly am very skeptical. I just don't think that business exists, and I don't think that those players want that business. Hasbro really wants that business. But just because they want it doesn't necessarily mean their customers want it.
- [36:44]
David Brown
Okay, let's. Let's do a little mind game here. Let's say you're still at Wizards of the Coast. How would you revitalize D and D to keep the momentum that we were talking about earlier? Is there a way of doing that?
- [36:59]
Ryan Dancy
I definitely do think there are ways to grow the D and D business. I think that there are things you could do to try to grow the tabletop business, and there are things you could do to try to grow the digital business. If you grew the tabletop business, you would get a very small return on Your investment. If you can grow the digital business, you can get a very big return on your investment. So, obviously, and probably Hasbro would much rather grow the digital business than grow the tabletop business.
- [37:25]
David Brown
Right.
- [37:25]
Ryan Dancy
And I think that the path to doing that lies in finding a way to make a part of Hasbro act a little bit like a venture capital company to go out and seed money into a number of teams, small teams with big objectives. Give them the opportunity to show that they can hit initial milestones, and then if they can be prepared, to back that up with more and more investment and see if those teams can scale.
- [37:51]
David Brown
Oh, that's interesting. That's.
- [37:53]
Ryan Dancy
That's a possible thing they can do. It's culturally very weird, but it's not an impossible thing that they could try.
- [37:59]
David Brown
So. So in a way, you're seeding the field. You're giving people an opportunity. Here's some money. What would it be? Something like three, five million dollars for each team. And then you'd say, all right, have at it, and in a year, come back. Show us your best scenario.
- [38:15]
Ryan Dancy
Yeah, exactly. What I would do, really, is I would focus on the people. I would try to hire the right people. I would not get bogged down in the details of what those people are going to do. Hire really good people with a passion for this project and turn them loose and see what they come back with. And you have to protect them, too. You cannot let the current people working at Wizards of the coast, who might feel very protective and want to be involved, you just have to not let them be. They are not experts in making digital products. And you've got to let the experts have. Have a blank sheet of paper and really be able go after it.
- [38:47]
David Brown
That's just it, you know, not invented here syndrome. Right? I mean, in any kind of environment like this, you've had a successful track record, and, boy, you're talking about really taking a chance, letting go of those reins. Do you get any sense from the whispers and people that you still talk to there that maybe they would be up for experimenting in that way?
- [39:09]
Ryan Dancy
You know what? I think they're doing something similar to it. My criticism of what they're doing now is I think they're spending too much money. I think they're trying to skip a bunch of the initial steps, and they're trying to go right to let's fund a big team and rush something into production. Instead of spending, you know, $5 million on 10 teams, they're spending 50 to $100 million on one team or maybe 50 to $100 million on three teams. And I really think this is a situation where you can't skip those initial steps, and you have to go slow, and you have to let things incubate. There's just no way to. To make something happen in that space overnight. There's no overnight successes.
- [39:49]
David Brown
Although I think that maybe a more conventional strategy might be, say, Hasbro partnering with a larger video game company to build out that video game side of D D's business. Would that work? Or would it be something that Hasbro would consider? Or what would be your advice on. On, say, that tech?
- [40:09]
Ryan Dancy
I mean, I think that is what they have tried to do, although a lot of the companies they partnered with have not been big companies. They've been smaller companies. But it takes you full circle back to this question of who should own it, who should get the lion's share of the benefit, Hasbro or their partners. And when Hasbro looks at a company like Larian Studios, who did Baldur Skate three, and they know that that company had hundreds of millions of dollars of profits, the 8 to 10% of that money that Wizards of the coast got, it's not bad. But you kind of get a little envious and you think, well, maybe that should be our profit.
- [40:43]
David Brown
Almost makes me think, what about something like, say, a possible acquisition of a video game company? And I'm loathe to mention names, but Riot, Rockstar, Naughty Dog. Excuse me. What do you think?
- [40:55]
Ryan Dancy
I think the reverse is more likely. One of those companies would buy Wizards of the coast, sure. I mean, well, buying the Gathering would be a very expensive proposition. Buying Dungeons and Dragons, not so much. I think you could make a deal to buy Dungeons and Dragons at a number that would be within the ballpark of what those kind of companies could generate. And I'm sure that it gets looked at all the time. And I am 100% sure that Disney thinks about buying Hasbro every year. They haven't ever pulled that trigger. But I'm sure that when they think about brands that would be compatible with their overall strategy, Hasbro is at the top of that list. So, yeah, I think if there was ever an acquisition, it would go the other way.
- [41:33]
David Brown
Yeah. Well, the game is about to hit its, what, 50th anniversary. What do you see next for the D and D brand to make sure it lasts another 50?
- [41:41]
Ryan Dancy
Well, this is probably no surprise to a business podcast, but I think that the next big change for Dungeons and Dragons is going to be artificial intelligence. And our industry as a whole is extremely cautious about AI and there are lots of ethical concerns about how AI is trained and how it is going to be deployed and all of these issues that are facing us about AI. But AI also has the potential to unlock tremendous value. We talked earlier about how you need a person to be the dungeon master, the referee, and that person's obligations are enormous in order to make the game function. AI is going to make that person's job much easier than it is now, and maybe it will allow that person to do things that no human would be reasonably capable of doing.
- [42:31]
So I think Dungeons and Dragons is about to go through another moment of revolutionary change as AI deploys and comes into this world. And I don't really know what that looks like yet, but my sense is that it is coming and that it's going to be big.
- [42:44]
David Brown
I love it. Boy, that's really interesting. Hey, one final thing for those who've been listening along and perhaps haven't dove in yet, Any pointers for someone who might want to give the game a try and understand firsthand what the excitement's all about about?
- [43:02]
Ryan Dancy
Yes, Wizards does a great job of always producing a beginner set, a box you can buy that has all the components in it that you need to play the game. I haven't. I haven't actually owned the current version, but I'm told that it's really good. So if you go to your local toy store, Target, Walmart, Amazon, you should easily be able to find the. The beginner box for D and D. It's usually a relatively inexpensive purchase, probably less than $40. You're going to get way more than $40 worth of value out of it. So I say give it a whirl, sit down with your kids, and, you know, roll up some characters.
- [43:37]
David Brown
Ryan Dancy is COO at Alderac Entertainment Group and a former VP at Wizards of the coast, where he played a key role in making Dungeons and Dragons one of the most popular tabletop roleplay games in the world. Ryan, it's been a real treat to get to talk with you here on Business Wars. Thanks so much for joining us.
- [43:55]
Ryan Dancy
Yeah, it was great. Thanks for having me.
- [43:57]
David Brown
Coming up, Nvidia has ridden the wave of AI mania, becoming the world's most valuable company worth trillions of dollars. But can it keep its monopoly.
- [44:17]
From wondery? This is episode three of the Many Deaths of Dungeons and Dragons for Business. I'm your host, David Brown. Kelly. Kyle produced this episode. Our lead sound designer is Kyle Randall. Our producer is Tristan Donovan. Our audio engineer is Sergio Enriquez. Our managing producer is Desi Blaylock. Our senior producers are Jenny Bloom and Emily Frost. Karen Lowe is our producer emeritus. Our executive producers are Jenny Lauer, Beckman and Marshall Louie. For Wondery.