The parent company of Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast will purchase D&D Beyond, the role-playing game’s popular digital suite of tools. The company announced the news in a press release this week, revealing that it would purchase D&D Beyond from current owner Fandom in a $146.3 million cash deal. Wizards of the Coast is a subsidiary of toy maker Hasbro, which bought the company in 1999.
Fandom, which hosts fan sites for popular titles for movies, games and TV, bought D&D Beyond and the rest of the company’s media assets in 2017 from game mod and community tool Curse, which was in the process of being entered into a deal with Twitch.
“D&D Beyond has been one of our most valuable partners in the digital space for the past six years, and we are excited to bring their best talent to our team,” said Cynthia Williams, Cynthia Williams, president of Wizards of the Coast and Digital. “The team at D&D Beyond has built an incredible digital platform and together we will deliver the best possible Dungeons & Dragons experience for players around the world.”
Big news to share! D&D Beyond becomes part of the Wizards of the Coast family! You will continue to have all the tools, features and content you know and love from the heart and home of Dungeons & Dragons. There’s more to come – excited to party with you!
➡️ https://t.co/wop7ySEKXS pic.twitter.com/nxoJwCRxF6
— D&D onward (@DnDBeyond) Apr 13, 2022
D&D Beyond is a digital game partner that’s ubiquitous enough in the scene that you can’t blame Wizards already owning it. The company’s website and app serve as a sort of digital Swiss Army knife for D&D players, offering everything from character creation and encounter building to digital dice (use these at your own risk to be judged by your table). The app, which offers paid subscription levels in addition to free basic access, already has more than 10 million users.
Prior to the deal, Wizards and D&D Beyond had already worked closely together, with the latter offering exclusive digital access to all official D&D sourcebooks. This arrangement has long been a source of consternation among players reluctant to repurchase a digital copy of a physical book they already own, with some hoping that linking digital access to paper sourcebooks could be in the cards. with the purchase.
Wizards is hosting a special livestream event on YouTube and Twitch on April 21 at 9:00 a.m. PT, so we may find out more about the plans then. The teaser trailer shows off a game map, minis, and a slightly misplaced Xbox controller, so it’s possible we’ll also hear about new game titles or a good launch date for Baldur’s Gate 3, the upcoming role-playing adventure developed by Divinity: Original Sin creator Larian.
Business is good with Wizards of the Coast, which also releases the strategy card game Magic: The Gathering. Between the pandemic forcing people to get creative about long-distance socialization and the widespread fame of popular live-play games like Critical Role — Twitch’s biggest earner — Wizards appears to be expanding the role-playing game audience by an order of magnitude. . The company had more than $1.3 billion in revenue in 2021, and with movie and TV spin-offs of the sprawling tabletop fantasy multiverse in the works, that’s only going to grow.
This post D&D Beyond comes under the wing of Wizards of the Coast in $146 million deal – TechCrunch was original published at “https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/15/dnd-beyond-wizards-dungeons-and-dragons/”
