Wizards of the Coast Keeps Buying Video Games With Magic Money
Hasbro's best-ever Magic quarter arrived alongside a $56 million write-off on games nobody will play.
Magic: The Gathering cleared half a billion dollars in a single quarter this spring for the first time in the game's history, and the same earnings report that delivered that number also disclosed a write-off of cancelled video games. Hasbro's 10-Q for the quarter ended June 28, 2026 lists Magic revenue of $545.3 million against a one-time non-cash impairment of $56.4 million tied to a refocused Digital Games portfolio. Those cancelled titles had been scheduled for 2028 and beyond. Six days after the July 21 earnings call, a separate filing confirmed that John Hight would leave the presidency of Wizards of the Coast on September 1, staying on as an advisor to Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks.
Set against the tabletop business, that write-off works out to roughly nine days of Magic sales at the pace the game set between April and June. Wizards moved a little over $528 million in cards and tabletop product across those three months, which the filing credits to Secrets of Strixhaven and the debut of Universes Beyond: Marvel Super Heroes. On the strength of it, Hasbro raised full-year guidance. Only the margin gave ground, sliding from the mid-forties to just under 41 percent on the back of the write-down, even as segment operating profit reached $270 million.
Hight arrived at Wizards in August 2024 after nearly thirteen years at Blizzard, most of that time as general manager of the Warcraft franchise, and his mandate covered publishing and development across Magic, Dungeons & Dragons, and Hasbro's wider digital gaming operation. In interviews he talked openly about wanting a modern D&D MMO. The logic behind hiring him was never mysterious, since Baldur's Gate 3 had landed in 2023, swept awards season, and sold to an audience many times the size of the tabletop player base, and Hasbro wanted more results shaped like that one. Getting them meant building an internal capability to make big games, which is a different business from the one Wizards had spent thirty years learning how to run. Larian made Baldur's Gate 3 under license, with its own studio culture and its own decade of RPG experience behind it, and Wizards and Larian went their separate ways once it shipped.
Since then the owned and publisher-directed projects have mostly ended in filings rather than in stores. Giant Skull, the studio Stig Asmussen founded after directing God of War III and the Star Wars Jedi games, signed an exclusive publishing agreement with Wizards in June 2025 for a single-player D&D action game. Bloomberg's Jason Schreier reported in May that the deal had been terminated, with Wizards saying it had chosen not to pursue an early concept while remaining open to other pitches from the studio. Earlier this year Hasbro shut down Atomic Arcade, the internal team working on a G.I. Joe project. July's write-down covers several more games that nobody outside the company ever got a name for, and their studios have not been identified either.
Hasbro has not said where the pruned projects fell short. On the earnings call, Cocks framed the surviving slate as anything clearing a bar of big audience potential and real franchise room beyond a first release.
Every one of those bets was funded by cardboard. Marvel Super Heroes had what Hasbro's own release called a record-breaking debut, and on the call Cocks described Magic as a mega franchise on the order of Pokémon and Minecraft. At MagicCon in Las Vegas this year, that set was the center of gravity for the entire show, and the enthusiasm in the hall was real, and so was the fatigue. Longtime players have spent three years arguing that Universes Beyond dilutes what Magic is, and that the release cadence has outrun anyone's ability to follow it. Whatever the merits, that argument is nowhere near settled and I am not going to settle it here, though the filing makes one thing plain, which is that Universes Beyond pushed the whole Wizards segment past $660 million for the quarter.
A tidy conclusion sits right there, which is that Wizards should license its worlds to studios that already know what they are doing and stay out of the room. Against that sits the 2027 slate, which is not small. The Exodus team at Archetype Entertainment includes BioWare veterans James Ohlen and Drew Karpyshyn, the novelist Peter F. Hamilton is writing expanded-universe material for the game, and Warlock is due the same year from Invoke Studios. According to Hasbro's own materials, Wizards Digital, mostly Magic Arena and D&D Beyond, added to segment growth. There is also a version of this where a $56 million write-off at the concept stage is the system working as designed, because the alternative is killing a game in year four, which is the expensive lesson Microsoft has been teaching the industry all year.
Line up the last three years and the pattern reads clearly enough, because the wins came from worlds Wizards handed to somebody else or borrowed from somebody else. Larian took Baldur's Gate 3 under license and turned it into the awards sweep that started this entire ambition. In reverse, Universes Beyond runs the same trade, with Wizards designing sets around Marvel and Tolkien properties it will never own. Monopoly Go! contributed $44.2 million of digital licensing revenue to the segment in the quarter, according to the 10-Q, and nobody at Wizards built that game either. Making games in house has so far produced a shuttered Atomic Arcade and a terminated Giant Skull agreement, though Exodus and Warlock could overturn the whole reading in 2027 and the people making them have the credits to do it. Hight stays on as an advisor to Cocks for up to a year under the terms of the July 27 filing, which hands his successor a full release cycle of overlap with the executive who placed those bets. A year of overlap is enough time to find out whether the lesson took, and Warlock and Exodus both land inside that window, which makes 2027 the first quarter Wizards gets graded on its own development.
