{"id":7641,"date":"2026-10-07T14:56:56","date_gmt":"2026-10-07T13:56:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/boardgamewire.com\/?p=7641"},"modified":"2026-10-07T14:59:59","modified_gmt":"2026-10-07T13:59:59","slug":"dd-magic-workers-move-to-unionise-citing-crunch-and-job-insecurity-despite-record-wizards-profits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/boardgamewire.com\/index.php\/2026\/10\/07\/dd-magic-workers-move-to-unionise-citing-crunch-and-job-insecurity-despite-record-wizards-profits\/","title":{"rendered":"D&D, Magic workers move to unionise, citing crunch and job insecurity despite record Wizards profits"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Dungeons & Dragons<\/a> and Magic: The Gathering<\/a> workers are moving to unionise after alleging rising workloads, unpaid overtime and job insecurity at Wizards of the Coast<\/a> – despite the business having become the main profit engine of toy and game giant Hasbro<\/a>.

Workers on Dungeons & Dragons, D&D Beyond and Wizards’ Studio X – which develops tabletop Magic: The Gathering and Duel Masters – plan to unionise with the Communications Workers of America<\/a>, having secured the backing of a “public supermajority” of employees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The move comes after several years of soaring sales and profits at Wizards, which has increasingly become the financial powerhouse of Hasbro amid struggles at the company’s traditional toys business – which includes Nerf guns, Transformers and Peppa Pig toys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wizards provided almost half of Hasbro’s $4.7bn revenue last year<\/a>, with booming Magic: The Gathering sales pushing Wizards to a record operating profit of more than $1bn in 2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That performance was driven by hugely successful Universes Beyond releases including Final Fantasy, Avatar: The Last Airbender and Marvel’s Spider-Man, alongside strong backlist and Secret Lair sales. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Studio X workers specifically highlighted that financial success in announcing their unionisation effort<\/a>, saying their team had been responsible for “back-to-back billion dollar years and a vast majority of Hasbro’s profit”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

D&D workers, meanwhile, said<\/a> growing workloads without corresponding increases in headcount had left some teams regularly “crunching” simply to complete planned releases – describing crunch as “intense and mandatory unpaid overtime”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They are also seeking contractual protections around job security, pay and career progression, saying, “Many of us are bringing home less money every month, adjusted for inflation, than we did when we were hired years ago. That needs to change.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An open letter from those workers added that employees “live in fear of suddenly losing their jobs, with no warning and through no fault of their own”, and that Wizards prioritising in-office work had left workers “unsure of whether their current living situation is tenable for their role”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hasbro cut about 1,900 jobs across two rounds in 2023<\/a>, including at Wizards, after a sharp downturn in its core consumer products business. That segment saw revenue fall 19% in 2023, swinging to a $64.7m operating loss, while Wizards revenue rose 10%.

Further cuts have followed since, including four Wizards employees during Hasbro-wide redundancies in October 2024, and about 30 developers – roughly 90% of the team working on Wizards’ now scrapped Sigil D&D virtual tabletop – in March 2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hasbro cut roughly 150 more jobs three months later, including D&D staff, and last month D&D community manager LaTia Jacquise and Magic social media manager Jordan Hopkins publicly confirmed their layoffs – with Hopkins describing his departure as part of a “greater restructure”<\/a>. Wizards has not disclosed the total number of jobs affected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Magic rules manager Eric Levine said of the union effort<\/a>, “Everyone I work with makes our company, our game, and our community stronger by bringing their talent, expertise, and effort to making Magic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Those incredible people deserve fair compensation, remote protections, clear career progression, and more. Supporting the people who make the game will ensure that Magic keeps getting better for years to come.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The unionisation push also called for protections for work employees create in their free time, with the D&D workers’ announcement saying, “Currently, if an employee makes anything creative in their free time, with their own resources, Hasbro can claim ownership. What we do in our free time should not be dictated by the company, and what we make in our free time should belong to us.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The D&D team also used its unionisation letter to reveal tension between Hasbro and Wizards over the use of generative AI, saying, “As pressure has ramped up from Hasbro to adopt LLMs and Gen AI tools in various aspects of our work, WOTC has resisted these efforts and kept AI out of our games. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“That\u2019s good! We want to preserve this commendable stance through a union contract that ensures our games will always be made by people for people.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks was openly enthusiastic about bringing AI into the D&D ecosystem in September 2024, saying at Goldman Sachs’ Communacopia conference<\/a> that Hasbro was already using AI “significantly and liberally internally as both a knowledge worker aid and as a development aid” – but was more excited about its potential in play.

He added, “I play with probably 30 or 40 people regularly. There\u2019s not a single person who doesn\u2019t use AI somehow for either campaign development or character development or story ideas. That\u2019s a clear signal that we need to be embracing it.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In an interview with The Verge in March this year<\/a>, however, Cocks said that while Hasbro was deploying AI widely across the company, he acknowledged there was resistance to its use in Wizards’ games.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He said, “There are some brands that the audience, the creators, just don’t want it, so we don’t even have it in our pipelines for our video games or for Magic: The Gathering, or D&D.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cocks added that he personally used huge amounts of AI-generated animation, images, text, sound effects and voice cloning in his personal D&D games, telling interviewer Nilay Patel there was so much on his home PC that it would “floor” him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He added that AI was being used extensively elsewhere at Hasbro, including in toy design and as a general productivity tool across the company, and estimated it could save more than one million hours of work this year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cocks also told Verge that he did not believe the technology would cost creative workers their jobs, saying, “I see it only making the quality of the creative we have better.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other demands from the unionisers include better support for working parents, changes to healthcare provision and greater financial transparency, to aid the unions in collective bargaining.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The latest unionisation push at Wizards comes just a few months after developers of its online platform Magic: The Gathering Arena revealed their own plans to unionise<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More than 100 Arena workers announced their unionisation drive in April, with Wizards declining their request for voluntary recognition. The group subsequently won a National Labor Relations Board election in June, formally establishing the first union at Wizards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

D&D and Studio X workers – who are also organising under the United Wizards of the Coast-CWA – have asked Wizards and Hasbro to voluntarily recognise their respective units by an October 13 deadline, and have filed an election petition with the NLRB to allow the certification process to proceed if that does not happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They are also calling for Hasbro and Wizards to adopt a labour neutrality agreement allowing other workers at the company to organise without fear of retaliation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

D&D senior game designer Joey Haeck said they were organising “because scared workers are neither happy nor productive”. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Haeck said, “By organizing to negotiate a fair contract on issues of layoff protections, forced relocation protections, equitable pay and career advancement, mandatory AI use protections, parental support, and more, we make our game better by investing in our human creators and resisting the churn and brain drain caused by roller-coaster layoffs.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For more stories like this direct to your email inbox, click here to sign up for BoardGameWire’s free email newsletter. \n\nAnd if you’ve found our reporting interesting or useful, please consider a paid subscription to help support our journalism!<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The move comes after several years of soaring sales and profits at Wizards, which has increasingly become the financial powerhouse of Hasbro amid struggles at the company’s traditional toys business – which includes Nerf guns, Transformers and Peppa Pig toys.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7655,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[404,6,135,2827,261,549,31,205,37,267,36,7,420,2825,2828,33,2826],"class_list":["post-7641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-ai","tag-board-game","tag-board-games","tag-communications-workers-of-america","tag-dd","tag-dungeons-dragons","tag-hasbro","tag-layoffs","tag-magic-the-gathering-2","tag-publisher","tag-revenue","tag-tabletop","tag-union","tag-unionise","tag-universes-beyond","tag-wizards-of-the-coast","tag-workers"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t