Last month, the company said it would lay off 15 percent of its workers as it sought to cut up to $300 million in costs. On Thursday, the toymaker reported a loss of nearly $130 million in the fourth quarter, versus a profit of more than $80 million in the same period a year before, as consumers spent less on toys during the crucial holiday shopping season. With consumers squeezed by inflation and economic growth slowing down, Hasbro’s reliance on Magic for growth has taken on a new urgency.
“I don’t think there is any toy brand that is even half that size.”īut Hasbro faces challenges making Magic even bigger, particularly player fatigue brought on by the release of 39 new card sets last year, up from 15 in 2019, according to an analysis by Bank of America. “Now you get to see how big it is,” he added. On Friday, Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro unit that publishes the game, will kick off MagicCon in Philadelphia.Īfter the initial buzz when it first appeared, Magic flew under the radar for many years, said Gerrick Johnson, an analyst at BMO Capital Markets who covers the toy industry. Magic’s popularity has spawned a cottage industry of video games, comic books, a Caribbean cruise and an animated series in development for Netflix. The game casts players as wizards who derive their powers by picking cards from the decks they have built, drawing from an ever-expanding universe of cards that are bought, sold and traded in a thriving secondary market. Since it was introduced in the mid-1990s, more than 50 million people - including the rapper Post Malone and the actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt - have played Magic in hobby shops and around kitchen tables around the world.
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