Magic: The Gathering’s most recent major set is getting top grades, at least in the sales department: Secrets of Strixhaven is now the best-selling MTG premier set ever.
This comes from Hasbro’s latest earnings call, during which the company shared that after Lorwyn: Eclipsed became the best-selling Magic premier set of all time earlier this year, Secrets of Strixhaven went on to surpass it. Later in the call, CEO Chris Cocks clarified that Lorwyn “not just beat the prior best-selling first-party set, it did it by quite a handsome margin” and that Strixhaven then “handily beat Lorwyn: Eclipsed as well.”
A “premier” set in this specific financial context is an MTG core or expansion set that introduces new, first-party cards into the Standard format. So this means that Hasbro isn’t including Universes Beyond sets like Final Fantasy, which remains the best-selling MTG set of all time after earning $200 million in a single day.
Largely thanks to MTG, Hasbro’s revenue for Q1 rose 13 percent year-over-year, with MTG revenue specifically up 36 percent. The TMNT Universes Beyond set “outpaced internal expectations,” but Hasbro shared no further details on how well it actually did.
At the moment, Hasbro’s digital gaming revenue isn’t bringing in nearly as much money as MTG (it was up 3 percent year-over-year largely thanks to Monopoly Go!), but Hasbro would like that to change. As reported by The Games Business yesterday, Hasbro has invested a whopping $1 billion into video games since 2018, using that money to build six game studios, create an internal publishing arm, and start work on a number of games including two sci-fi games, Exodus and D&D game Warlock, coming out next year. And it’s been encouraged by the success of the licensed-out Baldur’s Gate 3, a game Hasbro is now surely wishing it had made in-house.
“We’ll be building games mostly around D&D, Magic, Transformers, maybe some of our other properties, maybe selectively some new stuff,” Cocks told The Games Business. “It’ll be very focused on action-adventure and role-playing games for PC and console. And then, we’ll partner with the best in the business on more casual games, mobile games, new and emerging platforms like VR, et cetera. I think we’re the number one digital games licensor in the world by a fairly large margin. That’s pretty lucrative business. It also really helps us reach a lot of different gamers, and helps to fund those efforts in building out our first-party capabilities.”
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