Magic The Gathering is officially a billion dollar IP: what does that mean for the game?
Magic The Gathering is officially a billion dollar IP: what does that mean for the game?
Wizards of the Coast's legendary card game keeps getting bigger
➡️ The Shortcut Skinny: Billion dollar card game
💵 Hasbro had an earnings call, admitting flaws with the Open Gaming License
🤯 CEO confirms Magic The Gathering is a billion dollar IP
🤞 Updates to Magic Arena promised
There’s no question that Magic The Gathering is one of the biggest card games on the planet right now, and recently Hasbro had an earnings call that put it in perspective: MTG is officially a billion dollar IP.
In the earnings call, Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks discussed where the company went wrong over the last year, particularly around the now-defunct OGL update, which tried to over-capitalize on Dungeons and Dragons and led to widespread community backlash, according to a report from Gizmodo. But even among that doom and gloom, it turned out that Magic The Gathering is now officially Hasbro’s first billion dollar IP.
Because of the meteoric success of the popular card game, there are going to be a bunch of improvements over the next year, particularly in MTG Arena, which is supposedly getting a much-needed facelift sometime this year.
Cocks also addressed the issues with MTG pricing and supply, which caused what many considered to be the overprinting of Magic The Gathering sets last year. There were indeed a lot of them, with more products coming in 2022 than any previous year. The CEO did say that the game would resume its quarterly update schedule, but we’ll just have to wait and see if that pans out. After all, we’ve already seen two MTG sets this year, with Phyrexia: All Will Be One this month, and Dominaria Remastered in January.
Burdened with success
Any fan of Magic The Gathering likely has a billion reasons to complain about the game right now, whether it’s Ragavan taking over the Modern format, or those 30th Anniversary booster packs that cost $1,000 for 3 packs of 15 cards — cards you couldn’t even use in official tournaments.
But while all of that is a pain, this could potentially mean some pretty exciting things about the game, most of which is a much-needed revamp of MTG Arena, which would be one of the best PC games if it wasn’t so greedy with the microtransactions.
It’s hard to imagine that off the back of this hugely successful year for Magic The Gathering that Hasbro would get more generous with its free-to-play version of the game, but wow it can get expensive to get into that app. For instance, each booster draft costs either $9.99 worth of in-game currency, or hours upon hours worth of the gold you get from playing the game normally. And that’s one of the most popular MTG formats, whether its in-person or in Arena. That’s a little personal gripe of mine, but still.
Either way, though, the bigger Magic The Gathering gets, the more people are going to start playing the game. And now that Wizards of the Coast has revamped its pro tour system again, according to a blog post from the company, this success might see the resurgence of the good old days of Magic. But maybe I’m being a bit too optimistic.
There are so many ways MTG’s meteoric rise can mean good things for the game over the next year. Honestly, we’re off to a good start: Phyrexia All Will Be One is one of the best sets I’ve played in years and Dominaria Remastered was a pleasant surprise. Hopefully, Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro have learned from the mistakes of the last year.