Das Dungeons-&-Dragons-Team und Studio X, die Einheit hinter Magic: The Gathering und Duel Masters, hatten am 6. Oktober 2026 angekündigt, sich als United Wizards of the Coast-CWA (UWOTC-CWA) der Gewerkschaft Communications Workers of America anzuschließen. Wizards of the Coast sollte die Gewerkschaft bis zum 13. Oktober, 17 Uhr Pacific Time, freiwillig anerkennen. Laut der Gewerkschaft teilte das Unternehmen ihr am 13. Oktober mit, die Einheiten vor einer Abstimmung nicht freiwillig anzuerkennen, veröffentlicht hat die Gewerkschaft das am Tag darauf. Der Fall geht damit in eine Wahl beim National Labor Relations Board, für die bereits ein Antrag vorlag.
Gründe: Überstunden, Entlassungen und Sorge vor KI
Als Gründe nennen die Beschäftigten laut BoardGameWire unter anderem unbezahlte Überstunden durch Zeitdruck und inflationsbedingt sinkende Reallöhne. Dazu kommt die konzernweite Entlassungswelle bei Hasbro seit 2023 (rund 1900 Stellen allein in jenem Jahr, konzernweit inklusive des Spielzeugbereichs, weitere Kürzungen bei Wizards selbst 2024 und 2025) sowie der Wunsch nach Schutz vor generativer KI in der Entwicklung. Der D&D-Senior-Game-Designer Joey Haeck ist laut CWA Mitglied von UWOTC-CWA und wird mit dem Satz zitiert: „scared workers are neither happy nor productive“. Magic-Regelmanager Eric Levine äußert sich laut BoardGameWire unterstützend zur Gewerkschaftsbemühung, wird dort aber nicht als Mitglied genannt.
Rekordgewinne und ein zweiter Anlauf nach dem MTG-Arena-Vorbild
Wizards of the Coast erwirtschaftete laut BoardGameWire 2025 knapp die Hälfte von Hasbros 4,7 Milliarden Dollar Umsatz und einen operativen Gewinn von mehr als einer Milliarde Dollar. Beim Thema generativer KI deckt sich die Darstellung der Gewerkschaft mit öffentlichen Aussagen von Wizards: Laut dem Gründungsschreiben der Beschäftigten, zitiert bei BoardGameWire, kommt der Druck zur Nutzung von Sprachmodellen von Hasbro, während Wizards dem bislang widerstanden und KI aus den eigenen Spielen herausgehalten habe. Das deckt sich mit einer Aussage von CEO Chris Cocks, der im März 2026 sagte, die Spiele nutzten in ihrer Entwicklung keine KI.
Einen ähnlichen Verlauf nahm bereits das Team hinter Magic: The Gathering Arena. Auch dort lehnte Wizards of the Coast eine freiwillige Anerkennung im Mai 2026 ab. Die Beschäftigten gewannen die anschließende NLRB-Wahl im Juni trotzdem. Ob sich das beim D&D-Team und Studio X wiederholt, ist offen.
Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering workers are moving to unionise after alleging rising workloads, unpaid overtime and job insecurity at Wizards of the Coast – despite the business having become the main profit engine of toy and game giant Hasbro.
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, having secured the backing of a “public supermajority” of employees.
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.
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.
D&D workers, meanwhile, said 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”.
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.”
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”.
Hasbro cut about 1,900 jobs across two rounds in 2023, 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.
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”. Wizards has not disclosed the total number of jobs affected.
Magic rules manager Eric Levine said of the union effort, “Everyone I work with makes our company, our game, and our community stronger by bringing their talent, expertise, and effort to making Magic.
“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.”
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.”
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.
“That’s good! We want to preserve this commendable stance through a union contract that ensures our games will always be made by people for people.”
Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks was openly enthusiastic about bringing AI into the D&D ecosystem in September 2024, saying at Goldman Sachs’ Communacopia conference 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’s not a single person who doesn’t use AI somehow for either campaign development or character development or story ideas. That’s a clear signal that we need to be embracing it.”
Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks
In an interview with The Verge in March this year, however, Cocks said that while Hasbro was deploying AI widely across the company, he acknowledged there was resistance to its use in Wizards’ games.
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.”
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
D&D senior game designer Joey Haeck said they were organising “because scared workers are neither happy nor productive”.
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.”
Magic: The Gathering‘s record-breaking growth continues despite a surge of high-profile competitors, with the TCG soaring past $500m in quarterly revenues for the first time in its 33-year history.
That powerful rise has been built upon the already hugely popular TCG’s expansion into licensed crossovers through its Universes Beyond line since 2021, which has seen it bring out sets for franchises including The Lord of The Rings, Final Fantasy and Avatar: The Last Airbender.
The game’s success now underpins Hasbro’s fortunes, with Magic’s strong performance repeatedly leading the line in the company’s quarterly results – as well as offsetting underperformance in other parts of the business.
Magic’s revenue grew 32% in Q2 of this year compared to the same period in 2025 according to Hasbro’s latest results report, reaching a record $545m on the back of strong sales of Secrets of Strixhaven and Marvel Super Heroes – the latter of which the company described as a “record-breaking debut”.
That result means Magic alone outstripped Hasbro’s entire consumer products segment – which includes Nerf guns, Transformers and Peppa Pig toys – which recorded revenues of $463m in the same period, up 5% year-on-year.
The consumer products segment made an operating loss of about $14.5m in Q2, compared to an operating profit of $270m from Wizards of the Coast, the business arm which includes Magic, Dungeons & Dragons and its digital games such as Monopoly Go!.
The company said the cyberattack reduced second-quarter revenue by an estimated $25m while generating $11m in direct costs as order processing, shipping and invoicing were disrupted, particularly on the consumer products side. Hasbro said those operations had now returned to normal, although it expects to incur additional costs related to the incident in future periods.
Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks
Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks said in the results report, “With strong indications for our remaining releases and line of sight to continued growth in 2027, the Magic flywheel is firing on all cylinders.”
Wizards revenue was also up 27% across the first six months of 2026, with Magic revenue climbing 34% thanks to continued growth across tabletop and digital products, Universes Beyond releases, Secret Lair products and back catalogue sales.
That continued growth comes despite the emergence of several high-profile challengers in the trading card game market over the past few years, including Disney Lorcana, Star Wars: Unlimited, Altered, Flesh and Blood and One Piece Card Game – as well as the ongoing power of fellow TCG veterans Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh!.
Magic’s performance was strong enough for Hasbro to increase its full-year guidance, with the company now expecting total revenue growth of between 5% and 7%, up from its previous forecast of 3% to 5%.
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