Dungeons & Dragons has disappeared

There’s a lot to despise about the recent interview that Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks gave Nilay Patel on the Decoder podcast. His continued bullishness (to borrow his own corpo-speak) on forcing LLM-powered tools into every nook of the toy company is frustrating. His rush to line the pockets of notorious transphobe JK Rowling via a lucrative Harry Potter license is directly harming many of the people who make and play Hasbro’s games. Both are perfectly valid reasons to criticize the company and even abstain from purchasing their products. But I’m upset for a relatively smaller, yet still concerning, reason: Why doesn’t Chris Cocks talk about Dungeons & Dragons?

Rascal has a reputation of only writing about D&D from a pessimistic, even negative, posture. Earned or not, it’s hard to deny the vibrant and ever-growing ecosystem of players and creators who see something in the dominant RPG worth their time and money. It is maintained by a team of professional designers who create artistic, playful products, which is then marketed to a worldwide consumptive audience. We can criticize the lifestyle brand that has accumulated around this one specific game and how its gravity warps the rest of the industry, but reducing D&D down to its toyetic or AI-juicing potential ignores the reality of how the vast majority of people interact with it.

I would like to write more articles discussing the game the way I would any of Evil Hat’s RPGs, or those from Modiphius, Paizo, Free League, or Rowan, Rook and Decard — put the creative endeavor in conversation with its economic reality. How many new players picked up the new core rulebooks? What do LGS players enjoy, and how do they balance it against kitchen table groups? How is Hasbro imagining the next five years of campaign-level play? But to Cocks, D&D is a signifier for his everyman credentials, and a show pony in Hasbro’s stable. He cannot deny its existence, but he can relegate it to a purgatory of flat symbolism.

The Gamer’s CEO tends to mention D&D only in terms of his own play habits, famously boasting about facilitating multiple games per week for a cumulative 30 or 40 people. This Joe Blow posturing normalizes wider adoption of AI tools as supposed creative aids. “I do that all the time for just personal passion projects, and I DM... Dungeons and Dragons is kind of my jam, and I DM probably three or four groups,” Cocks told Patel. “There is so much AI-based animation, images, text, sound effects, and voice cloning on my PC, it would floor you.” He is the worst kind of games enjoyer — the power gamer — and you could be, too.

Beyond this self-mythologizing, the circumstances under which Cocks will evoke the cultural gem in Wizards of the Coast (WotC)’s crown are slim. Quarterly investor meetings are reserved for the near-$2 billion revenue maker, Magic: The Gathering (MTG). Tech and business journalists, such as Decoder, rank D&D as just another part of Hasbro’s portfolio, right alongside Transformers, Monopoly, and Peppa Pig. They give it a cursory mention. At best, it’ll serve as a line of inquiry into how much professional creatives hate and fear AI adoption by their corporate bosses. Here, at least, Cocks holds a tenuous peace with players, designers, and WotC staff:

“From a creative context, I think you have to think about [AI] very carefully,” Cocks told Patel. “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. For things like toys where we’re basing it on existing IP, or like a long legacy of ideas, we are able to use it and use it pretty effectively. And in that concept phase, especially when you’re figuring out different ideas for toys and clever derivatives of play patterns, it’s pretty magical. Yeah, you might generate 1,000 ideas and 999 of them aren’t that good, but one of them might be magical, and it’s basically free to be able to create it.”

Lastly, D&D is a vehicle for Hasbro’s growing digital ventures. Warlock, which appears to be releasing in late 2027 per Cocks, is directly tied to the tabletop RPG’s brand, while the science fantasy Exodus deployed a D20-compatible RPG of the same name as marketing material. An unnamed video game developed by Giant Skull will supposedly be the action-adventure answer to fans asking, Baldur’s Gate 4 when?? All told, D&D is the compost in which Hasbro’s future flowers are growing, a product that is useful but not treasured; valuable, but not valued.

Which sucks because the tabletop RPG finds itself in one of the most interesting periods of the last ten years. Following the release of three new core books in 2024 (and 2025), WotC parted ways with design heads Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford and installed Justice Ramin Arman as the new game design lead. Veteran adventure writer James Haeck joined as senior game designer in January, who will oversee a slew of fresh and talented creators such as Taylor Navarro and Leon Barillaro. 

At the same time, the D&D Beyond team wants to forge stronger lines of communication with players as it takes a more active stewardship of the digital toolset. The physical RPG is trying to rebound from an anemic late 2025 and early 2026 publishing calendar — likely downstream effects of the aforementioned torch passing — with its seasonal release model that will begin with a return to Castle Ravenloft and another fateful encounter with the vampire Strahd. Even considering a perplexing half-adoption of the D&D 5.5 Edition moniker, WotC seems resolute in steering the ship into calmer, more predictable waters.

Transmedia projects such as Honor Among Thieves and actual play’s popular adoption speak to a cultural surge parallel to the work done inside WotC’s walls. Critical Role and Dimension 20 chiefly power a cottage industry of performance art that additionally functions as the best free marketing D&D has ever enjoyed. What other tabletop game helps sell out Madison Square Garden? A more charitable person might even point to increased partnership with 3rd-party creators such as Hit Point Press as formal inroads to a designer class that has long labored in D&D’s direct shadow.

So, why does none of this register with Chris Cocks during interviews? Why does WotC president John Hight cozy up to Stig Asmussen on the Summer Game Fest couch but not around the table with Arman and the rest of his actual employees? Potential answers are as practical as they are unsatisfying: D&D doesn’t make enough money to earn the attention of its executive keepers; or Hasbro’s video game strategy doesn’t leave room for the business of physical games.

To which I say, so what? It’s an open secret that physical media isn’t profitable and, at best, treads water. We all know the new Player’s Handbook will never compete with MTG’s latest Universes Beyond set on the quarterly sales chart, but that doesn’t mean the RPG must be relegated to forgotten stepchild status, trotted out periodically to remind film and video game studios where Astarion and Shadowheart hail from. 

I would even accept a po-faced admission that they are “realigning strategy” or “going back to the drawing board” in regards to official support for D&D. Project Sigil was an ambitious and costly failure, which feasibly might have bankrupted goodwill and funding for anything beyond minimum viable product. Were three years not enough to recover from the OGL fiasco’s public tar-and-feathering? Is Daggerheart eating that much of D&D’s lunch (extremely unlikely). 

There’s one other possible answer to why Cocks chronically elides D&D from public statements: he doesn’t care whether it succeeds or fails. He is Don Draper in the elevator, pointedly ignoring provocational jabs from vocal critics and journalists, alike. Doing so is his prerogative, and my intention is not to demand Cocks directly reply to my accusations (he could answer my emails). But like nature, the internet abhors a vacuum and fills it with suppositions and half-baked theories.

Pundits often place far too much significance on sales and adoption numbers, but any context would help the public navigate the waters shaping the industry’s largest tabletop RPG. Until then, the RPG remains an informational black box decorated with a photo of Cocks giving us a practiced thumbs up.