A Toy Company, AI, and the Human Argument

If anyone can make it, no one can sell it.

This month, the people who make Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering moved to unionize. Most of the coverage is about pay, crunch, and layoffs, and those are real. But buried in the D&D team's letter is the sentence that explains the last three years at Wizards of the Coast:

"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."

Read that again. The workers are not asking the company to adopt a policy. The policy already exists. They are asking to lock it into a contract so the parent company can't take it away.

The Argument Everyone Thinks This Is

From outside, this looks like a fight about artists' rights — whether a machine should be making the art and stories people pay for. That argument is real, but it is not the one being fought inside the building.

Wizards drew its line in December 2023, after AI-assisted art turned up in a D&D book: "We require artists, writers, and creatives contributing to the Magic TCG and the D&D TTRPG to refrain from using AI generative tools to create final Magic or D&D products." A month later, a Magic marketing image made by an outside vendor turned out to have AI in it. The company denied it for three days, then admitted it, and at least one longtime artist announced he was done working for them. Three days of denials bought one admission, and the trust bill came due immediately.

The human argument isn't artists versus AI — it's about what happens when the executives hired to run a company cash out its IP for short-term gain. Is that unethical? Does a decision that pays investors this quarter, at the expense of the company's own future, actually serve the company's interest? And should the employees who build the product have a say in decisions like that? AI matters here only because it makes the short game cheap. It isn't making the product better. It's being used to saturate the market with poor-quality content, pull out every dollar of short-term value in the IP, and cast it aside once there's nothing left to wring out of it.

The Two Faces of Chris Cocks

Hasbro's CEO is Chris Cocks. He is not an outsider who wandered in from the toy aisle. He ran Wizards of the Coast from 2016 to 2022, he plays D&D, and by his own account his home games run on AI-generated images, text, sound, and voice cloning. In September 2024 he told a Goldman Sachs conference that Hasbro was already using AI "significantly and liberally," adding that among the thirty or forty people he plays with, "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."

Cocks acknowledged that some audiences and creators simply do not want AI involved, saying that Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons were not using it in their product pipelines. The problem is that the softer line does not survive contact with his own building. The union letter, written months later, describes AI pressure that "has ramped up" from the company he runs. The push itself never disappeared. Hasbro launched an AI studio in June, and since September 1, with the Wizards president gone, Cocks has overseen the division directly. The promise and the pressure now come from the same office. One is the public face. The other is the policy.

But the deeper issue is not inconsistency. It is a misunderstanding of what the product actually is.

Listen to how Cocks talks about his own games. He told The Verge that his home computer contains so much AI-generated animation, imagery, text, and voice cloning that the volume of it would "floor" interviewer Nilay Patel. When he looked around his table and saw every player using AI tools, he saw "a clear signal that we need to be embracing it." A market signal.

And even judged purely as business, the signal points the wrong way. Wizards' money has never come from making content. It comes from owning the thing nobody else can make: the official game, the trusted name, the world players agree is real. Generative AI destroys exactly that scarcity. If a model can produce a passable adventure, illustration, or campaign setting, so can every fan, every rival publisher, and every kid with a laptop. The product doesn't get harder to sell. It becomes impossible to sell at all. A company flooding its own market with machine-made content is spending down the only asset that ever made it money. Cocks is steering his most valuable division toward the one future where its catalog is worthless.

Because D&D was never successful because it generated stories efficiently. It was successful because it created community. Matt Mercer has described running games for his friends as an expression of love. He has also spoken about growing up struggling to find his place and how tabletop gaming helped him find his people. That is not incidental to D&D's success. It is D&D's success. For fifty years, the game's real product has been a reason for people to gather around a table, week after week, and build friendships inside a shared world. The story is the excuse. The people are the point.

An AI can write a competent adventure. What it cannot do is be the friend who wrote it for you. It cannot make four exhausted adults show up on a Tuesday night, argue over a locked door, laugh until it hurts, and leave closer than they arrived. Automate the game master and you have not made the experience cheaper or better. You have removed the reason the experience exists and kept the dice.

Maybe that is genuinely difficult to see from the executive suite. Someone who has spent his life comfortable in every room may never have needed a game to help him find belonging. He never needed a character sheet to find his people. Which may be why he can look at a fifty-year-old social ritual and see a content pipeline. It takes a certain confidence to assume that the part you never needed must be the part that does not matter.

New isn't Better, Does AI Hype or Help

And the premise underneath the push, that a beloved game needs new technology poured into it to survive, has already been tested at the largest scale there is. Microsoft bought Minecraft for $2.5 billion in 2014 and spent years trying the new-technology plays: Minecraft shown in augmented reality as a 3D world hovering over a table, a full AR spinoff called Minecraft Earth, and a VR version of the game itself. Earth shut down within two years. The VR version lasted longer, but Mojang dropped support for it in 2025. The headset and the hologram never became how people play Minecraft. The core game, meanwhile, barely changed, and what Microsoft did with the property instead was build different games for different markets: Minecraft Dungeons for action players, Minecraft Legends for strategy players. The original was never replaced, never rebuilt around the technology of the moment, and it is still the best-selling video game in history.

The Player's Contribution

D&D players should sit with the other side of that coin. The game is sold to them as timeless: fifty years of adventures that never expire. If that is true, they do not need to keep buying. A campaign book does not stop working when a newer one ships. The rules on the shelf will run games for the rest of a player's life.

And players are the worst possible customers for generated content because they are already creators. Every dungeon master who has ever run a homebrew campaign has done the thing the AI pitch assumes only a company can do: built a world, written the adventure, and performed it for an audience of friends. Players can cap their games at the content they already own, whether older editions, older adventures, or their own material, and the game loses nothing. That may make them the clearest proof that AI content cannot be profitable in this space. You cannot sell generated stories to the one audience that generates its own for free, because that is the entire point of the hobby.

Neither Side Is Innocent

Rather than turning this into a story about a virtuous studio resisting a predatory parent company, it is worth looking at Wizards' own record. The studio's hands are not clean. The pattern is the same. The incentives are the same. Only the vantage point differs.

In January 2023, a draft of a new Open Game License leaked. For more than twenty years, the original OGL had allowed creators to build games on D&D's rules without paying Wizards or seeking permission. Entire businesses and creative careers grew from that ecosystem. The new draft would have revoked those protections, imposed royalties on successful creators, and granted Wizards broad rights over work made by others. The backlash was immediate. Nearly 90 percent of respondents in Wizards' own survey rejected the proposal, and within weeks the company abandoned it entirely. The original license remained untouched, and the core rules were placed into Creative Commons, beyond the reach of any future executive.

What was the OGL controversy really about? It was an attempt to transform community creativity into a revenue stream. Twenty years of fan and third-party innovation suddenly looked less like a thriving ecosystem and more like untapped intellectual property waiting to be monetized.

The same logic appears in the layoffs. Throughout 2023 and beyond, Hasbro eliminated thousands of jobs, including creative roles at Wizards, even as Wizards continued delivering strong financial results. Teams were reduced, projects were cut, and community-facing staff disappeared while the company's most profitable division posted record numbers. The people fans actually knew and trusted became line items on a spreadsheet.

Taken together, the lesson is difficult to avoid. Hasbro pressures from above. Wizards protects its interests from below. When the value of human creativity strengthens the brand, it is celebrated. When that same creativity becomes an obstacle to growth targets, it becomes expendable. The honest picture is not a battle between good and bad actors. It is two corporations responding to the same incentives.

Hasbro pushes from above: layoffs, automation pressures, licensing opportunities, and quarterly growth targets. Wizards pushes from below whenever it sees a chance to consolidate control, protect revenue, or expand ownership over community-created value. Sometimes their interests conflict. More often, they align.

The artists and designers caught in the middle are not the authors of these decisions. Neither are the fans whose passion gives the brands their value. Yet both groups are routinely treated as resources rather than stakeholders.

That is the thread connecting the OGL controversy, the layoffs, and the AI debate.

They are not separate stories.

They are different expressions of the same relationship.

The fan community creates value. Creative workers create value. Corporate management captures value.

What to Watch

Forget the next AI art controversy. There will be another one, and it will dominate social media for a week before everyone moves on.

The more important question is who ultimately controls the future of these games: the people who create them, the communities that sustain them, or the executives managing them as assets.

That is the question behind the union effort. It is not really a debate about technology. It is a debate about power.

If "made by people, for people" becomes an enforceable contractual obligation, it survives changes in leadership and quarterly priorities. If it remains a marketing slogan, it lasts only as long as it remains profitable.

And that distinction will do more to determine what Dungeons & Dragons and Magic look like ten years from now than any AI model ever will.

The conflict begins whenever those groups disagree about who should benefit from the value they create.

Thanks to Dungeons & Discourse (@dungeonsanddiscourse) for bringing this discussion to light. If it interests you, go deeper on her YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@dungeonsanddiscourse