(Wizards of the Coast image)

The parent company behind Dungeons & Dragons has moved to outright acquire the game’s most popular digital toolset.

D&D Beyond, currently operated by the entertainment wiki service Fandom, announced that it’s officially joining Renton, Wash.-based Wizards of the Coast, as Wizards’ owner Hasbro plans to acquire Beyond.

In an official press release, Hasbro announced that it will pay $146.3 million in cash for D&D Beyond, describing it as a “strategic acquisition” that will add talent to the Wizards team and strengthen Hasbro’s moves into digital tabletop gaming. The acquisition is set to be completed later this year.

Beyond is one of several officially-licensed digital companion services that have arisen in recent years to make life easier for players of Dungeons & Dragons. Through its website and a companion app, Beyond offers tools like character and encounter builders, spell lists, and a new player guide, which can all come in very handy for a game as big and sprawling as modern D&D.

Additionally, Beyond broadcasts its own original D&D-themed videos and streams, such as Dungeon Master tips, behind-the-scenes featurettes, and live play shows. While many of Beyond’s tools are free or available after registering a free account, it also offers a subscription service and sells digital versions of official Wizards of the Coast D&D sourcebooks.

Beyond reportedly has close to 10 million registered users at time of writing, and the royalties from Beyond’s licensing were, according to Hasbro, “a significant contribution to the fastest growing source of revenue” generated by D&D.

Both the official websites for D&D Beyond and Wizards of the Coast posted versions of the same release. They state that Wizards will continue to support Beyond going forward, saying that “the purchases you’ve made, the characters you’ve created, and the campaigns you’ve run aren’t going anywhere.”

D&D Beyond originally launched in August 2017 as part of the Curse network of gaming websites, and was subsequently acquired by Fandom with the rest of Curse’s media assets in late 2018. Under Fandom, Beyond subsequently blew up; like everything else having to do with D&D, it rapidly gained users over the course of 2020, with its user base reportedly tripling in March and April of that year.

That same upswell in popularity has resulted in D&D being placed in increasingly high focus by Wizards of the Coast’s parent company Hasbro, with some sources claiming that the proceeds from D&D and Magic: The Gathering made up almost 50% of Hasbro’s overall pre-taxed revenue in 2021.

As a result, minority shareholder Alta Fox made a public plea in February to spin Wizards off into its own company, still owned by but largely independent from Hasbro, in a campaign called “Free the Wizards.” That debate, largely conducted behind the scenes at Hasbro, is still ongoing.

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