Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast told the union organizing the Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering tabletop teams on October 13 that they do not intend to voluntarily recognize it, which sends the workers to a National Labor Relations Board election. United Wizards of the Coast-CWA announced the decision on X the next morning. The organizers say the refusal puts years of work at risk and alienates longtime D&D fans, and original D&D designer Robert J. Kuntz answered them with a pointed question about who changed the game in the first place.
“It Doesn’t Intend to Voluntarily Recognize” the D&D or Studio X Units
The union’s post on X, timestamped 8:01 a.m. on October 14, read: “Yesterday, Wizards informed us that it doesn’t intend to voluntarily recognize the D&D or Studio X units of our union ahead of a vote. We remain committed to creating a workplace focused on wellness, transparency, and collaboration by winning our coming election.”
The organizers framed the decision as a threat to what they have built. They said: “We’ve worked very hard helping make D&D reflect our values. All we’re asking for is the job security necessary to make sure AI doesn’t change it back.”
The deadline for voluntary recognition was 5 p.m. PT on October 13. The workers had already filed an NLRB election petition, which they said they would withdraw if the company agreed to recognition. A union needs a majority of the votes cast, 50 percent plus one, to force Wizards to bargain in good faith. The union’s post is the only account of Wizards’ answer in what has been published so far, and Wizards has not issued its own wording.
How the Drive Began
On October 6 the D&D team, which includes D&D Beyond, and Studio X, the unit behind tabletop Magic and Duel Masters, told leadership they intended to unionize with the Communications Workers of America. Both groups joined United Wizards of the Coast-CWA, the union the Magic: The Gathering Arena developers formed in April. That unit has more than 100 workers and won its NLRB election in June, making it the first union at Wizards. The new teams said they had a public supermajority of employees behind them.
The D&D letter lists demands that include layoff protections, a ban on mandatory unpaid overtime, and an enforceable AI policy that keeps the games made by people. It also asks for a written remote work policy, wages that keep pace with inflation, healthcare changes, and access to financial information for the bargaining committee. The most unusual item is ownership of personal work. The D&D team wrote: “Currently, if an employee makes anything creative in their free time, with their own resources, Hasbro can claim ownership.”
Senior D&D designer Joey Haeck said the team is organizing “because scared workers are neither happy nor productive.” Principal game designer James Wyatt posted: “this has been a long, long time coming!” The Studio X team wrote: “We are stewards of our games, nurturers of families and communities.”
Record Profits, Repeated Layoffs and a Fight Over AI
Wizards supplied almost half of Hasbro’s $4.7 billion in 2025 revenue and posted a record operating profit of more than $1 billion. Hasbro cut about 1,900 jobs across two rounds in 2023, including Wizards staff, and about 30 developers, roughly 90 percent of the team on the scrapped Sigil virtual tabletop, followed in March 2025. Another 150 or so jobs went three months later, D&D staff among them. John Hight left as Wizards president on September 1, and CEO Chris Cocks is overseeing the division directly.
AI is the issue the organizers keep returning to. In September 2024 Cocks said Hasbro was using AI “significantly and liberally internally.” In a March 2026 interview he said Wizards’ games do not use AI in their pipelines and that he sees AI “only making the quality of the creative we have better.” The union’s petition says: “Leadership has pushed for LLMs and generative AI usage, disregarding our team’s preferences.”
The Arena fight set the pattern. Wizards missed the union’s May 1 deadline for recognition, and the union says Wizards hired Fisher Phillips, a firm it describes as a union avoidance firm. Employees received daily emails and letters at home saying that under a union “all the benefits and perks you currently enjoy would be on the bargaining table” and that workers “could end up with more, the same or less.”
The game the organizers say they shaped has changed a great deal under Wizards’ watch. The 2023 OGL fight nearly cost Wizards the third-party community before Hasbro backed down. The company revised how it describes the game’s peoples and monsters starting in 2020, and the 2024 rulebooks replaced “race” with “species.”
Kuntz Fires Back
Robert J. Kuntz, an early D&D designer who worked alongside Gary Gygax, replied on X: “Are not these the same persons whom under WotC’s policies helped ruin D&D?”
He has been critical of the game’s direction for some time. In December 2024 he called its path “a fitful, tragic ride” and said he would discuss “the descent of D&D AND the gradual ostracizing of Gary and myself from the equation.”
On the ENWorld forum, members were resigned. One wrote, “Not surprised, but still disappointed.” Another wrote, “Not again, WotC.” Wizards also declined voluntary recognition of the Arena union in May.
If the organizers say they spent years remaking D&D and Kuntz says that remaking is what went wrong, can a union formed by the people who rewrote the game win over the fans it says it wants to protect, or does the vote only deepen the split between the staff and the players who left?
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