Wizards of the Coast has no president right now. John Hight stepped down from the role effective September 1, moving into a one-year advisory position under a “Transitional Advisory Services Agreement” first disclosed in a July 27 SEC filing. Rather than naming an interim replacement, Hasbro confirmed to Polygon that “the Wizards leadership team will report directly to CEO Chris Cocks” while the company runs what it calls “a thorough search process” for Hight’s permanent successor.
This isn’t Cocks’ first time running the company. He served as president of Wizards of the Coast from 2016 to 2022 before moving up to CEO of parent company Hasbro, a position he’s held ever since. In effect, he’s back in the seat he already occupied, just with a different title stacked on top of it. The presidency itself hasn’t been stable since he left it: Cynthia Williams took over in 2022 and resigned in April 2024 after roughly two years; Hight succeeded her in July 2024 and lasted almost exactly the same length of time.
Hasbro insists nothing about this signals trouble for the games themselves. A company statement tied to the announcement said Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons “continue to perform incredibly well” and that the company’s 2027 video game slate, including titles called Exodus and Warlock, “remains on track.” The numbers back at least part of that up: Magic: The Gathering generated $545.3 million in revenue last quarter, the first time the brand has crossed $500 million in a single quarter, accounting for roughly 48% of Hasbro’s entire $1.14 billion in quarterly revenue.
The reason this leadership vacuum matters isn’t abstract. Cocks has been on the record for years pushing two specific directions for these games that a meaningful chunk of the fanbase actively distrusts, and he now has no internal executive layer between himself and the day-to-day decisions on both games while Hasbro searches for a permanent hire.
The first is Universes Beyond, the licensing initiative that puts outside IP, Warcraft, Star Wars, Final Fantasy, Avatar: The Last Airbender, directly inside D&D and Magic products. Cocks has called Universes Beyond crossovers “probably the most successful new player adoption program that we’ve ever done,” and the numbers support his enthusiasm: Magic’s Final Fantasy set became the best-selling release in the game’s history in 2025, pushing prior crossover sets with Lord of the Rings and Avatar into second and third place. On the D&D side, Wizards announced Universes Beyond at Gen Con 2026, kicking off with a World of Warcraft-themed expansion arriving November 17 and a Star Wars crossover called Season of Rebellion following in 2027. Two weeks ago, Hasbro posted three new senior job listings, a Creative Lead, a Creative Manager, and a Principal Game Designer, all attached specifically to the Universes Beyond line, with salary bands starting above $100,000. Wizards’ own creative leadership, Dan Ayoub and product architect Laura Hohman, have publicly framed this hiring as additive rather than a resource shift away from core D&D content, telling GameSpot the company has “been hiring on top of our additional staff to support these” crossovers and confirming outside studio partnerships to keep classic settings like Ravenloft, Eberron, and the Forgotten Realms in active development alongside it.
Whether that promise holds is exactly the concern driving fan anxiety, because Magic: The Gathering already lived through this exact trajectory. Universes Beyond started on the Magic side in 2021 as a supplementary program and has since grown to the point where crossover sets now regularly outsell the game’s own original settings. If D&D follows the same curve, and its own Universes Beyond hiring push suggests real institutional weight is going behind it, it’s not unreasonable for longtime players to worry the flagship tabletop game could gradually shift toward being a licensing platform for other people’s franchises rather than sustaining its own settings as the priority.
The second flashpoint is AI. Cocks has called himself an “AI bull” in multiple interviews over the past two years, telling Goldman Sachs in September 2024 that “there’s not a single person” among the 30 to 40 people he regularly plays D&D with who doesn’t use AI in some form for campaign or character development, and that this was “a clear signal that we need to be embracing it.” In a March 2025 Semafor interview, he described running a Scooby-Doo-themed home campaign built around an “incredibly elaborate” PowerPoint presentation, and reiterated that AI is “supercharging fandom” in ways he considers “just net good for the brand.” Those comments sit uncomfortably next to Wizards’ own public position distancing the company from AI use in officially published D&D content, a distinction the company has had to draw repeatedly as Cocks keeps bringing the subject back up on his own.
None of this means D&D or Magic are collapsing tomorrow. Both games are financially healthy by every number Hasbro has released, and Wizards’ creative leadership has gone on record specifically to reassure fans that Universes Beyond isn’t displacing core development. But a company with no permanent president, run on an interim basis by an executive who has spent two years publicly advocating for exactly the two directions, AI integration and expanding licensed crossover content, that much of the hobby’s base is most wary of, is a legitimate reason for that base to be paying closer attention than usual to what gets announced next.
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D&D development has become so degenerate that I no longer bother with it. Stopped decades ago. I didn't like the direction WotC took it and Hasbro's injection of woke crap ruined any idea of a return.
It's great that D&D numbers are at all time highs and making trillions of dollars in profits for them. Let the buzz-sided comb-over witches have their game: I won't touch it.