Wizards of the Coast

Wizards of the Coast is a tabletop game publisher based in Washington State. A subsidiary of Hasbro since 1999, the company has grown into the dominant pillar of the games industry, with its flagship games including Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons. Today, they've turned these two formerly niche hobby games into household names, and they currently support the 5th edition of D&D. Wizards of the Coast, sometimes known as WotC, first purchased Dungeons & Dragons from its original publisher TSR in 1997. Not long afterward, they published a new edition of the game, D&D 3.0, and a follow-up patch known as D&D 3.5. They achieved dominance in the tabletop roleplaying game space in the 2000s thanks to the Open Gaming License, or OGL, that allowed third-party publishers to produce content which was compatible with the d20 System, the "engine" on which D&D ran. They also produced D&D 4th Edition from 2008-2014, which inspired a number of indie RPGs with its tactical combat system. But the launch of Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition in 2014, followed by the explosion in popularity of actual play podcast Critical Role, as well as a number of exposures in popular culture like Stranger Things, catapulted Wizards of the Coast and D&D into the mainstream, where they still persist today. In 2024, WotC produced a series of books updating the "core three" rulebooks of D&D 5E: the Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual. Whether these consitute a "new edition" or "5.5" is of course, hotly contested by fans, but Wizards' official position is that the new books represent a continuation of the 5E line.