Hasbro Announces Lay Offs for 3% of Its Workforce
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Dungeons & Dragons brand owner Hasbro has quietly rolled out a series of lay offs that will impact 3% of its total workforce, representing a cut of about 150 people from its pool of over 5,000 employees. The news was announced in the Wall Street Journal and comes hot on the heels of the recent departure of D&D VP Jess Lanzillo, with D&D video producer Todd Kenreck also announcing that he had been laid off.
The cuts aren’t a surprise to many, given that Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks has hinted that lay offs were likely coming due to the ongoing impact of US tariffs. So just what does this mean for the future of Dungeons & Dragons? Below, we break out all the details.
Why has Habsro carried out the lay offs?
Despite economics being the chief reason for the lay offs, Hasbro profits are actually up, due largely to Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons, with the company’s sales increasing 17% in the first quarter of 2025. That being said, the expected impacts of tariffs are now catching up, as about 50% of all of Hasbro’s toy and game products are produced in China.
As such, the lay offs are likely a proactive measure as Hasbro braces for the financial impact of the US government’s tariffs on their toy lines, which were already seeing flagging sales even before the US’s global trade war began.
How will Wizards of the Coast and D&D be impacted?
So far the only confirmed casualty of the lay offs on the Wizards of the Coast side is D&D video producer Todd Kenreck. It’s still not entirely clear if the departure of Jess Lanzillo is related, but it seems likely given the timing. It’s also not yet clear if other WotC and D&D team members have been let go.
The small percentage of cuts across Hasbro as a whole, however, suggests that the D&D team may not be as impacted as it has been in previous lay offs.
Final Thoughts
This isn’t the first time that Hasbro has rolled out mass lay offs. In January 2023 the company laid off 15% of its workforce. Less than a year later in December 2023 it cut another 1,100 employees, including Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition co-lead Mike Mearls and a number of other key D&D staff members.
More recently, in March 2025, Wizards of the Coast cut 90% of the Project Sigil team (representing about 30 employees) after they announced the much-touted VTT was being scaled back and essentially scrapped.
We’ll be keeping a close eye on this story as it develops and will update this page with more info as it’s available.
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Cameron Nichols is a Senior Editor who lives in Boston, Massachusetts, and has been playing D&D since the early 90s, when he was introduced by his older brother and cut his teeth on AD&D 2nd Edition. Since then he’s played virtually every RPG he could get his nerdy little mitts on (including a weird Goth phase in the early 2000s when he rocked Vampire: The Masquerade pretty hard). His favorite D&D campaign setting is the Forgotten Realms and his favorite character to play was a Half-Orc Barbarian named Grug (who was unfortunately devoured by a gelatinous cube).
