Magic: The Gathering players across the world are going to be losing out on a couple of language options in the immensely popular and profitable TCG. The news means that some players may find the game harder to play, but it's happening anyway.
The Announcement
Let's break things down because the announcement is muddy at best. After Modern Horizons 3, Portuguese products will be discontinued, and the post states that Chinese (Simplified) will end with Bloomburrow. Along with that, MTG Arena is ending support for Russian after Modern Horizons 3.
Wizards of the Coast also states that "As part of these and other recent changes to our product language line-up, promo packs for Outlaws of Thunder Junction will only be produced in English, German, French, Chinese (Simplified), and Japanese. Promo packs starting with Bloomburrow will only be produced in English and Japanese."
After Modern Horizons 3, the languages supported in tabletop releases will be English, Japanese, French, Italian, German, and Spanish. On Arena, it'll be the same, plus Portuguese and Korean. While it's nice that these languages are still supported, it sucks that any other languages are being removed when really, we'd argue that there aren't enough languages in MTG in the first place.
The announcement explains that support for countries and regions won't be changing at all, but that doesn't change the fact that more people are basically being told to speak a specific language or simply lose access to the game.
A Lack of Funds?
Given how much Magic we get every year at this point, it'd be a fairly safe assumption to assume that money is being made fairly efficiently, especially with the occasional price increase and ever-changing roster of booster packs on sale.
In fact, if you were just to read the announcement about this language change, you'd be forgiven for thinking that maybe Wizards of the Coast wasn't making money.
That's not the case, though. If you're someone who likes to look at profit and loss sheets, then you'll know Wizards isn't short of cash. According to the Hasbro investor release that came out recently, Wizards of the Coast and Digital Gaming made a total of 538.3 million in profit last year. Wizards of the Coast and Digital Gaming took in a little over 1.07 billion last year, and basically half of that was pure profit.
That's a staggering amount of money, and it makes you wonder what's going on here. The likely answer, unfortunately, isn't just your bog-standard corporate greed. It is, instead, because while Wizards of the Coast is making an obnoxious amount of money, the company that owns them, Hasbro, is not.
Unfortunately, while the brand is a titan in the toys industry, Hasbro is making losses across a few of its other companies. Due to this D&D and MTG are both seen as big old golden cash cows spraying extra zeroes out of their udders and into bank accounts.
Sadly for MTG fans, this means their beloved game is likely often used to offset Hasbro's business decisions. Part of that also means Magic is cutting languages from their rotations because "product sales have not kept pace with rising costs across the board."
It's a shame, isn't it?