It slashed jobs: Despite Hasbro’s expansion, employment declined from 13k in 1995 to 10k in 1998, according to the company’s annual disclosures.It engaged in price fixing with distributors: In 2002, the company was issued a then-record £4.9m (~$8m) fine by Britain’s Office of Fair Trading.Having vanquished the competition, Hasbro acted like the industry behemoth it was: There was an easy word to describe the newfound dominance: It was a monopoly. Battleship, Candyland, Scrabble, Risk, Clue, Magic: The Gathering, Dungeons & Dragons, Ouija - all Hasbro. Philip Orbanes, who worked for Parker Brothers and Hasbro and has written multiple books about Monopoly, estimates that by the late ’90s Hasbro had cornered 85% of the board game market. And just like that, a once wide-open industry was largely closed to competition. Though the acquisition raised antitrust concerns, the FTC never took action. In 1991, it wrangled Parker Brothers away from Tonka.

The company went on to buy other board game companies like Avalon Hill, Wizards of the Coast, and Coleco.

Potato Head - would end up on top.įounded by the Hassenfeld brothers in 1923, Hasbro became a player in board games in the early 1980s when it acquired Milton Bradley. It really upped the stakes.”īut a toy company called Hasbro - best known for making Mr. “Monopoly proved board games could be very lucrative. “Having a hit in the board game or toy industry is so rare - and having one multigenerational game was pretty much unheard of,” Pilon tells The Hustle. This influx of sales single-handedly kept the company in competition with rivals like Milton Bradley and Transogram. And for the next 30 years, the company averaged ~1m copies in annual sales.īefore Monopoly came along, Parker Brothers had flirted with bankruptcy. Players didn’t seem to mind: In 1936, Parker Brothers sold 1.8m copies at $2 each (~$37 in 2020 dollars). Monopoly violated the cardinal tenets of board game design: The rules were confusing and a single game took an eternity to finish. Images from Parker Brothers’ 1935 patent (Google Patents) Magie felt she had been hoodwinked and told her story to the press.īut there was no going back: Parker Brothers would soon use its Monopoly patent to stifle competitors. In November of 1935, Parker Brothers bought the invention patent for The Landlord’s Game from Magie for $500, then credited Darrow as Monopoly’s sole inventor in ads for the game. And eventually, it drew the attention of a man named Charles Darrow.ĭarrow distributed his own version of the game - called Monopoly - and, despite not being the original creator, licensed it to a large-scale family business called Parker Brothers. The Landlord’s Game, which Magie self-published, became a cult classic.

Monopoly began its life as The Landlord’s Game.Īs Mary Pilon writes in the book The Monopolists, the game was patented in 1904 (and again in 1924) by Lizzie Magie, who originally intended to illustrate the injustices that can arise from the mass accumulation of wealth by one person. The Landlord’s Game - the precursor to today’s Monopoly (LandlordsGame.Info) In the wake of the Civil War, industrialization, and Christianity’s embrace of the prosperity gospel, the overriding theme of board games shifted from morality to unbridled capitalism.Īnd no game captured the spirit of Carnegie and Rockefeller like Monopoly. Many were inspired by religion and designed to imbue children with values of honesty, gratitude, and fair play. How did Hasbro corner the board game market? And could a new wave of collaborative board games threaten to disrupt their dominance? From family business to consolidationīoard games as we know them came into existence around the middle of the 19th century. In the UK this spring, board game and jigsaw puzzle revenues were up 240% - and Monopoly was the top seller.Īsk industry observers and fans why Monopoly has thrived, and they point to the game’s unique storyline, nostalgia, and a desire to escape screens.īut there’s another factor at play: Hasbro created a real-life monopoly that allowed Monopoly to flourish. The pandemic has created another boom: Gaming sales for Hasbro reached a record high in Q3 of 2020. By one estimate, that accounts for ~30% of all mass-market board game sales in the world - equivalent to Google’s share of the US ad market. In 2013, Euromonitor pegged Monopoly’s annual revenues at ~$400m. Its publisher, Hasbro, can toast the occasion knowing that its prized board game is more popular than ever.

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