Chris Cocks, CEO of Hasbro, has revealed the company has put a massive $1 billion into video games since 2018, and not a single title is a live service project.
Speaking with The Game Business, Cocks revealed that Hasbro has established six development studios and an internal publishing outfit, allowing it to work on titles that can compete with some of the industry’s biggest games. First off the bat is Archetype Entertainment’s Exodus, which is slated to arrive next year and will be published by Wizards of the Coast.
First off, the team at Archetype, founded by James Ohlen, but then Chris King and Jesse Sky… it’s a lot of people from BioWare who made some of my favorite games. It’s a new IP, but it’s not unfamiliar ground to us. Exodus is effectively D&D in space. We’re familiar with role-playing games, and familiar with how to make good ones. It’s a genre we understand.
Invoke’s Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons is also arriving in 2027, and Hasbro appears to now be putting more focus on single-player experiences despite the success of projects including Monopoly Go.
[We have] a really broad portfolio. So, where were we going to place our bets versus where we’re not? And we chose core games focused on PC and console, with more traditional business models. It was a safer bet for us. If you invest a fair amount of money and give a fair amount of time to a talented team to do a more traditional game, you probably won’t make billions, but your chances of at least making your money back is much higher. And even if you fail, you’re probably making 50, 60, 70 cents on the dollar back. So, when we just looked at the risk-reward equation of that and we looked at the design sensibilities we have — frankly the kind of games we like to play, and I’m more of a traditional gamer — we felt that to be the safer route.
We’ll be building games mostly around D&D, Magic [The Gathering], Transformers, maybe some of our other properties, maybe selectively some new stuff. It’ll be very focused on action-adventure and role-playing games for PC and console. And then, we’ll partner with the best in the business on more casual games, mobile games, new and emerging platforms like VR, et cetera.
Yesterday it was reported that Hasbro had scrapped the Dungeons & Dragons title that was set to be the debut title from Giant Skull, the studio formed by God of War III director, Stig Asmussen.
Back in March last year, Dan Ayoub, Senior Vice President of Digital Games at Hasbro, revealed during a chat with IGN at the San Francisco Game Developer Conference that the studio was “working out plans for the future” of the Baldur’s Gate series, and said that “we’re going to have some stuff to talk about around that.” Larian Studios, the developer behind the critically acclaimed Baldur’s Gate III, has obviously moved on from the franchise to work on Divinity.
[Source – The Game Business via VGC]