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Discussion Following the success of Baldur's Gate 3, Hasbro gets drunk and opens four studios they will spent a billion dollars on.

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ItWasMeantToBe19

Manakete
www.gamesindustry.biz

Hasbro's $1 billion bet on internal game development

Last year was a massive one for Hasbro's video game business, with Monopoly Go and Baldur's Gate 3 providing the toy ma…
www.gamesindustry.biz www.gamesindustry.biz

The company has four AAA studios right now. There's North Carolina-based Atomic Arcade, which is working on a Snake Eyes GI Joe game that Ayoub calls "not your daddy's GI Joe."
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"Over $1 billion is in video game development right now," Ayoub says. "And that is just these studios. That's to say nothing of the other game investments that are happening. Definitely I've seen the company put its actions around its words in terms of building these studios around strong leaders, thinking about the long game as well. We've got a portfolio that goes much, much larger than anything we're talking about right now."
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Well uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Good for people laid off in the gaming industry this year I guess?
 
Awesome. Hope they put out good games
 
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I'm not looking forward to this, Hasbro's business expansion strategy is very aggressive and completely earnings-first like the rest of the giant corporations in the U.S. They will force their subsidiaries to produce games and release them in the shortest time possible to make a profit.
 
they can start eating babies if that's what it takes for a new Transformers game that isn't shovelware for babies
 
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Lugia667 said:
didn't know Hasbro owned BG3

if they wanna try to catch Lightning again good lcuk
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Hasbro owns Wizards of the Coast, which owns Dungeons and Dragons; since the Baldur's Gate games are set in the D&D universe/use D&D as a basis for their mechanics, the series is ultimately under Hasbro
 
I hope these studios have a bright future, but trying to do Baldur's Gate 4 without Larian is a mistake. I would have parked infinite money and taken a pay percentage decrease to keep them around. Whoever follows BG3 is doomed to fail.
 
"Not Your Daddy's GI Joe" is a funny thing to read considering dads are exactly the only demographic that would remotely care about the GI Joe brand.
 
Hasbro stahp, you genuinely don't understand what you're doing.

Here, let me demonstrate how you could spend 1% of that and make more money: hire the Tabletop Simulator people to do 1:1 conversions of several of the most popular DnD modules including Descent Into Avernus, then sell expansion packs with more modules every six months.

Then you give the other 99% of that one billy to me since the idea is just that good.
 
Elementary said:
Hasbro stahp, you genuinely don't understand what you're doing.

Here, let me demonstrate how you could spend 1% of that and make more money: hire the Tabletop Simulator people to do 1:1 conversions of several of the most popular DnD modules including Descent Into Avernus, then sell expansion packs with more modules every six months.

Then you give the other 99% of that one billy to me since the idea is just that good.
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Hasbro bought DND Beyond so there's only a marginal bonus to doing Tabletop Sim skins.
The idea of AAA games for their brands seems more in the favor of boosting their brands' awareness outside the current circles. It certainly seems worth an effort but I don't think it's $1 billion worth. Warner Bros. Is a great example of why doing it all internally is ill-advised unless you got good management.
 
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Good! More jobs for the people in the industry. Founding new studios always will be better than buying existing ones.

Also Hasbro, before you release any game you're working on, could you please get the Transformers Cybertron games back from Microsoft and re-release them? Platinum's Transformers Devastation too. Thanks in advance.
 
Bowser Sr. said:
"Not Your Daddy's GI Joe" is a funny thing to read considering dads are exactly the only demographic that would remotely care about the GI Joe brand.
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Could be an adaptation of the Larry Hama comics which are indeed tonally different from the animated series.

(Which is also the blueprint for like, almost 80% of GI Joe adaptations.)
 
9-Volt said:
Good! More jobs for the people in the industry. Founding new studios always will be better than buying existing ones.
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they basically literally bought existing ones though

very young ones, but existing ones
 
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Magic-Man said:
I hope these studios have a bright future, but trying to do Baldur's Gate 4 without Larian is a mistake. I would have parked infinite money and taken a pay percentage decrease to keep them around. Whoever follows BG3 is doomed to fail.
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Source for the stuff I'm about to say here, note that most of the stuff is not written in the article but rather in the embed video interview.

Swen Vincke(Larian CEO) was clear that it wasn't because they were unhappy with BG3 and/or Hasbro(although I do recall him being saddened that a lot of the team he talked to was now gone).

They had begun work on DLC/Expansion for BG3 and looking into possible BG4 ideas during fall/holidays 2023 but decided against it in the end.
Sven actually had long term plan with two games post-BG3 but the studio him(and the studio) momentarily fell into chasing the money because it was the "safe" thing to do considering the success of BG3(who could blame them?)

Ultimately he/they decided to go back to that original planned production schedule with the two new games with the 2nd one being particularly ambitious.

Prior to development on Baldur's Gate 3, Larian CEO Swen Vincke was already planning out the company's future, and this included what he calls "the very big RPG that will dwarf them all."
Speaking to GameSpot at GDC, Vincke explained that Larian's next game also won't actually be the aforementioned "very big RPG," but will be another step toward realizing it.
"I think there is some tech that we don't have yet," Vincke said. "And I don't know what the specs are on the next gen [of gaming systems] yet, but I hope that it's going to bring us closer."
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In the end, I don't think there was much that Hasbro could've done to keep them around.
 
BlackthornOrion said:
Hasbro owns Wizards of the Coast, which owns Dungeons and Dragons; since the Baldur's Gate games are set in the D&D universe/use D&D as a basis for their mechanics, the series is ultimately under Hasbro
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how much money did Hasbro actually make though? Reminds me of when Nintendo had to clarify they didn't really make much from Pokemon Go
 
Lugia667 said:
how much money did Hasbro actually make though? Reminds me of when Nintendo had to clarify they didn't really make much from Pokemon Go
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www.ign.com

Baldur's Gate 3 Has Made $90 Million for Hasbro - IGN

Hasbro, the parent company of Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast, revealed that Baldur's Gate 3 has earned the company $90 million through a licensing deal.
www.ign.com www.ign.com

During a Hasbro investor's call, the American toy and game company revealed that Baldur's Gate 3 has earned it $90 million since the RPG's official release last year, thanks to a licensing deal.
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Considering this article was from Feb 2024, it's probably about the two quarters the game was out from August and ending December 31st.
It's not that much, especially considering the estimates of how many copies BG3 sold, but this is because is was only a licensing deal.
Larian Studios funded the game development of BG3 by themselves, they also published and probably marketed the game via their own money.
 
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dolpic said:
A billion? Embracer Group vibes
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Not really the same thing at all. Embracer was grabbing and packaging studios at lightning speed to imminently sell them off to Saudi Arabia based on a handshake deal. Hasbro is a toy company that’s been around for a century and was selling Transformers and GI Joe across multimedia in the 80s. While I don’t have much faith in them as a multinational flogging licensed toys, particularly regarding WotC and D&D/rpgs in general, they at least aren’t kidding when they say they have an interest in curating the brands they have. Whether they are any good at it given the wild mix of quality in the expansions of their licensed properties over time is another matter, and whether they can have their own studios build on Larian’s smash hit to anywhere near the level of such a specialised and experienced studio is obviously a big ask too.

If they do end up closing down studios following this push of their video games division/studios, it’ll be more equivalent to Square refocusing on a smaller number of projects than Embracer’s bizarre mismanagement, incompetence and hubris.
 
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Feel a bit sorry for whoever ends up developing BG4. The weight of expectation on that could crush coal into diamonds.

Also really don't trust Hasbro as a company to not screw this up and make employees pay the price.
 
So which one of these is going to make me my Jem and the Holograms game
 
Hasbro makes a bigger expansion than Nintendo in game development after 1 big title release.
 
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kaya bunji said:
They are doing a bang up job of completely destroying Magic The Gathering, so forgive my pessimism. Hasbro only understand $$$.
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They probably think they can release whatever crap if it says Baldur's Gate on it. Then again there are people who think the same for Pokemon so can't blame them.
 
Zellia said:
Feel a bit sorry for whoever ends up developing BG4. The weight of expectation on that could crush coal into diamonds.

Also really don't trust Hasbro as a company to not screw this up and make employees pay the price.
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Yeah, that's a tough act to follow and I imagine it'd feel almost doomed to fail. I kinda wonder if maybe the move is "just get a Game Mill-tier studio to do a quick and cheap BG4 that everyone hates, so that expectations are completely reset for whoever gets to make a serious effort with BG5"
 
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Derachi said:
For a company that only understands money you’d think they’d be better at managing it lmao
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Hasbro has been in "We know the toy industry as we know it is slowly (Frankly not slowly) dying and we need to branch out with our IP" mode since 2009 or so. They've tried multiple times to become a media company and every single time their plan failed, and the current new CEO is in a dire need of a win since the company has had to deal with like two separate attempts at borderline hostile takeover attempts from investors who see him as easy prey.

Investing in videogames is frankly not a bad idea since there is doubtlessly a higher number of kids who would be interested in playing a game where you're a shooty soldier shooting at guys with neat guns than there are kids interested in action figures of the GI Joe characters, it certainly is a more sane use of their IP than trying to become a cartoon/movie production studio like they tried before, but it is hard to expect good things when it's clearly another in a series of desperate moves.
 
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