At a time when most are scaling back their ambitions in the video game industry, Hasbro has decided to do the opposite. While most major studios are either cancelling projects or laying off staff, Hasbro's head of digital product development, Dan Ayoub, has announced the company plans to spend $1 billion to re-eneter the games market. In an interview to gamesindustry.biz, Ayoub stated:

"The biggest thing to takeaway, which is honestly a little surprise to a lot of people, is that Hasbro is in fact making video games," Ayoub says. "And we have a considerable investment in our studio structure; we've got over $1 billion in games right now being developed."

"Video games is an integral part of Hasbro's strategy going into the next 100 years and we have to make sure that everything that comes out is top quality, is authentic, and is something we can build upon, because we're talking about a couple studios and a couple games right now, but we have much larger ambitions for that."

As part of these ambitious plans, Hasbro has secured four studios: Invoke Studios, Atomic Arcade, Skeleton Key, and Archetype. Hasbro has tasked each of these to work on games with AAA aspirations with some working on original ideas and other using Hasbro's extensive list of IPs. For example, Ayoub revealed that Atomic Arcade is working on a mature GI Joe title, Invoke on a a Dungeons & Dragons game, Skeleton Key on an original horror-themed title, and Archetype on a new AAA franchise led by former BioWare alum, James Ohlen.

All of these gaming ambitions will be operating under Hasbro's Wizards of the Coast digital brand which not only was buoyed by Baldur's Gate 3 being a massive success but also Monopoly Go, which generated $2 billion for Hasbro is about 10 months. Nonetheless, Wizards of the Coast also spent $500 million to market the game, which exceeds the marketing budget of even the likes of The Last of Us Part II.

Now, for those of you that have been around the block for a while, you may recall a time when Hasbro was a major player in the video game arena. Hasbro Interactive, Inc. was at one point the third largest video game publisher in the world. Unfortunately, Hasbro Interactive's aggressive growth only happened due to Hasbro spending money like crazy and when the Do-Com Bubble Burst, the gaming division bled money. It also did not help that Hasbro's hardware division, Tiger Electronics, Ltd, struggled to make handheld devices, though it had the saving grace of making the Furby. Nonetheless, at one point Hasbro Interactive lost $74 million on revenues of $237 million and when Hasbro decided to exit the video game market, that is what led to Atari SA/Infogrames.

Nonetheless, Hasbro does have the advantage of having a plethora of IPs that are bound to sell. Wizards of the Coast has been itching to make a sequel to BG3, even if Larian has signaled they have no plans to continue working with Wizards to even make DLC for BG3.

Maybe they should have not laid off all of those people who had ties to various studios they were working with. It's almost like those people had jobs that were actually important to the functioning of the company.

One of the Larian people specifically mentioned having their direct contact within Hasbro/WOTC laid off being a big cause of friction since communicating with them had become a massive hassle as a result.

Forget trying to make another Baldur's Gate 3, Hasbro. It's a fool's errand. I'll tell you where the real money is. Go find whatever warehouse/landfill you dumped all those old Tiger Electronic handhelds in, rip the guts out, put a halfway decent emulator in there. Boom! You've got your one billion dollars back on just that alone.

@brian_: Of course they can't make another Baldur's Gate 3. It will be Baldur's Gate 4.

This seems poorly thought out and doomed. The reason Baldur's Gate 3 was a huge success was not because it was Baldur's Gate. It was because of Larian, which has been making games like this for a long time, came up with a great plan, and executed it close to perfectly. Larian did not come out of nowhere with this game. It built on a lot of experience.

Grabbing a bunch of studios without a great pedigree and giving them money to make some licensed AAA stuff almost never works. It doesn't even work for Microsoft, who has bought a bunch of very experienced studios and who has decades of experience of managing these kinds of projects and putting out AAA games. It's just too complicated an undertaking for that.

Maybe they'll surprise me and these games will not only come out (I'd put even money on that not even happening) but be good, but I think we're going to have either cancelations or games that hit a metacritic of 75 or lower.

The right move here is either to start with smaller projects and build up or partner with established studios if you want to make AAA. Founding a new studio to make AAA when you're not even an experienced games publisher just rarely works out. I mean look at EA and Immortals of Aveum. Respawn is the exception, not the rule, and those were very specific circumstances.

The only words that appear when you open up your video game history text book to the section on the 2020s.

@brian_:

The video game industry during the Pandemic when player counts jumped and venture capital was easy to access:

And the once heroic story, about Baldur's Gate 3, is about to have a tragic ending. This news is what they call "Foreshadowing".

It's insanity at it's highest, but I can think of only one studio out there with the talent, financial backing, and raw desperation to ever undertake a project like Baldur's Gate 4.

Bioware.

@av_gamer: I mean a bunch of developers are going to get paid for at least a few years. A megacorporation may lose a bunch of money on a dumb venture but I don't really think that's tragic. In the end a billion dollars being pumped into the game industry is probably a good thing, it would just be better if it were done smarter.

@mach_go_go_go: Bioware in the late 2000s/early 2010s. There's no reason to think 2024 Bioware could actually pull it off. It's not the same studio, let alone the same studio that made the original Baldur's Gate games.

Honestly I think the two studios other than Larian that I think could do it would be CD Projekt Red and Obsidian. There are others that could probably step up under the right circumstances. InXile comes to mind as a studio that under the right circumstances could make the leap.

@bigsocrates: I think your and I are talking about two different games made under two different sets of circumstances. A successful and honorable followup to the Larian banger? CDPR or one of the Microsoft studios, sure. But I personally doubt WotC and either of those companies could agree to terms.

EA, however, is a company that I can imagine is looking at their little stepchild and wondering what to do with them for the summer. Dragon Age 4 is shipping soon, the publisher would love to be in a relationship with another big IP following the Star Wars kerfuffle, it would look good from a PR perspective ("Hey remember that thing from years ago that led up that thing you liked?").

To be clear, I don't think it's a good idea for Bioware to do another Baldur's Gate (I live in the greater Edmonton area and have a lot of fondness for that studio), but I think it's exactly the sort of project EA would shop them out to with a limited time and budget, with a press release about 'returning to their roots' written by someone who's never played the original games.

Owlcat Games would be a better fit similar studio size to Larian with a lot of experience making CRPG's, they often produce very good flawed gems a bigger budget with time could be the missing piece. I would be hesitant to jump into BGS4 it would probably be better to start smaller a spin off or expansion for BGS3.

@mach_go_go_go: EA knows what to do with a studio that's no longer a cash cow. SHUT! IT! DOWN!

It's what EA does best! Buy studios and then close them.

Honestly I think that Dragon Age 4 may be make or break for Bioware. If it's a hit, or at least not a disaster (I think it's fine if it's a Mass Effect 3 style game that people have issues with but at least some like) then I think that Bioware probably moves back to Mass Effect. If it's another Andromeda or Anthem I think there's a good chance Bioware becomes Bye-o-ware. Or gets turned into a Dice support studio or something. Either way I think that with the Dragon Age IP in hand EA is unlikely to want the D&D IP, which isn't really that strong. I mean the D&D movie that came out last year was really good and still wasn't a success. Baldur's Gate 3 was a huge hit, IMO, not because it was Baldur's Gate but because of Early Access word of mouth.

But yeah EA does dumb stuff so maybe it could happen. However I think here Hasbro is trying to do it all in house, which, again, seems like a bad idea. I do think they could probably have made a deal with Microsoft under the right circumstances, though I don't think that those particular studios are the only ones who could do it.

My point was not that you'd need Obsidian or inXile specifically. My point was that I would not give an AAA budget to Invoke, the studio that made the absolute disaster that was 2021's Dark Alliance. Make an AA game budgeted at like $10-15 million that isn't a dumpster fire and then think about scaling up to 50-100 million (though probably not even then.)

Dark Alliance wasn't even just a technical mess. It had a lot of really stupid design decisions that made it bad. The people who designed that game need to show they understand how to make a good video game before they should be given a massive project to oversee.

@ben_h: This is the biggest reason why I think this effort is destined for failure. Better studios than whatever Hasbro has access to are already grappling with the brain drain from their stupid please-the-investors 8% layoffs the last couple of years. But blowing up the key bridge to the games industry is only going to lead to them driving a billion dollars in cash over the edge of the cliff.

The 2021 reboot of Dark Alliance might be the worst game I've played in the last decade or more. I would expect games much closer to that level of quality than to BG3, if any (non-mobile) games even see the light of day.

A lot of questionable decisions here, but GI Joe might take the cake for me. When was the last time any media based on that IP has done well? They couldn't even get people to watch a movie with Bruce Willis and The Rock. They have so many other franchises to work with, why keep trying to bring this one back?