Wizards of the Coast: “There are lots of ways to express Dungeons & Dragons beyond RPGs”
Senior vice president of digital licensing Eugene Evans says there is almost no Hasbro IP that isn’t heading to games
Image credit: Dead by Daylight by Behaviour Interactive
One year on from the launch of Baldur’s Gate 3, Hasbro and its Wizards of the Coast subsidiary are leaning on video games even harder — and the two companies are believe there’s room in almost every genre for its wealth of IP.
Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz at Gamescom in Cologne, senior vice president of digital licensing Eugene Evans said that, while Larian Studios’ blockbuster RPG has been a massive boost to the company, the IP owner is exploring for Dungeons & Dragons and Magic The Gathering — Hasbro’s biggest IP in terms of revenue — beyond licensing further AAA games.
“We do have AAA games that are in development,” he says. “We’ve announced some of the partnerships that we have with the likes of Starbreeze and Gameloft to build D&D games. I’ll leave it to your imagination where they might take that.
“But we think that, beyond RPGs, there are lots of ways to express D&D and Magic. We are only at the very beginning of exploring what digital expressions of Magic can be.”
He points to Magic: The Gathering Arena, a free-to-play PC and mobile recreation of the collecitible card game, as an example, as well as the company’s collaborations with established games.
The company has already run a number of brand collaborations with popular titles to celebrate Dungeons & Dragons’ 50th anniversary this year, including cosmetics and armour in Bungie’s Destiny 2 and the use of iconic villain Vecna as a killer in Behaviour Interactive’s Dead By Daylight. And Evans says there are “more surprises coming even in the next six to eight weeks.”
The exec tells us Hasbro has 80 live games and/or active contracts in the games market, with 40 games or collaborations that are currently in development with partners. These are all currently due to ship over the next two to three years, with 18 to arrive throughout 2024.
This isn’t too surprising, of course, given that CEO Chris Cocks said alongside the company’s most recently financials that Hasbro is “going all in on becoming a digital play company.”
Evans says future releases range from mobile games like smash hit Monopoly Go, which has now grossed more than $3 billion, to larger PC and console titles. More importantly, he says it’s across almost the whole range of Hasbro-owned IP, which encompasses D&D, Magic: The Gathering, Transformers, Mr Potato Head, Monopoly, Sorry!, Clue and more.
“If there’s a game you played as a kid, there’s a 50/50 chance we own it,” he laughs. “We seem to be signing new deals to bring new partners in as fast as we can ship games. There’s almost no IP that we’re not talking about or already have a product in development.”
This is in no small part to the success of Baldur’s Gate 3 and Monopoly Go. Since both these games took off, Evans reports developer pitches and meeting requests have been “off the charts.”
It’s not just hopeful developers wishing to create the next Hasbro-fronted hit. Evans believes that in these turbulent times for the games business, more studios are seeking to improve their chances of success with the company’s “absolute embarrassment of riches” when it comes to IP.
“At the moment, with a lot of risk and concern within the industry as a whole, people are trying to find ways to mitigate that risk and bringing an established IP into the market is a very effective way to do that,” he says. “You reduce your marketing costs and perhaps give you a better chance of creating a sticky successful game.”
