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Ever since the release of Baldur’s Gate 3 a few years ago, Dungeons & Dragons owner Hasbro has smelled the money in the water. Realizing that there’s quite a lot of money to be made on successful games, it created several studios and bankrolled its own triple-A projects to try and boost its gaming endeavors, which is understandable given the IP it owns.
Hasbro Seems To Be Lowering Its Gaming Ambitions
Unfortunately, three years on from Baldur’s Gate 3, and it seems like things haven’t been going to plan. First reported by Kotaku earlier today, it appears as though Hasbro has included a $56 million impairment in its second quarter earnings results, which is “related to the Company’s refocused Digital Games portfolio for 2028 and beyond.”
That essentially means that Hasbro has overestimated how much value was in its digital games push, and is now attempting to right the ship by valuing the strategy much lower. It was apparently caused due to the cancellations of several video games that were slated to launch at some point in 2028 or beyond.
Hasbro isn’t mentioning what these canceled projects are, but a statement to Kotaku has revealed that sci-fi RPG Exodus and the Dungeons & Dragons RPG called Warlock are both still slated to launch in 2027.
This announcement isn’t a great sign for Hasbro’s big gaming ambitions, and later in the earnings call, it was claimed that Hasbro will start co-developing and co-publishing a lot more with “lower-cost partners”, and that its promises of a couple of big games every year will no longer happen, and “more service-oriented games, and potentially some smaller, more focused content bets inside of games” will happen instead.
So, basically, Hasbro has underestimated just how rough it can be to actually develop games in-house (or it just doesn’t know how to), and it’s going to go back to the old method of making the occasional game while licensing out its most popular IP and assets, which is how big hits like Baldur’s Gate 3 came to be.
I guess it was a fun experiment, though one that never got the time it needed and will ultimately lead to lost jobs and broken hearts, all for the sake of chasing more money. Then again, name me one big company that isn’t doing that these days.
