"Hasbro spent over $1 billion on games and has plans for 'the next 100 years'"

[kane_magus]

Full headline, because I didn't even try to fit it in up there: "Buckle up—Hasbro spent over $1 billion on games and has plans for 'the next 100 years', since Baldur's Gate 3 proved fans 'like a great, well-executed D&D game'"

Riiiiiiiight. Because I totally believe Hasbro will do a very good job with this. *eye roll* Odds are they'll make maybe one or two games, those will bomb horribly because Hasbro isn't Larian and doesn't actually have a clue how to make a video game, and then Hasbro will give up and fire all the people they hired to make all these games.

Or... they'll make one or two games, those games will actually do reasonably well or better, and then Hasbro will still give up and fire all the people they hired to make all these games, for no discernible reason.

Also, if Hasbro just, you know, had a billion dollars sitting there for shit like this, why'd they have to lay off 1100 people? Including, specifically, most of the people who worked with Larian on BG3.

Comments

[owsf2000]

I think what happened was Hasbro was very reluctant to allow any games to be made based on ip they owned for a long time - then Baldur's Gate III happened and made them some good cash. Then dev groups and publishers started bombarding them with offers to make The Next Big Thing to repeat Baldur's Gate's success and they started greenlighting everything put in front of them.

So yeah give them a few stinker releases out of the upcoming batches to see what they really feel.

[kane_magus]

It seemed like they were implying that Hasbro was going to try their hand at making games in-house, but yeah, I could see that being the case, too.

Hasbro allowed BG1[1] and BG2 and Planescape: Torment and Icewind Dale and Neverwinter Nights and Temple of Elemental Evil and such to be made, back in the late 90s and early 2000s, and then "the industry" (and retailers) arbitrarily decided that games like that didn't sell anymore and basically killed the whole thing, at least for a while. But now, with BG3 selling like hotcakes, followed by Larian deciding they didn't really want to become the new "Baldur's Gate" company (and I don't blame them one bit, since that's what Interplay kind of became back then, toward the end), Hasbro doesn't really have an actual clue what to do next and is scrambling and throwing money around haphazardly to try to capitalize on it while people still kind of give a shit. In any case, whether it's Hasbro themselves making the new games, or whether it's rando developers approaching them (or being approached by them) in hopes of becoming the next Larian, this probably isn't going to end well for anyone involved. Mostly for gamers and fans of D&D.

It's kind of like how all these The Lord of the Rings games are being made all willy-nilly lately by seemingly random publishers[2], like this new Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of The Rings Game game (I mean, who the fuck even is "Wētā Workshop"?[3]) or that shitty Gollum game (which basically killed Daedalic Entertainment as a developer, sadly). Hell, even Interplay made a few "Lord of the Rings" games for MS-DOS and SNES back in the day (kind of biting Ultima VII's style along the way), before they mostly became the "TTRPG to isometric video games" company.

[1] - Well, the first Baldur's Gate was already released, in 1998, before Hasbro bought Wizards of the Coast in 1999, (but after WotC bought TSR, the original creators of D&D, in 1997), so Hasbro had shit all to do with that one, at least.

[2] - Not to be confused with the "Middle-Earth™" games, which are apparently separate from "The Lord of the Rings™" as an entity, for whatever reasons ("artistic choise" or legal or what have you, depending on which articles you read about the whole thing), even though it's all really the same shit.

[3] - Well, if nothing else, it seems like Wētā Workshop is already off to a wonderful start for fitting right the fuck in with the rest of the modern video game industry. *eye roll*