It looks like Hasbro is not slowing down. The manufacturer of Transformers, Magic: The Gathering, Monopoly, and Dungeons & Dragons look to be aiming for a digital expansion, with six video game studios and many soon-to-be unannounced projects, in the works.
Hasbro’s general manager of digital gaming, Tim Fields, spoke with Axios.com on the firm’s plans for digital expansion. Fields joined Hasbro in February after working at EA, Capcom and, most recently, Kabam. The latter, notably, specialised in mobile games tied to Marvel, Disney and Hasbro’s Transformers.
When speaking about the beginning of this digital expansion, Fields said it started with an “intentional shift to move more of our product development and publishing efforts in-house.”
The objective is to develop a number of new and original video games and make some games to tie to the Hasbro and fantasy and science fiction-themed game developer Wizards of the Coast (WotC) franchises.
Hasbro and WotC now have six internal video game studios and have licensed out properties such as mobile Scrabble games and Baldur’s Gate III, to Larian Studios.
Possibility of failure means nothing
“Even great game makers don’t succeed every time,” Tim Fields told Axios. “But Hasbro, Wizards of the Coast is committed.”
Fields concluded, “You hire great people, you give them the tools, and you give them the resources that they need. And when they succeed you celebrate and grow it and try and get as many people in the world to enjoy it as you can. And if sometimes things aren’t as great as you hope they would be, then you dust off their shoulders and you get them back up and you get them to build another game.”
The article mentioned the possibility of Hasbro’s efforts being in vain if the company fails at developing its own video games, comparing it to Disney’s failed attempt in 2016 when the firm ended all involvement in the console games business outside of licensing.
More recently, Netflix Games has been having a hard time engaging Netflix subscribers. Fewer than one per cent of subscribers play the streaming platform’s games.
