Wizards of the Coast is once again pushing itself toward videogames. President and CEO Chris Cocks openly said as much during the Q&A portion of Hasbro’s Q2 2024 earnings call (transcript available on Fool.com), revealing that the studio has hired veteran executive John Hight with the goal to ship one or two games per year starting in late 2025 or early 2026 at the latest, thanks to a yearly investment of around $125 million.
John, I think, is a luminary hire. He’s had a major hand in a bunch of franchises: Warcraft, Hearthstone, God of War, and even going way back to Command & Conquer. He’s worked on some great stuff, which I think is perfectly on point with what Wizards of the Coast is all about and what our digital gaming strategy is all about, which is extending a bunch of great mid-core and hard-core brands and an expertise in designing for those kinds of audiences and helping us digitize what those brands can do. I think between our board moves and with talent that we brought on board, most recently with John, but even before that, studio leaders we have like Ames Kirshen, who was in charge of the Batman: Arkham series; James Ohlen, who was the Head of Creative Design at BioWare, responsible for the first Baldur’s Gates, Neverwinter Nights, Mass Effect.
We’re going all in on becoming a digital play company. Roughly, our capital envelope is about $250 million a year. About half of that is going into Digital Games. Our goal is to be shipping one to two new games per year starting as early as late 2025, potentially early 2026. And I think we have a balanced approach to that. When you look at our game, when you look at our portfolio of investments in games, whether they’re partnerships or JVs that we’re doing are just fully internal investments.
And then you look at our whole lineup of licensed games, we have 150 projects that are either active in the market or in development. I think it’s important for us to have a hand as a publisher to guide our franchises and to work on the areas and the audiences that we think are hyper-important. But I also think it’s important for us to work with the best partners in the business and extend those franchises in areas where either we don’t have the expertise or we don’t have the platform. And I think we’ve been doing a good job of it.
It’s no accident why I think we’re the No. 1 licensor in the space. And I think we’re going to be a top publisher eventually in the space, and we’re going to take our time and do it right.
It’s not the first time we heard Cocks talking about a push toward the videogame industry, particularly for the Dungeons and Dragons franchise. However, last year Wizards of the Coast canceled five games, including two D&D projects in development at Hidden Path Entertainment and OtherSide Entertainment.
Given the newly confirmed push, it’s safe to guess those projects were axed due to their own problems rather than a change in strategy. Wizards of the Coast currently owns Archetype Entertainment (which is working on the Mass Effect-like sci-fi RPG Exodus), Skeleton Key, Atomic Arcade (currently working on a triple-A GI Joe game based on the character Snake Eyes), and Invoke Studios, formerly known as Tuque and now working on a new triple-A Dungeons and Dragons game powered by Unreal Engine 5.
Wizards of the Coast is also in talks with various partners to continue the Baldur’s Gate franchise following Larian’s decision to find its own path elsewhere.
