- cross-posted to:
- gaming@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- gaming@beehaw.org
Speed Daily exclusively learned that the American toy company Hasbro is seeking to sell its well-known IP “Dungeons & Dragons” (referred to as “DND” below), and Tencent is one of the potential buyers.
At present, the negotiations are still in the early stages and both parties have not yet reached an agreement on the details of the transaction.
According to informed sources, the financial crisis faced by Hasbro is the main reason for considering the sale of DND, and Tencent Investment’s Larian Studios is acting as an intermediary in this transaction. Larian Studios’ game “Baldur’s Gate 3” won the TGA Game of the Year award in 2023 and is considered one of the most successful adaptations of DND. As a result, it was seen as a potential target buyer by Hasbro. However, due to insufficient funds, Larian ultimately introduced this deal to shareholder Tencent.
Hasbro was founded in 1923 and has a history of over a hundred years. In 1935, the company gradually became a world-class toy company with its Monopoly series games. It owns well-known IPs such as Transformers, Dungeons & Dragons, Monopoly, and My Little Pony. However, this century-old enterprise is currently facing a huge crisis due to losses. Its stock price has dropped from a high of $108 in 2019 to $51 (closing data on January 26th).
According to the financial report, as of the third quarter of 2023, Hasbro has been experiencing consecutive losses for four quarters due to its main business of toy sales. The accumulated loss from Q4 2022 to Q3 2023 exceeds $500 million USD, and in Q2 2023, there was even a negative free cash flow situation. According to Forbes reports, in response to the crisis, the company underwent significant layoffs last year, with a total reduction of over 1,900 employees accounting for more than 20%.
Although the company as a whole is in a loss situation, its DND-related IP is a high-quality asset and has achieved considerable success in video game adaptations. Last year, the release of “Baldur’s Gate 3” by Larian Studios was both critically acclaimed and commercially successful. It not only won six TGA awards, including Game of the Year but also generated revenue of $657 million, surpassing the Harry Potter IP adaptation game “Hogwarts Legacy,” making it the most profitable PC exclusive game last year.
The success of “Baldur’s Gate 3” is also reflected in the financial data of Hasbro. The financial report shows that in the third quarter of 2023, driven by “Baldur’s Gate 3” and another Monopoly IP game called “Monopoly Go!”, Hasbro’s electronic gaming and licensing-related business achieved a contrary year-on-year growth of 40%, reaching $423 million.
Outside of electronic games, DND is also one of the most popular tabletop games in Europe and America. It has appeared multiple times in American TV shows such as “The Big Bang Theory” and “Stranger Things”. A large fan base has formed around its related culture, making it a top-tier IP.
A Tencent IEG (Interactive Entertainment Group) insider revealed that Tencent, represented by its overseas business department IEG Global, is in negotiations with the aim of acquiring a series of rights including the adaptation rights for electronic games such as DND.
According to the aforementioned IEG insiders, Tencent currently holds the game adaptation rights for many top-tier IPs. However, due to the licensing model mostly not being a one-time buyout, Tencent not only needs to bear high copyright fees and long-term revenue sharing but also frequently faces restrictions from its partners in terms of development and operation. Previously, the mobile game adaptation of “NieR” developed by Tencent TiMi Studio was unable to be launched even until the project was cancelled.
If this acquisition is successful, it will enable Tencent to gain dominant control over the IP of Dungeons & Dragons, which will largely avoid the aforementioned issues.
Companies in Europe and America attach great importance to the value of intellectual property (IP), while Chinese companies have limited opportunities to acquire top-tier IP from overseas. For Tencent, the opportunity to acquire the Dungeons & Dragons IP from Hasbro due to financial considerations is a rare chance.
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From bad to worse?
I really doubt Hasbro are looking to sell it unless they’re planning to shut their doors too. To my knowledge they have two profitable IPs, Magic the gathering and Dungeons and Dragons. D&D is also a strong brand but people don’t need the brand to enjoy the game. If the designers aren’t appeased, they’ll just leave and make their own D&D clone. It’s happened before and it’s currently happening now.
Also the repeated use of only referring to the game as DND in the article is very odd, nobody calls it that maybe DnD is ok but not in a professional setting where either Dungeons and Dragons or maybe D&D is the standard. It sets off my hearsay alarm massively.
No? I know the West has a giant boner for China Bad, but so far, tencent has been … fine. Certainly better than what a lot of American companies have been doing. Hasbro is a good example.
The issue here isnt that Tencent is Chinese. It’s that they’re a massive corporation with basically no interest in the product except how much money it can make.
WotC seemed to actually care about it and most of the bad decisions were Hasbro’s fault in the name of profitability over quality
they’re a massive corporation with basically no interest in the product except how much money it can make
I think that describes Hasbro just as well as Tencent.
I don’t think it does.
Hasbro is an Western company, DnD is an a Western IP and cultural touchstone. Hasbro is as greedy as any corporation that owns an IP, but at the very least, I trust Hasbro to be staffed with people that have a greater respect for it than Tencent.
There’s just no good reason why a Chinese company needs to be buying up Western IPs. It’s bad enough we have American conglomerates doing it, but at least they still reside where their roots are.
Exactly this. I started playing from the blue box back in the late 70s or very early 80s, and I have always been a huge fan of RPGs since. I got into it because I was really into fantasy novels (picked up the addiction from my mom), and those little lead figures of orcs and skeletons with swords were irresistible to me. I even had drinks with Gygax during a con at one point and we talked about the game and his hopes and vision for it all night.
I wasn’t particularly happy when WotC took over the IP. Companies like TSR and White Wolf just brought so much passion to the games they wrote and you never got the sense of there being corporate bullshit. I never met Richard Garriott, but I got the same vibe from the Ultima games.
Anyway, yes, the problem is the corporatization of what’s essentially art (for want of a better word). Yes, of course the content creators want and need to get paid, but I’d much rather have a grey beard hippie looking guy who says “You know what would be really cool?” than some American Psycho looking guy trying to milk another couple of million bucks out of a franchise by including products like Coca Cola in tavern menus.
I really don’t get to play much anymore, but it’s always a little disheartening to watch this kind of thing happen.
Tencent historically is quite hands-off with their investments. Hoping they continue to be so if they did end up purchasing D&D.
If they’re hands off, then it’s an odd coincidence that most of the companies they heavily invest into go to shit it seems like.
Can you give some examples of companies that went to shit after Tencent purchased them, and what investor-pleasing behaviour they did that led to this enshittification? I’d genuinely appreciate that.
If Tencent buys it but let’s Larian (read Swen) manage its trajectory, it might be a good move.
WotC seemed to actually care about it and most of the bad decisions were Hasbro’s fault in the name of profitability over quality
WotC stopped existing shortly after Hasbro bought the company. It’s like pretending Blizzard isn’t basically just part of Activision/Microsoft.
I was about to counterpoint you and say that to make money you need to maintain a good product and then quickly realized how dumb of a thought that was… people gobble up horse shit products like it’s filet mignon.
WuMao
Remember when there was a lot of concern about China potentially buying Star wars? But then Disney did, I sometimes wonder what it would’ve been like if China had instead.
No pooh bear in star wars, no blood, no gore, no skeletons or force ghost. Would make for a very boring SW movie.
Few things are more pathetic than someone that edits their original comment to whine about downvotes. It’s sad you genuinely believe only a bot could explain them all.
I’m not whining about downvotes, I said they don’t matter here. I’m annoyed at whoever set up a bot to downvote the comment they hate. There was like a hundred in ten minutes. It’s obvious. Downvotes are fine, and botting is pathetic. You understand this, I’m sure.
tHe VoTe BoTs
Ok tencent intern
This was the most American thing I read today 👍
Holy shit, its the cop guy
What are the odds you have two trash takes in a row? I should check usernames more often apparently
Please no, not Tencent of all companies please. Just sell it to Games Workshop and let them run it alongside the assorted warhammer IPs. GW already has the mini printing and lorecrafting experience to make it successful
Maybe Microsoft should buy it.
Oh god no, id rather give it to nintendo and see new mtg cards printed every 5 years
Or Free League. Swen buying D&D would have been one hell of a life journey though.
I’ve gotta say, Hasbro didn’t make Monopoly they stole it. They ripped Landlord’s Game by Elizabeth Magie and changed up the box art slightly. The board was even a square beforehand.
They didn’t steal shit. Parker Brothers bought the rights. Hasbro bought Parker Brothers in 1991.
Didn’t parker brothers make monopoly?
They published it for her in 1932 after rejecting it at first in 1909. It was published in 1913 in the UK under a different name, and a college professor from Elizabeth’s town also spread it to his students. Which is where the monopoly name came from. The information for this followup comment I found on Wikipedia. It also mentions she sold her patent to them in 1935 for 500 bucks. Which they then shelved her version of the game for someone else’s. I think I just invalidated my stolen comment and found where that accusation comes from. Cause there were a fuckton of versions of this game. But she made the original for sure. I read all this on wikipedia for the follow up comment, it seemed unbiased but someone should challenge me if they know better.
China has some odd cultural hangups around skeletons and such that I think would eventually work its way into the IP (see old video game releases and the state approved model changes they have to make for their versions). Thats not nessessaraly a bad thing, but it would be weird to see what gets changed.
I would be concerned if I cared for the IP. The thing is that Hasbro broke the public’s trust with the attempted OGL change along with many other bad decisions and my groups fully abandoned the IP for Pathfinder. BG3 really is only my last connection to the current edition, and even then its really only set dressing over the video game mechanics.
As someone who deeply cares for D&D as a collaborative story telling tool, an excuse to RP with friends and just play fun games. I dont care who owns it, ive got my old books and can use any framework to tell a fun adventure. As Hasbro proved in 2023, the hobby is too popular to kill and people will make rules forks if they feel like the owner has too much influence over it.
“Eventually”? They already force wotc to change art in DND and mtg for their market. If they owned it, those things would never be seen in the games again.
BG3 had skeletons in it though.
I think they’re was muted about China “relaxing” some of these things. I’ll see if I can find it.
I couldn’t find it. My memory is real bad so maybe I remembered something different.
Wonder how Larian got away with having skeletons.
BG3 had skeletons in it though.
BG3 isn’t made in China. Larian Studios is a Belgian developer and publisher.
You can’t even show skulls in Chinese media
That’s kinda where I’m at with it. There are loads of other systems at this point which honestly probably do more interesting things with certain mechanics. Just a matter of finding which one works for your group.
Im more curious to see what this does to a group like Critical Role. Most of the appeal there is the RP anyway so it seems like they’d be fine barring any weird contract stuff.
To shreds you say…
Jesus Christ, why?
Hasbro is broke as fuck.
What’s the big idea here anyway? Cash out before Hasbro dies completely? You can’t survive longterm by selling your only profitable IPs, instead you could focus on them and abandon the rest.
CEO makes a profitable year, collects large bonus then golden parachutes out while has to melts down after selling one of only two profitable divisions of the company. The other is Magic the Gathering
Yeah, I don’t understand the end goal here. They sell DnD, make some quick buck… then what?
I don’t doubt that the other franchises listed in the article (Transformers, My little pony, Monopoly) still make money, but if you’re losing money already, the solution is not to sell one of the branches that’s actually making a profit.
D&D has been somewhat profitable yes, but it has also been notoriously hard to monetise. Magic: the Gathering is their big cash cow. This is why Hasbro was fiddling with the OGL last year and why they were (are?) investing into an official digital tabletop (which they would presumably fill with micro transactions).
They are also in huge trouble financially, and last year was a bit of a surprise hit for the D&D brand with both the movie being pretty good and BG3 being a huge unexpected success. It’s not inconceivable that they deem the brand value to be somewhat inflated currently and feel pressed to try to cash out, given their circumstances.
Now, whether that is a good idea or not I have no clue. I’m not an expert.
Was this what Wizards was talking about when they said they had big plans for D&D’s 50th anniversary?
I was smiling as I read the first half. I should have known better…
Why not just sell to paizo
I don’t think paizo can afford the IP
This, Paizo is a low cashflow company with a solid product and stable business. However, they don’t have the balance sheet to make an offer or the historical performance for a lender to float them for a purchase of something this big. A best-case would be a larger organization buying the IP and then licensing Paizo to manage and develop it.
Bruh
Honestly, if they buy the IP and hand it over to Larian to make games, it’s a big win for everyone that wants DnD RPGs.
I really don’t like Tencent, but if they decide to hand it off all control over the IP to Larian while merely keeping royalties, I would be a lot more okay with the purchase happening.
Considering Larian’s faithful use of the IP and that they worked with Hasbro throughout the development of BG3, I trust them enough to not gut D&D and turn it into a hollow shell. That being said, it’s far more likely that Tencent would use the IP to create predatory mobile games to rake in money.
When did tencent gank the chrome logo?
Its the result of decades of Chinese R&D(Replicate and Duplicate)
Yeah no. This is a licensing deal that one person misunderstood and everyone else freaked out about.
Hasbro doesn’t sell IPs.
Have any sources?
There’s this one: https://www.wargamer.com/dnd/tencent-hasbro-rumor-denies
But also this very article. Once you get down toward the bottom where they actually reveal what the source said, it specifically says “the adaptation rights for electronic games such as DND.” But through either incompetence or a desire to overhype the story for more clicks, they buried that fact at the bottom of one of the last paragraphs of the story and didn’t look at the specifics of the proposed deal in question.
Wait… I thought Larian was private company. Why is this article saying that tencent owns shares of it? Or am I reading it wrong?
Private companies can still have stock. It’s restricted to only be sold to qualified investors. Which is anyone that can show 200k in a bank account. It’s a way to let rich people get in a profit before the rest, and to some degree prevent poor from being scammed too badly.
Such a restriction on qualified investors is not the norm in most countries.
