Hasbro seems to be backing away from making their own games

Ever since the release of Baldur's Gate 3 a few years ago, Hasbro, the owner of Dungeons & Dragons, has smelled money in the water. Realizing that there was more money to be made in successful games, it created several studios and bankrolled its own triple-A projects to promote its gaming efforts, which is understandable given the IP it owns.

Hasbro appears to be scaling back its gaming ambitions

In Exodus June approaches some purple-looking magic.

Unfortunately, it's three years after Baldur's Gate 3, and it looks like things are going to plan. First reported by Kotaku earlier today, it appears that Hasbro included a $56 million loss in its second quarter earnings results, which is “related to the company's refocused digital game portfolio for 2028 and beyond.”

This essentially means that Hasbro overestimated how much value it had in its digital game push, and is now trying to right the ship by grossly underestimating the strategy. This is apparently due to the cancellation of several video games that were supposed to launch in 2028 or at some point after that.

Hasbro hasn't mentioned what these canceled projects are, but a statement to Kotaku revealed that the sci-fi RPG Exodus and the Dungeons & Dragons RPG called Warlock are both still scheduled to launch in 2027.

The announcement is not a big sign of Hasbro's larger gaming ambitions, and later in the earnings call, it was claimed that Hasbro would begin co-development and co-publishing with “low-cost partners”, and that its promises of a few big games every year would no longer be there, and “will be more service-oriented games, instead of smaller games”.

So, basically, Hasbro has underestimated how difficult it can be to actually develop games in-house (or doesn't know how to do it), and it will sometimes revert to the old method of making games while licensing its most popular IPs and properties, which turned out to be big hits like Baldur's Gate 3.

I think it was a fun experiment, albeit one that never got the time it needed and ultimately led to a lost job and a broken heart, all for the sake of chasing more money. Again, name me one big company that isn't doing that these days.