Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/02/01/hasbro-in-talks-to-sell-dungeons-dragons.html
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That’s truly disappointing. Ideally it would be spun off into it’s own thing. I hate to think of it just as a corporate asset to be pillaged for IP. What if Disney bought it? A slew of movies/shows/cartoons/amusement park rides would be entertaining for a bit before the life was completely sucked from it.
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" In a bid to steady the ship, Hasbro laid off more than 1,900 employees, "
More like a bid to suck as much profit and stock price increase out of one of their tentpole properties at the expense of quality and longevity.
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How many executives did they lose?
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Not enough.
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Ever the answer, isn’t it?
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Sadly, that’s what it’s been treated as ever since the heiress to the Buck Rogers fortune took it over and ousted Gygax. She didn’t give a damn about the game itself (indeed, she was contemptuous of RPGers) and only saw the lore as another piece of intellectual property for her to squeeze dry.
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Well, if Larian gets some sort of creative control, I’m all for this deal. They’ve shown a true love of the game, and BG3 is astounding and wonderful and made me feel like I was 22 years old again (the year Pool of Radiance was released, the first DnD RPG game which felt like actually running a campaign but for a single player).
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I find it amusing that this is happening so soon after it was noted that this year is the 50th anniversary of D&D.
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They are apparently in talks with Tencent
Aw, geeze. Please don’t. Come on, man.
Surly there is a better company out there that would want to take the reigns.
No, they are in talks to license the video game rights to Tencent.
That’s it.
A poorly translated article led to all sorts of terrible conjecture.
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Well, that would be ok.
Wizards of the Coast are straight-up denying that they’re looking to sell. It seems incredibly unlikely, given how much money they make from it, even if they overspent and screwed up last year.
That might be the reality, but the claim doesn’t seem to be just a mistranslation - there’s vague talk of “sources” (who might be imaginary). The story - and I don’t know that it was based on anything at all - was that Larian were going to buy the D&D rights to avoid having to pay license fees, and brought in Tencent to front some of the money they needed.
I suspect it’s just made up, as it doesn’t make a lot of sense, given how huge D&D is relative to Larian and any future Baldur’s Gate plans (and how little of the D&D empire they’d actually be making use of)… it’s like someone getting tired of paying rent on their much-loved apartment and deciding to buy the whole block of apartment buildings, that they now had to manage.
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There have definitely been enough truly bad, awful garbage licensed D&D games on mobile platforms that any notion of ‘protecting’ D&D from corporate pillaging is a bit late.
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Update: Wizards denies rumours of IP sale
“to be clear: we are not looking to sell our D&D IP.”
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sign me up
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That makes me feel so old!
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NOPE. NOT TRUE. It’s a news hoax from a news aggregator in China. Here are the details.
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