Color me shocked that a large publicly-traded corporation ran a property that originated in a DIY, creative hobby into the ground.
I remember the days when RPGing (and wargaming) weren’t big business. It was a fun time.
Bethesda too on-the-nose? The Elder Scrolls series shares 95% of its DNA with Dungeons & Dragons already.
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I don’t think that D&D has been run into the ground. Hasbro is trying to do some shitty stuff with licensing and subscriptions to make MORE money, but it still seems like D&D is more popular than ever.
So does Larian’s Divinity series, though. And they’ve already shown they treat the D&D universe with a great deal of respect with BG3. I have more confidence in Larian turning out quality games than Bethesda.
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Is it metagaming to ask if they just had to roll for a bluff check?
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OVERHEARD
1d6
1 … The wizard Hasbro is seeking to sell a valuable and ancient artifact of which the true use and value is a mystery to the wizard.
2 … A mysterious figure was seen lurking around the wizard’s tower, is believed to be Tencent the Nimble
3 … The wizard has imprisoned the spirit Xagyag which some say is connected to the ancient artifact.
4 … The goblins have poisoned the brown ale.
5 … The town crier shouts gibberish that seem to bewitch the villagers into jumping to conclusions
6 … The wizard Hasbro plans to suck all magic out of the ancient artifact to enhance his stock portfolio and overwhelm the townsfolk in microtransactions.
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With the things that WotC has been denying lately, if this weren’t so silly, I’d almost take their denial as proof that they were.
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“We’re not selling the IP” is not quite the same thing as Hasbro saying “We’re not selling WotC”
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If it ends up in the hands of Larian Studios through whatever machinations happen behind the scenes, that might be the best thing to happen to the game in decades. They have already shown they understand the game, and Baldur’s Gate 3 has been a wildly successful adaptation of it. Hopefully whomever ends up owning it understands that the value of the IP is in the communities built around it, not in the trickle of cash to be squeezed out of it before it is an empty husk.
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Sure, Hasbro wouldn’t lie to their customers, right? And they would never shoot themselves in the foot with such an obviously bad business decision, would they?
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Oh, WotC’s denial isn’t worth much, but my immediate objection was that it just doesn’t make sense for Larian to be involved with this. The whole idea of “Larian buying D&D” is almost nonsense, and certainly the idea that they’d be interested in running this massive operation, 90+% of which they have absolutely no interest in either owning or operating, in order to avoid paying a licensing fee, makes no financial sense at all*. I’m pretty sure Larian don’t want to “own D&D” - they’d stop being a game developer and become a manager of intellectual property.
*Leaving aside that, given the relative sizes of the companies involved, WotC with billions of dollars in revenue (a good percentage of which is D&D) each year, and Larian having… hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue generally (not cash on hand), Larian wouldn’t be contributing much to a sale - Tencent would be the one doing the buying, on their own. And since Tencent only own 30% of Larian, they’d still be licensing D&D to the studio.
It would be spectacularly dumb, though. Hasbro cut a third of its workers - WotC, and more specifically D&D, is probably one of their more reliable revenue streams right now, and the success of BG3 is a big part of that. It’s a significant amount of money that WotC can get for just licensing out the IP; the amount of money they’d want, in order to give that up, would be significant.
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Well, now that it’s clear this was erroneous reporting anyway, I wasn’t suggesting that Larian might buy the IP. As the article above explains, Larian is partly owned by Tencent, a company an order of magnitude larger than Hasbro. If they were the ones to buy the IP, it would be reasonable for them to farm out the handling of it to a proven company already in their portfolio.
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Except that the idea of Larian taking control of D&D is the thing I was mainly objecting to, as it doesn’t make sense. Larian is not a company that a) has any experience doing anything of the sort, and b) it’s a much bigger undertaking than they could handle. It would mean, at the very least, that Larian, as a game studio, would simply stop existing, and the supposed reason for the fantasized buy-out was about the licensing fee for making their next D&D-based game. Since Tencent only own 30% of Larian, it doesn’t make sense for them to either be buying it for Larian, or giving them control over it from their perspective either.
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