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.
“Habro can’t possibly do anything more stupid with DnD than they’ve already tried” Hasbro:
They will manage to ruin D&D by hook or by crook.
The profit motive rots everything it touches
Good god, no.
On the one hand, yes. On the other it can’t be much worse than Hasbro.
I get it. But I’ve seen how Tencent does things. And I don’t like what I see. It’s not about what’s worse, it’s about going to a company that will do right by the IP. Hasbro sucks, I agree, but moving the IP to another company that sucks is not what I’d like to see for D&D.
It’s hard to not sound snarky here, but you could play another system that’s not seen as a commodity to be passed around Corps for profit.
I switched a couple years back, and honestly couldn’t see going back even before their licensing drama. As a GM, their books are so hard to make work, and expensive for what you get. D&D became too much of a product, and the game has suffered. 3rd party stuff has always had better value and usability compared to WotC books (few exceptions), and other systems give much better support for GM’s to actually run the game.
The coolest shit you do in D&D is the stuff you’re group comes up with at the table, and you get that with any system. Tencent also can’t buy that, so there’s nothing stopping you just playing 5th Edition, and not 6th (or One, whatever Marketing ends up calling it).
Of course! I have numerous various systems at my disposal: Savage Worlds, Fate, Fudge, Mork Borg, etc.
But that doesn’t mean I can’t have a soft spot for D&D. I played it back in the early 90s when it was still AD&D 2nd edition. I remember having a love/hate relationship with THAC0. So I’d like to see D&D get owned by a company that understands what they have is something to be nurtured, not exploited. So if Hasbro sells it, my hope is it will go to a company that will do that. I’m sure I’ll be disappointed, but I’m still going to leave room for that hope.
Tencent is worse than Hasbro
Tencent owns Larian
Tencent only owns a minority share in Larian. (Some resources say it’s around 30%; this is the source used in Wikipedia’s article.)
The most important of these is undoubtedly the studio founder Swen Vincke, who still heads Larian to this day - but not only as managing director, Swen also makes creative decisions. Because Swen also owns the majority of the studio - the Chinese publisher Tencent holds only a minority of the shares - Larian is immune to the waves on the stock exchange, to which CD Projekt, for example, is exposed. (Translated from German to English using Vivaldi.)
So same situation as Epic
Perhaps. Tencent’s chief strategy seems to be to own 30% of every tech company on Earth, so honestly I wasn’t too surprised in this case. ;D
Don’t even end a convo with “it could get worse” because IT WILL ALWAYS GET WORSE
They’ve been talking to Tencent, I’m gonna stick with “no.”
Tencent already has Larian and they did a great job with BG3 so what’s your issue?
As long as they don’t try to turn it into a microtransaction hell like only being able to play the classes you bought in their store, it’s going to be no different except Tencent has a ton of money for funding.
Tencent only has a 30% share in Larian. Not that they can’t influence them, but that isn’t a controlling share.
Two questions:
- Who does that money come from?
- Are they going to accept market cycles in the TTRPG industry, or are they going to panic after one or two bad quarters and demand awful things to boost the profit train?
Having lots of money isn’t the only consideration for how good they will be for D&D. There has to be love as well. WotC was arguably a decent home for it because the company had bonafide geek roots and was really rescuing D&D from bankruptcy. But then Hasbro bought them out and I think it has only been a matter of time since then.
It depends on who they hire to run it and how friendly they will be to the fractious industry.
At this rate, we might as well make our own DnD.
With three-dragon ante. And concubines!
-points at Pathfinder.
Just when I thought they couldn’t shit on DnD worse than they already have 😭😭😭
Curious on what Tencent’s attitude to the OGL would be. I imagine Larian Studios to be respectful, and it sounds like Larian is the Tencent subsidiary that would be taking over the TTRPG.
Also, “back in my day” it was D&D, not DND.
Is Larian owned by Tencent? I can’t find anything about it online except a 30% ownership, which wouldn’t mean it’s a subsidiary, right?
Friendly reminder that you don’t need to buy WotC/Hasbro products to play 5e. The 5e publishing ecosystem is pretty strong and there are lots of options so that you don’t have to get rid of your old books. Level Up Advanced 5e has free PDFs online of their whole books, but the books are fantastic quality. Tales of the Valiant is coming soon, and there is a huge catalog of Kobold Press content before that. And then there are hundreds of smaller presses that also support the ruleset. I haven’t gotten any WotC products in years even before the OGL, mainly because quality seemed to be taking a turn, but there is still great content out there.
I’m reading between the lines here and I think it’s actually talking about adaptation rights, and not selling the entire IP? Otherwise this doesn’t really make any sense.
Man imagine if they somehow retroactively pull the OGL just to make Pathfinder pay up, and they just make a new system for Pathfinder.
They are already doing that. Patherfinder 2e itself is going through a ‘remaster’ under a completely new license, it has all the OGL remnants stripped out.
