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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?
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.
Edit to point out, “Oh good, the vote bots have arrived on lemmy”. Wonderful, this will be great for the community 👍
Whoever set that up, it’s pointless on lemmy because votes are pointless and you’re pathetic
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.
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.
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.
Off the top of my head look at Funcom and the issues Conan Exiles has with server lag, they started suffering “launch fever” aka making new products instead of stabilizing existing ones.
It’s just my opinion on the enshittification bit but here goes: Funcom Riot Turtle Rock (blatant on this one) Epic (battle passes and loot boxes, since 2012 they have massively pivoted) Frontier Developments (2017 investment, and ARX ran amuck since then while massively enshittifying) Paradox
Tbf, it only seems like they enshittify because my exposure is to these games and I draw a direct correlation, when I parse through the list I see Remedy and Dont Nod in there, and those two are still cranking out quality against all odds. I don’t get the vibe of “hands off” though, based on the pattern my guess is they have to fight for it. Dunno.
If Tencent buys it but let’s Larian (read Swen) manage its trajectory, it might be a good move.
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.
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.
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.
I thought Embracer Group was fine. I was almost a fan of their hands off investments in game studios.
Then they had a major deal go through that cost them a lot and they have been gutting or closing a lot of great studios they invested in ever since. Anything that isn’t currently making or isn’t guaranteed to make them money hand over fist in the near future, regardless of past performance, is at risk.
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
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.
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.
It’s a site based out of Beijing, written in English, reporting on a story published on another Chinese site, that was written in Chinese. It’s completely believable that they wouldn’t know this. There is no & in Chinese, they just write their word for “and”, and not thinking to leave the middle N uncapitalized is hardly an odd mistake.
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
Or maybe everyone on the internet who plays it crowd sources a bunch of money to buy it, then makes it open source or whatever, because a company owning copy rights to something like DnD is ridiculous.
They’re going to want hundreds of millions if not billions, I don’t think we can do that even if the celebrities that like it pitch in heavily lol
Each class would get its own codex and they would always be released staggered and late 😂
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.
Freeleague have money but I’d doubt they’d have D&D buying money. I think GW may be able to afford it but it would be an enormous cost for them.
I would say Paizo would be a good home for D&D. Pathfinder/D&D crossovers could be cool.
Hasbro would burn their HQ to the ground and piss on the ashes before they sold D&D to Paizo!
Nah, it’s all about the money. Nobody is there that cares.
Was this what Wizards was talking about when they said they had big plans for D&D’s 50th anniversary?
Just wait til MtGs 35th when they claim every aftermarket card banned and you can only play with the cards you buy direct from their on site printer
MTG, now with non-transferable NFTs!
So, regular microtransactions?
It is online. It’s worse bc it’s all just a closed eco system.
Per game
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.
deleted by creator
BG3 had skeletons in it though.
BG3 isn’t made in China. Larian Studios is a Belgian developer and publisher.
Yes, but if you want to sell your game in China you need to follow those rules. At least that’s how it was 15 years ago. Things could’ve changed.
You can’t even show skulls in Chinese media
Is that some sort of weird superstition thing, or are they just scared of spooky skeletons?
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.
Removed by mod
They didn’t steal shit. Parker Brothers bought the rights. Hasbro bought Parker Brothers in 1991.
Removed by mod
Didn’t parker brothers make monopoly?
Removed by mod
Fucking Tencent?
RIP D&D.
Prepare for D&D Beyond with class and gear lootboxes
You don’t have to buy anything to play DnD.
I’ve seen a real box set only once in my life.
So why really?
It’s not like Hasbro is much better.
looking at you, beyblades
To shreds you say…
Jesus Christ, why?
Hasbro is broke as fuck.
Hasbroke
Real broke or investor “broke”? That is, “it isn’t wildly surpassing the level of profits it makes every year”.
It says it right in the breakdown of the article, they’re hemorrhaging money.
Greed and people who don’t care about the property
Hasbro was founded in 1923 and has a history of over a hundred years.
Yep, that’s how years work.
2024-1923=101, that’s over a hundred
Who would have known. It doesn’t feel like it’s been 101 years since 1923.
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
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.
Although the movie was well received, It didn’t make a lot of money.
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.
Depends on whether your plan is to right the ship (sensible, boring, doesn’t interest investors) or to take that money and gamble it elsewhere in hope for big returns (chaotic, potentially disastrous, shareholders love it).
D&D isn’t even top 10 for Hasbro. It’s surging in popularity right now and could fetch a good price.
If yall thought WOTC and Hasbro was toxic for D&D, just wait until Tencent owns it outright!
But this smells more to me like stock market manipulation. BG3 is a beast, D&D has never had more players, Hasbro’s stock increased directly due to BG3 sales, they identify it as a high value IP, and yet they’re trying to sell?
I mean, clueless corporate executives that are failing upwards having no clue how to do actual business is not a new phenomenon.
Yeah there are plenty of stories of long term losses because people sprinted for the short term gains.
Sell at the top
If your focus is make billions or it’s worthless, then D&D seems like a perfect IP to move. It’s not been that amazing in recent history and suddenly exploded with a hit game. If you can get some suckere to pay 4-6 billion for it that’s a huge win in their book.
Wait… I thought Larian was private company. Why is this article saying that tencent owns shares of it? Or am I reading it wrong?
I don’t know about this case, but private companies also have shares and can sell them out/issue them to other parties just like public companies. It’s just that it doesn’t happen via a stock exchange and a lot of what they do doesn’t need to be publicly disclosed.
Minority share. Tencent does that a lot. Helps them get a foot in the door for later full acquisitions or potential deals such as the one here.
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.
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.
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.
