Dungeons & Dragons is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year in style. The IP is healthier than ever, and Wizards of the Coast has just released the new 2024 Player's Guide and Dungeon Master's Guide, while the Monster Manual is slated to be available on February 18, 2025. But the company is betting big on videogames, too, following the big success of Larian's Baldur's Gate 3, which earned the D&D IP owner over $90 million in its first six months.
Speaking to Bloomberg, Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks confirmed that there's another videogame in development in addition to the ones we already knew of. Let's recap: the co-op game announced by Starbreeze in December 2023 for a 2026 release; this one will be set in Waterdeep, one of the biggest cities of Faerûn. Then there is the D&D Virtual Reality game announced this January by Resolution Games, and the regular Dungeons and Dragons Unreal Engine 5 game in development at Invoke (formerly Tuque, the studio that made Dark Alliance). This latter Dungeons & Dragons videogame might feature some sort of PvP mode, as gleaned from a job advertisement.
It's not even all about D&D, anyway, as Hasbro has also invested in Archetype Entertainment's sci-fi RPG Exodus, featuring Matthew McConaughey as one of the main characters and developed by former BioWare designers and writers. Moreover, they've got a G.I. Joe Snake Eyes game in development at Atomic Arcade and a horror game in the making at Skeleton Key. The article also said there's a new Magic title in testing with the Commander format; this would be separate from Magic: The Gathering Arena. All in all, the company is investing over a billion dollars at a rate of $100 to $150 million a year to release one or two games per year starting in 2026.
On the flip side, Hasbro is paring back its investments in film adaptations. Following the slightly underwhelming box-office performance of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves and Transformers One, it won't co-finance any new movies or TV series. On the subject, Cocks said:
We want to reach fans where they want to play, and increasingly that is through digital expressions of their favorite brands.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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