Hasbro, the now longtime owner of Dungeons & Dragons maker Wizards of the Coast, is cooking up some big plans in the video game space, and the stunning success of Baldur's Gate 3 has proved to the company that the world wants more digital D&D adaptations.
"We're all super excited by the reaction to [Baldur's Gate]," Hasbro's head of game studios Dan Ayoub tells 12DOVE in an interview at the Game Developers Conference. "I think it proved for us that people really want great D&D games. We're certainly doing that."
D&D was once a mainstay of the video game world, spawning countless digital RPGs and a fair few more action-oriented spin-offs. Outside of ongoing games like Neverwinter, those releases had very much dried up in the years leading up to the launch of Baldur's Gate 3, even as D&D itself was enjoying a major resurgence. 2021's Dark Alliance revival was a notable exception, but it fizzled out after a mediocre launch and bad reviews.
Ayoub believes the success of Baldur's Gate 3 shows three things. First, that "a high quality D&D game, there's going to be an audience for that." Second, that a successful video game can bring more players into the tabletop world. Finally, there's "the importance of taking time to get it right. That's a game that Larian was very diligent, very adamant about. We're going to have a long dev cycle and take the time we need to get it right." Now that Hasbro is building its own internal game development studios, Ayoub says "we're taking a similar approach with the internal titles," adding that "we've got to make sure the ones coming in now from our AAA studios hit home in a big way."
For now, Ayoub says "our Montreal studio is working on a really, really cool D&D game. We're going to be able to start talking more about that hopefully soon." That's on top of the GI Joe Snake Eyes game in the works at Atomic Arcade from the former leadership on the Batman: Arkham games, and the new sci-fi IP Exodus in development at Archetype Entertainment with a host of devs from the original Mass Effect games.
"We've been very diligent and I would say purposeful in building out the studios that are really being created, tailor-made to build a specific type of game," Ayoub says.
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