Dungeons & Dragons Publisher Denies Selling Game To Chinese Firm: Here’s What To Know [was: Hasbro Seeks to Sell IP “DND” and Has Had Preliminary Contact with Tencent]
Dungeons & Dragons Publisher Denies Selling Game To Chinese Firm: Here’s What To Know [was: Hasbro Seeks to Sell IP “DND” and Has Had Preliminary Contact with Tencent]
American toy company Hasbro is seeking to sell its well-known IP
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I just wish that Larian Studios would buy it. They could save their licensing fees for BG3 and could keep DnD community driven. Would also make it much easier for them to introduce new game mechanics into future games and pull those changes back into DnD.
Edit: I just read that tencent owns 30% shares of Larian which is kind of a bummer. Still would be much better with Larian directly, because tencent doesnt have a majority say then.
Larian isn't especially big though, even with the success of BG3, a purchase like this is likely would be well outside what they could hope to afford.
They have over 450 employees and operate in six different countries. I don't know what DnD would be worth but it's not like Larian is small.
Logically I think it makes more sense for Larian to want to buy the video game rights specifically as anything beyond that would be outside their scope.
Imagine how much staff works for Hasbro or Tencent, because that's the league we are playing in here - after a quick Google, Hasbro has 6480, Tencent has 108,436. Larian is a dust mite to Tencent and DND has been around for half a century, had a film based on it recently, just had a game of the year based on it and a two decade old dnd IP. DND made $100-150 million in 2022.
Those would be mad expensive too - think about all the awesome D&D video games that have ever been made. Yes they’ve been less so in the last decade, but any company would know the power of the name and want the game rights as well as the printed media and other rights. It’s a whole deal. Larian could almost never hope to have the kind of money that would convince Hasbro to sell the game rights separately, much as we’d basically all prefer that.
D&d price roughly 2 billion. Ten cent has 100 times that.0 larion has only millions to spend
If this site can be trusted, BG3 has about 90 Million users in total. With the game not being on sale for less than 53€ if we use that price as our baseline and remove the 30% that steam takes, they would be around 3.3 Billion euro in revenue. With 450 employees, investors like tencent and previous games financing a large chunk of early development, and a marketing budget of a few million euros, I assume that after taxes they still have at least 1 billion in money leftover, probably more.
Granted, thats not quite the 2 billion that you mentioned D&D is worth, but putting Larian into the “millions” category is underselling them quite a bit and if tencent as their biggest investor backs the idea and pumps money into it, I wouldn’t be suprised if they could come up with the money somehow. Wouldnt be the first time that a company takes on a lot of debt to aquire a valuable asset for them to pay off through the estimated revenue in the upcoming years. The possible ROI for Larian would be way larger than for many other companies just based on the current success of BG3.
Impossible Film also took over the Polaroid IPO in a similiar way. And Porsche nearly took over VW even though they were a way smaller player before VW aquired them.
I just learned about that as well. I hope Larian dilutes or buys back Tencent's shares.
Why would they do that, though? They're a private company. They didn't have to let Tencent buy in in the first place, which means it was purposeful.
And the reason companies give Tencent a cut of themselves is to have better access to the Chinese market. You need a Chinese publisher or partner to operate there, and Tencent offers that to software companies in exchange for letting them buy in. They always buy minority stakes, and they don't take over editorial control of anything.
They're actually a good business partner for anyone wanting to have their games distributed in China.
They're just also a really aggressive F2P developer.
Tell them! Tell them naow!