Hasbro-barians at the gates | This Week in Business

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This Week in Business is our weekly recap column, a collection of stats and quotes from recent stories presented with a dash of opinion (sometimes more than a dash) and intended to shed light on various trends. Check every Friday for a new entry.

This week we ran an interview with Wizards of the Coast's Dan Ayoub about parent company Hasbro's ambitions for internal game development.

STAT | $1 billion – The amount of money Hasbro has invested in building out its four internal studios, according to Ayoub.

STAT | Five years – Roughly how long it has been since Hasbro first started on this push, if we set the starting date as this 2019 interview we did about the hiring of former BioWare creative director James Ohlen.

STAT | 0 – The number of shipped projects from this internal development push to date. We've only actually seen one game, and it doesn't even have a release window yet.

That's a lot of time and money, with not much to show for it yet. Ohlen's studio Archetype showed off a sci-fi game called Exodus with a trailer announcement at The Game Awards last year. We also know the Atomic Arcade team has a Snake Eyes game in the works, but in keeping faithful to the source material, they've said nothing about it yet.

Beyond that, the company's Invoke Studios is working on a Dungeons & Dragons game, and Skeleton Key (headed by another BioWare veteran in Christian Dailey) is "doing something spooky."

So far, so good. But Hasbro is just the latest in a very long line of big-name companies from outside the games industry that have attempted to move in on this turf. And most of those attempts didn't go to plan, including a few from Hasbro itself.

While Hasbro's acquisitions of Milton Bradley and Coleco in the 1980s gave it access to gaming brands in Vectrex and Colecovision, respectively, they had fallen out of favor by the time the toy maker came into ownership of them. So its first big move into building out a video game business of its own was something new, but still tied to