How the success of Baldur's Gate 3 and Monopoly Go are driving Hasbro's "all in" digital strategy
Earlier this year, the CEO of Hasbro said the firm was "going all in on digital play."
When we catch up Hasbro's senior vice president of digital licensing Eugene Evans, we asked him for a little more insight as to what this actually means and he told us that, while it inevitably brings video games to mind, the 101-year-old toy company is also looking at new ways to explore the relationship between its physical and digital products.
"None of us can escape digital in our daily lives, right?" he tells GamesIndustry.biz. "Digital is an expression of almost everything we do. We're all carrying a supercomputer in our pocket these days that can do just about anything. It can connect us with people. So how do we embrace the idea of what is at our roots? We're a very old company that has constantly reinvented itself, tried to stay fresh and relevant, and we're going through that now with our increasing focus on digital.
"It doesn't take away from what we do on the physical side of stuff. For example, Dungeons and Dragons is still ultimately about that expression of a group of friends sitting around the table, having a good time, trying to solve problems and tell stories together. But if we can augment that with tools and systems digitally, whether it's on their laptop, phone, iPad or TV, then hopefully it only embellishes the experience."
Hasbro is still riding high on the success of two major video game hits from 2023: the acclaimed Larian-developed RPG Baldur's Gate 3 and Scopely's mobile smash Monopoly Go. At first glance, these appear to be polar opposites with few similarities that would help inform Hasbro's digital strategy going forward, but Evans says this is not the case.
"They actually have a lot in common," he says. "Both were in development for six years or so. Both took huge teams, who managed to make it through COVID and succeed in finding their own market. And both are built by craftspeople, people who really understand their particular domain and figured out what
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