Two years after boasting about how hard it was going on videogames, Hasbro has recorded a “$56 million non-cash impairment” in its second-quarter financial report, arising from the cancellation of several games in development that were expected to release “in 2028 and beyond.”
First things first: As PC Gamer’s Joshua Wolens explained when Sony took a staggering $766 million impairment against Bungie, that $56 million figure isn’t a direct loss. Rather, it’s an unexpected decrease in value of an asset compared to its book value, separate from standard depreciation.
Just a few years ago, inspired by the massive success of Baldur’s Gate 3, Hasbro was going hard on videogames. In 2022 it had a half-dozen game studios working on different projects in its stable; two years later Dan Ayoub, head of digital product development at Hasbro-owned Wizards of the Coast, put a number on that effort, saying “we’ve got over $1 billion in games right now being developed,” and adding that “videogames are an integral part of Hasbro’s strategy going into the next 100 years.”
But it hasn’t gone especially smoothly since then. A big-budget GI Joe game announced in 2021 is in trouble, and the deal for a new D&D game from Stig Asmussen’s Giant Skull studio was cancelled earlier this year. Hanging over all of it is the ghost of Baldur’s Gate 3: Three years after the game’s 1.0 release, with tens of thousands of people still playing, Hasbro has yet to announce any kind of follow-up—a whiff that PC Gamer’s Harvey Randall says is emblematic of deeper-seated problems at the company.