By Marie Dealessandri

It's been over a year since Hasbro unveiled its 'Playing to Win' strategy, doubling down on core brands, videogames and licensing.

And CEO Chris Cocks tells Knowledge the strategy has been paying off so far: "We reach about 1.1 billion people a year across markets, and that's been growing pretty significantly."

"When you think about [our] assets, we have these player communities established through offline games, Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons, or our board games, Monopoly and Clue. That builds a large fanbase that you can then marshal in a variety of different capacities. Digital gives people another outlet to play a game that they love. And for people who don't necessarily play those games, it's a lower-friction entry point."

He gives the example of Magic: The Gathering and how free-to-play title MTG Arena gives newcomers an opportunity to learn how to play.

"We're trying to replicate that across our portfolio," Cocks explains.

Scrappy innovator

Despite Hasbro's manpower and 160 years of expertise in analogue play, Cocks still describes the company as a "scrappy innovator" when it comes to videogames. "We've been building out our videogaming capacity since 2018," he says, "but we really haven't shipped many games yet. We've been in investment mode and starting new studios."

The company has big expectations for the games it has scheduled for 2027: Archetype Entertainment's Exodus – which Cocks says is going to scratch players' Mass Effect itch – and Invoke Studios' Warlock ("a nice follow-up for all the millions of people who played Baldur's Gate 3").

On the other side of the coin, however, Hasbro closed Atomic Arcade – which was developing a GI Joe game – earlier this year.

"Atomic had some great people," Cocks says. "We tried to retain several of them and move them into other projects. It started small [in 2021] and then ramped into pre-production. We thought [the game] looked really good, but based on the hiring ramp we [had] and the metrics we [looked] at, we realised, 'OK, I don't know that we can hit this game at the budget and schedule we need'. We made a tough call, but we made the right call."

Rather than cancelling the project, though, Hasbro moved production to another team. No announcement has been made yet, but Cocks says it'll be a partnership rather than in-house development this time.

"That team was really good at building out the idea and getting it to a proof of concept. Now we found a different set of people who have a little more experience to take that idea and move it into production."

Tough calls

Last year, we asked Wizards Of The Coast CEO John Hight whether it was more difficult to bet on new teams considering the industry context. He jokingly answered: "You should come back and ask me that question in a year." We ask Cocks for a follow-up and how that might have evolved over the past 12 months.

"It's always challenging," he says. "The cost of [making] games has gone up a lot since 2018. The market has grown, but it hasn't grown at the same pace as the cost of inflation for developing new games. That's the core challenge.

"I started at Wizards Of The Coast in 2016 – I bet it had sub-500 employees. Over the last decade, we've grown it to be north of 1,200 employees. In a time where the industry is having tough turns, we're doubling down and investing. That doesn't make us immune from having to make tough calls now and then. When we started our videogame journey, you had all these companies snapping up development studios, buying games and buying talent. We decided we weren't going to buy our way into the industry – we were going to build it up organically and start our own studios.

"When we seeded the initial teams, we were clear: 'Hey, we're going to invest in you, we're going to give you a long lead time.' But we made it clear that not all these games were going to work out. I'd say about a tenth of the games that we went into concept with made it into pre-production, and about half [of those] have made it into production. There's a little bit of churn associated with that, but that's inherent in any creative industry. We have been investing and, on the whole, we have been net hiring at a pretty significant rate."

The company is still aiming to release up to two videogames yearly for the next five to six years. And while it's not looking to open more in-house studios, Cocks says there is a focus in trying to globalise the developers it does have, and diversify where it's drawing talent from. It's particularly looking at Eastern Europe and Montreal, Canada.

"We probably have 150-ish people in Montreal today – I wouldn't be surprised if that grew to be 300-plus over the next couple years," he says. "Partnerships and joint ventures are pretty important for us as well. I could easily envision doing more games with people like Saber."

Ready or not, AI comes

With the industry still undergoing a painful transformation, we ask Cocks for his thoughts on the current state of videogames, how he envisions its future, and where AI fits in.

"In a creative industry, you're going to have these gear shifts. A couple years ago, everyone was talking about games as a service… I think: balance in all things. Have a portfolio approach, maintain some ability to test and learn, try new things across different areas, and you'll be better off. That's what I hope the industry will end up doing.

"We're taking the approach that good old-fashioned action-adventure games that have an amazing protagonist, a really cool story, give you 40–50 hours of content and a fair price, is a timeless bet. That doesn't mean I'm anti-Roblox or anti-UGC. Those are really cool, too. Games as a service obviously has huge upside; that's what Monopoly Go is. As a company, we'll try to pick a lane that we can become great in and deliver really good product in, and then we'll use partnerships to fill out the balance.

"In terms of things like AI, I'm pretty pro-AI. I use it all the time in my personal life. I use it mostly for D&D – it really helps me with writing and image creation for my campaigns. I see it being adopted across Hasbro for productivity, selectively with different teams for design and innovation. It's got to be used responsibly. As we start to productise it, we have to make sure that we're paying creators and giving creators credit for what we're doing."

Cocks says Hasbro has an "AI studio" working on a number of unannounced products. "As we roll [them] out, whether that's a toy or a game, we have to make sure it's for the right audience and expectations are set the right way," he concludes.

(After our interview, Hasbro clarified in a statement that, when it comes to AI, it has different approaches for different brands: "There are some brands that the audience, the creators, just don't want it, so we don't even have it in our pipelines for our videogames or for Magic: The Gathering, or D&D. As AI unlocks new possibilities for interactive storytelling and creativity, it remains a tool in service of those fans: powering human-centred experiences that protect, inspire, and empower.")