Hasbro has a wealth of IP at its disposal, and the company is planning on turning much of it into some smash-hit video games. It's spending $1 billion on making some hopefully great games, but none of those upcoming titles will be games-as-a-service.
Why, you ask? Well, let's not look a gift horse in the mouth here, but Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks did explain the decision in an interview with The Game Business. "You can invest $100 million to build a really great mobile game, or a really great games-as-a-service, like a shooter. And the upside is you make billions and billions. But how many people achieve that upside? It's very low single-digit percentages, if even that. The downside is you don't make anything back, and it's basically a wash," he explained.
Hasbro is therefore much more interested in what Cocks terms "traditional games." Action/adventure games, RPGs, and the like. "If you invest a fair amount of money and give a fair amount of time to a talented team to do a more traditional game, you probably won't make billions, but your chances of at least making your money back is much higher. And even if you fail, you're probably making 50, 60, 70 cents on the dollar back," he said.
"So, when we just looked at the risk-reward equation of that and we looked at the design sensibilities we have — frankly the kind of games we like to play, and I'm more of a traditional gamer — we felt that to be the safer route. I think there's always going to be demand for good games that deliver a nice 40 to 50-hours worth of content set at a fair price."
While we always see the odd GaaS pop up and take over the world, we're becoming much more aware of the amount of big-budget flops the genre sees these days. Concord, Highguard, ad arguably Marathon all fall into the umbrella, no matter how much the players they get may like the game. However, that doesn't mean Hasbro is guaranteed to make its billion back. It's going to have to deliver solid experiences first and foremost, drawing people's attention by the quality of its products.