Over the last several years, Hasbro has been talking a big game around video games.<\/p>\n
In 2022, the company touted the creation of six brand new, internal game studios<\/a>. Atomic Arcade was working on a GI Joe game. Skeleton Key, which we later learned was working on \u201csomething spooky,\u201d still hasn\u2019t announced its project. There was an unnamed studio in Washington state, Archtype Entertainment with a new sci-fi RPG franchise called Exodus, and Tuque Games in Montreal (renamed to Invoke Studios) working on a Dungeons & Dragons project we now know as Warlock. And of course, the MTG Arena team.<\/p>\n It didn\u2019t start off great. In 2023, despite the explosive success of its licensed Baldur\u2019s Gate 3 and Monopoly Go! releases, Hasbro nonetheless canceled five internal video game projects and laid off, at first, just a handful of people<\/a>, and then, many, many more<\/a> at the end of the year. Senior vice president of digital strategy and licensing Eugene Evans told Game File this wasn\u2019t unusual. \u201cIt became a narrative of, like, \u2018Oh, they canceled a bunch of projects,’\u201d he said. \u201cAnd it\u2019s like, \u2018Yeah, we do that all the time, like everybody else.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n But in 2024, head of digital product development Dan Ayoub once again talked about the company\u2019s strategy<\/a> for building up internal development studios. He said that so far, Hasbro had invested over $1 billion in game development across just four studios: Invoke, Archtype, Skeleton Key, and Atomic Arcade.<\/p>\n \u201cVideo games is an integral part of Hasbro\u2019s strategy going into the next 100 years,\u201d Ayoub said in the 2024 interview, \u201cand we have to make sure that everything that comes out is top quality, is authentic, and is something we can build upon, because we\u2019re talking about a couple studios and a couple games right now, but we have much larger ambitions for that.\u201d<\/p>\n In the following months and years, Hasbro reiterated this strategy in interview after interview. In 2025, at a panel at something called Brandweek<\/a>, it loudly pronounced that it would be developing its own video games in 2026, a thing we already knew was happening from all of the past interviews. Just this past May, Ayoub reappeared in an interview with The Game Business<\/a> with a really nice-sounding pitch: not a single one of those six internal studios was making a game-as-a-service. They were focused, he said, on more traditional PC and console games, even as the broader company would continue working with external partners for casual, mobile, and (inexplicably) VR games.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ll be building games mostly around D&D, Magic, Transformers, maybe some of our other properties, maybe selectively some new stuff,\u201d Ayoub said. \u201cIt\u2019ll be very focused on action-adventure and role-playing games for PC and console. And then, we\u2019ll partner with the best in the business on more casual games, mobile games, new and emerging platforms like VR, et cetera. I think we\u2019re the number one digital games licenser in the world by a fairly large margin. That\u2019s pretty lucrative business. It also really helps us reach a lot of different gamers, and helps to fund those efforts in building out our first-party capabilities.\u201d<\/p>\n Exodus <\/p>\n Today, however, the strategy seems to have hit another snag. Hasbro just shared its second quarter earnings results, which included a $56 million impairment charge \u201crelated to the Company\u2019s refocused Digital Games portfolio for 2028 and beyond.\u201d<\/p>\n Impairment charges are effectively a company writing off an asset it possesses when it\u2019s found it to be worth significantly less than what the company previously valued it at. In this case, the impairment charge was taken because Hasbro \u201ccancel[ed] several games scheduled for release in 2028 and beyond,\u201d indicating that Hasbro\u2019s investment in those games (and studios) is no longer worth what it thought it was originally.<\/p>\n What games did Hasbro cancel? It\u2019s not specifying. We can make some educated guesses. Both Exodus and Hasbro\u2019s upcoming DnD universe game Warlock were confirmed later on the call to still be in development and planned for 2027. I checked in on Skeleton Key this morning, and it appears to be actively recruiting for an environment artist for its Montreal studio. It was also discussed on the Hasbro call that the company wants to focus development on \u201clower cost regions\u201d with Montreal specifically called out, so it seems like Skeleton Key\u2019s project is probably fine.<\/p>\n However, GI Joe game studio Atomic Arcade underwent layoffs earlier this year. At the time, Hasbro shared a statement<\/a> saying that \u201cThe Snake Eyes game is not cancelled.\u201d It continued, \u201cThe team is currently taking time to evaluate the path forward for the game. While decisions haven\u2019t been finalized, we\u2019re committed to providing updates as soon as we\u2019re able.\u201d However, at least one employee posted on their social media that the studio was being shut down, and we haven\u2019t heard any updates since then.<\/p>\n There\u2019s also the publishing agreement with Giant Skull for a DnD action-adventure game, which Hasbro ended in May, less than a year after it was announced. This is almost certainly one of the canceled games Hasbro\u2019s referring to.<\/p>\n