Despite rumors of a sale to Baldur’s Gate 3 studio shareholders, the D&D developer says it is “not looking to sell.”
A Chinese financial news site called Pandaily said that Hasbro, the company that owns D&D, was looking to sell the rights to the tabletop game because it had lost money for a year. As per the report, Hasbro talked to Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian about possible purchases, but the studio didn’t have the money to make such a big purchase, so it sent Hasbro to Tencent.
The Chinese company Tencent is a huge publisher that owns parts of many studios around the world. Riot Games, the studio that makes League of Legends, is owned by the company 100%. The company also owns 30% of Larian, but doesn’t have direct control over the studio or its work on the Baldur’s Gate series or its original Divinity franchise.
“We regularly talk to Tencent and enjoy multiple partnerships with them across a number of our IPs,” D&D developer Wizards of the Coast said in a statement to Dicebreaker. To be clear, we are not looking to sell our D&D IP. We don’t make it a habit to comment on rumors on the internet.
There is always a chance that Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast don’t have the same business goals, but the developer’s statement makes that pretty clear. There’s also a strange reason to go after Larian for D&D as a brand: the studio has a lot of tabletop experience, but it’s only worked directly with the D&D brand once, and there’s no guarantee that it will return to The Forgotten Realms soon. As much as we all want Baldur’s Gate 3 DLC, Larian and Baldur’s Gate 3 director Swen Vincke has made it clear that he’s still thinking about his next project.
Our list of the best board games probably won’t change if D&D gets new corporate overloads or not.
