Baldur’s Gate 3 has made bank for Hasbro, significantly contributing to a 40 percent increase in digital revenue for the company.
Baldur’s Gate 3 has made bank for Hasbro, significantly contributing to a 40 percent increase in digital revenue for the company.
I didn’t realise Hasbro were the publisher, now I feel a little dirty. Those bastards ruined Super Soaker.
Hasbro owns wizards of the coast, which is the owner of the D&D trademark.
Of the “sent the literal Pinkertons after a streamer” fame.
Tbf there’s a good chance that story was massively exaggerated and overblown. Like, supposedly they didn’t threaten him at all, and he willingly gave them the cards in exchange for something else. They were after whoever leaked the cards from their supply chain.
I don’t know the story, but if it’s something that wasn’t supposed to be released, it’s pretty much definitely stolen property. You’re not entitled to keep stolen property because you think it’s cool, and sending PIs to recover stolen property instead of the police is the nice route.
Showing property that belongs to someone else online and can’t be acquired legitimately is absolutely grounds for an actual police search warrant.
Exactly. However being in possession of stolen property is not itself a crime, you just don’t have any right to keep it. If you paid for it, then your claim is against whoever you paid.
They could have got the police to reclaim the stolen property, however perhaps that might not have been as effective for them in investigating the leak. In any case, the stories about the Pinkertons threatening him might not be true, and he’d have every right to refuse them entry or even to speak to them. The fact that he did suggests he willingly complied.
Knowingly being in possession of stolen property is a crime.
If there’s no legitimate source and a reasonable person would recognize that it’s stolen by default, you can definitely go to jail.
They didn’t publish it, but they licensed the DnD brand to Larian
Wait, Hasbro owns DnD? It feels weird to me that a company can own DnD rights.
Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) was originally incorporated by Gary Gygax in 1973. It went bankrupt and got bought out by Wizards of the Coast (WotC) in 1997. That purchase gave us D&D 3.0 and the original OGL, which was intended to encourage third-party publications of a game set WotC wasn’t overly confident in. This, after a decade of aggressive litigation by TSR’s VP Lorraine Williams who’d engineered Gygax’s ouster from the firm.
Hasbro acquired WotC two years later, in 1999, but was generally apathetic towards its administration outside of it being another revenue source. So WotC ran more-or-less independently until 2020 when the CEO noted on an earnings call that WotC was something like 40% of the company’s overall revenue. This triggered a sizable realignment of focus onto the various WotC brands (Magic: the Gathering and Pokemon card games being two other big players).
Now we’re seeing a much more traditional corporate refocusing on the WotC product line (movies and cross-promotions), a return to aggressive litigation against competitors, and a sharp increase in the price of WotC products to justify the increased expenses.