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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jer" data-source="post: 2578158" data-attributes="member: 19857">This thread made me laugh so much - you guys are great!  Now I have to add my own 2 cents...Do you mean the "reversion of rights" for Ravenloft and Gamma World from Arthaus to Wizards, or is there some other re-acquisition that I haven't heard about?  The rights reversion seemed to be less Hasbro/Wizards grabbing the rights back from Arthaus and more Arthaus deciding that the settings weren't making them enough money.  Is there more to the story than this, and if so where?To me, it looks like Infogrames thinks it can make more money over a longer period of time with the D&D brand than it can with the Monopoly or Risk brands.  And since Atari/Infogrames is about to release a new Massively-Multiplayer Online RPG fairly soon, I'd imagine they're making sure that they have the terms of their D&D license firmed up before the rollout of the MMORPG (for their own shareholder's benefit, if nothing else).And why all formats instead of the clearly delineated ones for the other games?  Dunno, but I'd speculate that Atari/Infogrames thinks they can do more with D&D than they can with Scrabble.  It may also be that Hasbro is going to re-open their internal development for video games and wants to bring their board/card games in-house because those will be easy for their in-house developers to roll out.But, there's a HUGE licensing issue right there - the online license is locked up for a decade.  The online rights have got to be a bigger draw for a buyer than the "Ravenloft" license is, so if you wanted to clean up licensing issues THAT would be the one to clean up.  I'd be more concerned if they had yanked the electronic rights away from Atari (especially with the MMORPG rollout coming up), but extending it?  That looks like a company with faith in its brand.And, as someone else mentioned earlier, Hasbro doesn't generally get rid of IP.  If they were in financial difficulties, I could see it, but this is a company that doesn't generally create new stuff - they just wait for the nostalgia cycle to swing around again and re-release the same stuff again.Now, after that's all out of the way, the one doomsday scenario that I COULD see happening goes something like this:D&D pen-and-paper RPG (for whatever reason) becomes totally unprofitable for Hasbro.  The D&D trademark still has value (for CRPGs, MMORPGs, board games, whatever), but the RPG itself becomes unprofitable.  Hasbro decides to drop the RPG market altogether but KEEP the brand instead of selling it off.  They agree to license the brand out for RPGs, but the price is too high for any RPG company to come up with the money for it and the game "dies" until the nostalgia cycle swings around again and Hasbro can re-release it.I don't think its likely that this would happen - but hey I think its as likely as anything else I've heard <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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