Hasbro Opens New Wizards of the Coast Video Game Studio in Montreal to Support D&D Franchise

Hasbro has announced a new video game studio in Montreal, with a new focus on supporting D&D video games. The new studio, called Wizards of the Coast Studios Inc. will focus on developing new content for the Dungeons & Dragons franchise and expanding Hasbro's lineup of digital games. The studio is expected to support 200 jobs. Dan Ayoub, the head of the D&D franchise, will also run the new studio. Ayoub, you may recall, has a long pedigree in video game development.

The new studio will not replace Invoke Studios, Hasbro's other studio located in Montreal. The new office for Wizards of the Coast Studios Inc. will be located next to Invoke Studios.

Hasbro has big aspirations for expanding the D&D franchise via video games. Several D&D video games are in development at third party studios and now we're seeing an in-house expansion of the D&D digital portfolio. One obvious speculation is that the new studio will work on a Baldur's Gate 4, which Hasbro has promised will eventually be released following the mammoth success of Baldur's Gate 3.

 

[Myrdin Potter]

Because others who actually did say they live there have said they don’t experience that and it took a simple question to suss out that they do have some experience with this; something that given the strength of their opinion they hadn’t taken the time to set the context.

I have multiple posts in this thread, including my first one that said it is my home city.

The issue with Montreal is the need for workers to speak French. I speak French well (I used to be fluently bilingual to the point where I thought in French when I spoke it but not I am just bilingual). This requirement is not just that it is a French place, it is required by law including the requirement to send your kids to French schools and it is almost impossible to get healthcare delivered in any language than French. Taxes are also quite high.

It also is a fun city with a lot to do, lots of winter sports around. A pretty good video games talent pool that is even more available today because Ubisoft has been struggling, affordable housing compared to many U.S. markets, especially California (house mortgages interest is not tax deductible and the French requirement has get the immigration pressure in housing prices down compared to the rest of Canada).

WoTC traditionally has done poorly on in-house computer games, so I am not sure this is a wise investment. Yes, the latest Balder’s Gate made much more money than the license fees they received, but they also were not capable of delivering it and would not have earned anything if they had tried and failed themselves.

 

[Dire Bare]

No need to wonder. This is exactly the strategy they are pursuing and they have made no secret of that. Every release is an EVENT. None of this, "Oh, hey, we'll publish 100 books a year but only actually promote like six of them." thing anymore. Every single 5e release is a big deal. It's a hugely successful strategy and I'm frankly baffled why anyone thinks WotC would stray too far from that formula.

Hrm... We saturate the market with a bunch of self-competing products and the business goes bankrupt vs we release only a handful of products, all heavily marketed and even the least successful of them is still selling very well years after release.

It's not a terribly hard mystery to solve.

They've been pretty upfront about that too.

Although, they moved away from making each book an "event" after Rime of the Frost Maiden. It sounds like they plan to get back to that model with the decision to move D&D to a "franchise" model.

 

[Blue]

I don’t know about all the positions on the RPG side, but the ones they posted for recently were quite high salary.

For leadership positions like that? There were competitive for those types of positions in a large company like WotC, but not particularly high in general.

 

[Clint_L]

I'm just happy that, in the current climate, an American company is going ahead and opening a new branch in Canada. Remember when that used to be unexceptional? Like eight months ago? Anyway, this makes me look more positively on WotC.