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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Abstruse" data-source="post: 9255401" data-attributes="member: 6669048">Hasbro tends to be an IP black hole. They very rarely let an IP go once they have hold of it. Even if it's an IP they don't care about and have zero plans to ever use again, they'll hold onto it and refuse to sell just to keep anyone else from having the rights.One example is the character Rom the Space Knight in Marvel Comics which started off as a licensed tie-in to a Hasbro toy line (technically it was Parker Bros but Hasbro bought Parker Bros). Hasbro owns the rights to the character, but Marvel had a habit up until the late 80s to integrate their licensed characters into their stories. So there's a lot of comics that have Rom in them including stuff like Guardians of the Galaxy, Secret Wars, a few issues of Uncanny X-Men, and other comics that Marvel would really really like to reprint. But couldn't because Hasbro held the rights and didn't want to sell them. It took until less than a year ago for Marvel to finally get a license out of Hasbro to reprint the comics again.But if you look through a lot of Hasbro's history, you'll see a ton of acquisitions where Hasbro buys up a company, strips out all the IP rights to games, toys, characters, etc., then either dissolves the company if there's nothing else of value (no need for Hasbro to keep Parker Bros active when Hasbro already makes toys and games) or sells whatever's left (like EntertainmentOne was stripped of a lot of assets and rights - particularly the children's show Peppa Pig - and was then broken into chunks and sold off because Hasbro didn't want the rap label Death Row Records). They will also just camp on stuff, like if you're a child of the 90s you'll remember the knock-off Transformers brand Go-Bots and likely haven't heard anything of them in decades...because Hasbro bought them and just sidelined them in favor of Transsformers (it's way more complicated than that but you get the idea).If I had to speculate what Hasbro would do if they felt the D&D IP wasn't worth investing in anymore, it would be they would license it out but keep ownership and let a third party company start making "official" D&D (the way they decided to license TTRPGs and board games to Renegade Games for big IPs like Power Rangers, GI Joe, Transformers, and My Little Pony despite doing TTRPGs and board games in-house). They may continue publishing in-house as well, sticking the brand into a sort of "maintenance mode" where new material is printed but on a very reduced schedule like 1-2 releases per year designed by third-party publishers. You know, kind of like what happened when Hasbro executives were disappointed with 4e's sales not meeting expectations and so cut way back on the release schedule for 5e, licensing out the first adventures to Green Ronin and Kobold Press, and only started ramping up after the current boom in D&D started.And even if they wanted to sell D&D, they sure wouldn't do it this year. Hasbro invested a lot of money into upcoming releases for 5ee in the 50th anniversary, the largest of which is probably the development of their new VTT. Hasbro's going to want to at the very least collect the profits off of all of those before they dump the IP. Which they wouldn't because see above.</blockquote>

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