Hasbro Seeks to Sell IP “DND” and Has Had Preliminary Contact with Tencent
Hasbro Seeks to Sell IP “DND” and Has Had Preliminary Contact with Tencent
American toy company Hasbro is seeking to sell its well-known IP
Rumours, speculation and hearsay? "Interesting" at least.
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Hasbro has no clue what to do with the game since their games-as-service, closed ecosystem plan went kaput after they backed down on the OGL revision (which would have been necessary to shut out other VTTs and ensure player & DM subscriptions). I think the recent lay offs of senior people in the D&D related teams suggests this as well. This article doesn't seem well sourced at all, but a shake-up would be very interesting at this point.
Side-stepping some of the speculation and impact on the traditional market/fanbase, I am curious about the interest in D&D in China, as a Tencent acquisition would presumably make it much easier to market the game there. From the searching I've done, there doesn't seem to be a ton of interest in D&D, and there's no official translation into Mandarin. The movie didn't do great at the Chinese box office, although Baldur's Gate 3 did fine? Obviously, if Tencent does put together a subsidiary to design a version for the Chinese market, I'm not sure if they'd want to start by translating/adapting existing books or using the ruleset to design a bespoke version (either with a fantasy setting or based on relevant Chinese IP.)
I was in China for two years and not once ever found anything related to actual role playing games ever. Anywhere. And I really looked. There is a market there, waiting to be created, and I'm not surprised one bit that Tencent would be interested in that. But as other people have mentioned, monetizing that stuff is gonna be a challenge. I sure am looking forward to it, though. Especially once I get good enough at Chinese. I dream of the day I have a level strong enough to help translating games there...
You didn't look hard enough. It's ALL OVER TAOBAO.
Perhaps you didn't look in the right places?
Here's a search for "DND". (I ran the search through Google Translate for you.)
Here's a search for "克苏鲁" (Cthulhu). (Again with the Google Translate.)
Here's a search for "TRPG". (Google Translate again!)
So if you really looked, you might have tried instead really looking where people actually go to buy these things. Different country, different customs, different ways of doing things.
edited to fix up images that my screen capture tool screwed up
Haha, I may have exaggerated a bit for effect ;) I was on Taobao and found myself some reliable suppliers of dice and minis, which made sense since China produces everything for the rest of the world. I found some board games imports. There were a good few card games, too. But i dont recall finding any RPG boss in Chinese. This is very cool! I ended up finding gaming partners through the grapevine, but even they had difficulty finding suppliers and confirmed my suspicion that the hobby is still tiny. Nobody has any idea when I asked about rpg, boardgames, etc. Apart from a few card games board games. I found one gaming shop in the whole of Wuhan and it turns out it was a mini shop (again, no surprise when the manufacturing is all made in China). Anyway, it was 8 years ago, so it's no surprise things have changed. They do tend to do so very quickly, over there. Seeing translated versions is super encouraging! Thanks for taking the time, though.
Ah, yes, 8 years ago things would have been harder. (And I know the shop you mean in Wuhan for that time frame, I think. Mostly Warhammer 40K and a smattering of imported card and board games?)
Call of Cthulhu is the giant here, though D&D/Pathfinder is a pretty close second. Fate, of all things, is a decently close third as well, and going up. (There's Chinese-native Fate modules and campaign/setting packs popping up all over the place now, along with some native CofC stuff. Native D&D stuff is rarer.) Make no mistake it's still a fringe hobby with loads of room for growth, but it is no longer unheard of. Most people now have at least heard of it, even if they don't know exactly what it is.
Dude if you actually know a gaming shop in Wuhan, I'm interested! I'm going for a few weeks in April and it would be just fantastic to go to a real gaming shop :) The one I found was mostly military modeling, with a mezzanine where people were, I guess, painting (I didn't dare go up, my level of Chinese was abysmal at the time). And yeah, I noticed Cthulhu in your screenshots. I'm not totally surprised to see it, though. It's been I the top 3 in France for the last thirty years. Fate is definitely a surprise, though! I guess it all depends on who the "evangelists" are. I'm so getting a copy in Chinese when I get there, hahaha!
Fate was crowd-funded for translation on Modian. They wanted 50,000 RMB for the main rule book's translation. They got so much money (215,930.76 RMB) that they wound up translating everything Evil Hat had published for Fate up to that point.
Since then Fate has been a juggernaut here.
edited to add
If you run that page through Google Translate and scroll to the bottom, you can see an explanation for why D&D isn't as much a juggernaut as it is in North America. I'll quote the relevant bit:
Every time [our American friend Scott] came to JOYPIE, he would bring us a game as a gift and actively encourage us to participate in the DND games hosted by him. I tried to participate out of curiosity and for the purpose of practicing English speaking. In order to facilitate learning and operation, I decided to choose a big "double player" [probably dual-class? — ed.] - Priest profession, and selected dwarves based on racial characteristics. However, after several group experiences, I decided to give up. The reason was not the communication problem in English, but that I felt that our minds were not in the same picture at all.。
Scott and I had a candid exchange about this embarrassing experience. We both believed that it was because the fantasy background of DND was too strong. For people like me who have little in-depth understanding of the background of Western fantasy worlds, there is no way. You can do role-playing with just your imagination. From a cultural perspective, it is the cultural differences between East and West.
One of the things that always seems to come as a surprise to people trying to sell into other cultures is that, well, they're other cultures. What might be thought of as "common tropes" in North American and European cultures may just be bewildering nonsense to others. (Like as he goes on to talk about after that snippet above, dragons here are WILDLY different than dragons in the west.) D&D is steeped heavily in western mythology and is going to feel too alien. A generic game like Fate will do better until homegrown games start popping up.
(He also takes a bit of a snipe against how D&D players tend to play the game like it's a wargame, but I'm not certain I agree with him there; I mean yes the tendency is there, but ... his rant looked a bit like BadWrongFun™ which I'm opposed to as a concept.)
You've no idea how exciting it is to read all this! This is the kind of convo I was desperately trying to find, to no avail, while there. I'm gonna have to parse through that page and see if I can find a few keywords to hook on for future reference. At least I know what I'm gonna look for when I get there in April, haha! Thank you so much for taking the time to show all this! :)