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D&D developer says it is "not looking to sell" amid reports of a planned sale to Baldur's Gate 3 studio shareholders.
Reports from Chinese financial news outlet Pandaily stated that current D&D owner Hasbro was looking to sell the rights to the tabletop game following a year of losses. The report claims that Hasbro approached Baldur's Gate 3 developer Larian to discuss a potential purchase, but that the studio, lacking the money to make such a substantial acquisition, referred Hasbro to Tencent.
Tencent is a Chinese mega-publisher that owns slices of multiple studios across the world. Most notable is its 100% ownership of League of Legends studio Riot Games, but it also has a 30% slice of Larian, albeit no direct control over the studio, or its work on either the Baldur's Gate series or its original Divinity franchise.
In a statement issued to Dicebreaker, however, D&D developer Wizards of the Coast said that "we regularly talk to Tencent and enjoy multiple partnerships with them across a number of our IPs. We don't make a habit of commenting on internet rumors, but to be clear: we are not looking to sell our D&D IP."
There's always a chance that the corporate aims of Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast don't entirely align, but the developer's statement is pretty definitive. Larian also seems like a peculiar target for the ownership of D&D as a brand - while there's obvious tabletop DNA running throughout the studio, it's only worked directly with the D&D brand once, and there's no guarantee that it will return to The Forgotten Realms in the short term - as much as we might all want Baldur's Gate 3 DLC, Larian and Baldur's Gate 3 director Swen Vincke has made it clear that he's still in the pretty early stages of planning out his next project.
Whether or not D&D ends up with new corporate overloads probably won't affect our list of the best board games.
