Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks is ready to get work and play. A Microsoft veteran who joined Hasbro in 2016 as president of its Wizards of the Coast division–which includes Magic: The Gathering and all things Dungeons and Dragons–and wants to double down on bringing those worlds to the hands of video game players with new Magic and D&D games in the works.
Cocks took the reins of the company in 2022 and saw an initial boom under his leadership during the pandemic, but as kids went back to school, sales slumped, and the company issued over 1,000 layoffs since. Hasbro had previously dedicated $1 billion to video game development. Speaking to Bloomberg about this focus, Cocks indicated that $100-$150 million a year would be spent on games like Exodus, which will be developed by Archetype.
“We want to reach fans where they want to play, and increasingly that is through digital expressions of their favorite brands,” Cocks explained. The CEO also confirmed that Hasbro was developing its own D&D video game as well as the Wizards branch working on a video game focused on the Commander format for Magic: The Gathering. That’s on top of a GI Joe action-adventure game that’s already in pre-production.