Baldur’s Gate 3 has made bank for Hasbro, significantly contributing to a 40 percent increase in digital revenue for the company.
Baldur’s Gate 3 has made bank for Hasbro, significantly contributing to a 40 percent increase in digital revenue for the company.
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Of the “sent the literal Pinkertons after a streamer” fame.
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It is completely overblown, and most people seem to be picturing the people from Red Dead Redemption and not a dead brand name that a Swedish security company bought to do collections under. Yes if you have sensitive possessions of a company they will send someone to get it, not trust you to mail it back to them.
The context that this was to prevent an NDA and happened within a month of someone else breaching an NDA with a leak that had a handful of noisy people declaring D&D dead is also pretty important, but never mentioned. It would never have even been a story without that context.
I don’t know the story, but if it’s something that wasn’t supposed to be released, it’s pretty much definitely stolen property. You’re not entitled to keep stolen property because you think it’s cool, and sending PIs to recover stolen property instead of the police is the nice route.
Showing property that belongs to someone else online and can’t be acquired legitimately is absolutely grounds for an actual police search warrant.
It wasn’t stolen; it was sent to the streamer by mistake - they ordered something that had a very similar name and were sent the wrong item by the distributor. https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/26/wizards-of-the-coast-sends-pinkerton-agency-to-person-that-bought-unreleased-magic-cards-in-error/
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Yeah he complied his family was in a house surrounded by a group of men that could have had guns.
Knowingly being in possession of stolen property is a crime.
If there’s no legitimate source and a reasonable person would recognize that it’s stolen by default, you can definitely go to jail.
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It’s generally hard to prosecute because there are plausible other explanations for intent. You don’t have any way of knowing a generic laptop is stolen vs used.
Having a unique item from a company you make money covering, that wasn’t ever sold legitimately and you didn’t acquire from any legitimate source, is absolutely something that could get to trial at minimum, if the company is pushing the DA to do so. You’d end up having to have a lawyer convince a jury that “I didn’t know” is believable.
The fact that they chose to give the streamer a pass for cooperating doesn’t mean that they couldn’t have perfectly reasonably or successfully pursued charges. Choosing not to do so is more evidence of them choosing the nice way.
They said they were going to detain him and seize all of his cards, and make him prove he owns any of them.
That’s a huge disruption to his life and business.
It wouldn’t take a genius to be polite enough to be invited inside to talk about stuff, and slowly ramp up the severity enough to keep a guy listening and minimise confrontation.
These kinds of stories tend to be overblown.
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also see https://youtu.be/9xxK5yyecRo?si=reXzGyDY3YHkmkjl
They didn’t publish it, but they licensed the DnD brand to Larian
Wait, Hasbro owns DnD? It feels weird to me that a company can own DnD rights.
Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) was originally incorporated by Gary Gygax in 1973. It went bankrupt and got bought out by Wizards of the Coast (WotC) in 1997. That purchase gave us D&D 3.0 and the original OGL, which was intended to encourage third-party publications of a game set WotC wasn’t overly confident in. This, after a decade of aggressive litigation by TSR’s VP Lorraine Williams who’d engineered Gygax’s ouster from the firm.
Hasbro acquired WotC two years later, in 1999, but was generally apathetic towards its administration outside of it being another revenue source. So WotC ran more-or-less independently until 2020 when the CEO noted on an earnings call that WotC was something like 40% of the company’s overall revenue. This triggered a sizable realignment of focus onto the various WotC brands (Magic: the Gathering and Pokemon card games being two other big players).
Now we’re seeing a much more traditional corporate refocusing on the WotC product line (movies and cross-promotions), a return to aggressive litigation against competitors, and a sharp increase in the price of WotC products to justify the increased expenses.
That is a great attitude towards everything DnD stands for, don’t lose it. Theres been a great deal of controversy this year, because the executives at wotc/hasbro believe that owning a popular brand like DnD means they’re entitled to shitloads of money, so they’re attempting to turn it into a cash cow, completely alienating the long standing community
Technically, Wizard of the Coast owns D&D, but they are a subsidiary of Hasbro (and have been since like ‘99).
Hasbro and WOTC are rotten to the core and, unfortunately, own D&D among other headline franchises you’d probably be familiar with.
Larian makes their own games and made BG3 after Hasbro was impressed with how well Divinity: Original Sin 2 turned out (which, imo has the best combat system of their games so far). That said, Larian really rounded out the dialog, conversations, and non-battle options in BG3. I hope they take that to their next title, preferably organically developed without Hasbro/WoTC.
I’m pretty sure hasbro/wotc had nothing to say in the development beyond ip related stuff. With dos1 larian moved away from editors to self-product all their games since.