Odd Lots - How a Traditional Toymaker Is Going Big on Digital Games

Episode Date: August 9, 2024

Hasbro has been making toys for decades, including many classic favorites like G.I. Joe and My Little Pony. But in recent years, it's also been going big on digital games. An app version of the classic board game Monopoly — called Monopoly GO! — has become one of the top mobile games of all time and grossed billions in revenue since it launched last year. Hasbro also owns Wizards of the Coast, the publisher of Magic: The Gathering, Dungeons & Dragons, and the best-selling video game Baldur's Gate 3. So why is gaming such a big growth market for a traditional toymaker? Where is the market heading? And how does a big company judge the success of "freemium" apps like Monopoly GO!? On this episode, we speak to Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks about the business of gaming.Read More at Bloomberg.com: Hasbro Stock Rises on Digital Gaming StrengthHasbro Names Microsoft’s John Hight to Lead Wizards Gaming Division  Only Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at  bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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My daughter's really into monopoly. She's really getting into it. Do you play with her? I do. And she's really into it. And I think she's developing some good intuitions. About capitalism? Yeah. And I think she could be like a little bit conservative. Like sometimes I think she should buy and she wants to like hold on to her cash and so she like forgoes opportunities to get good properties. But I'm excited. She's taken to the game. That's actually impressive impulse control for a little kid. But I do think in Monopoly, the best strategy is just buy everything you land on pretty much.

That's basically, are we going to do an episode just on an optimal monopoly strategy? Because I could, I'd be done with that. We should actually. Okay. Let me rephrase this. What do you know about Monopoly's history? Well, what I've heard, and I don't know if this is true. because it seems like it could be an urban legend. I've heard that the game was like started by some socialist or something like that who wanted to, you know, create a game that would indict capitalism. Monopoly is not considered to be a positive aspect of the market system. We usually are against those.

And yet, I don't think many people take that lesson and it became massively popular. It's a massively successful business in its own right. This is actually, it's not an urban legend. It's true. So Monopoly, I was reading a book about this, and it's actually really fascinating. But Monopoly comes from the Landlords game, which was created in 1903 by a woman named Lizzie Maggie, or Maggi. I'm not sure. And she was actually a Quaker.

So sort of, you know, progressive ideals. And it had almost the opposite ethos to the monopoly we know today. And it was supposed to demonstrate that an economy that rewards individuals is better than one where monopoly. hold all the wealth. And there was also a version of taxation in the game that was kind of progressive. But then a company called Parker Brothers basically published a version of it in 1935 without the taxation aspect. And then Hasbro bought it in the 1990s. And then that's when we started getting the sort of modern version of monopoly that we all know today. And I have to say, I was also looking at all the various versions of monopoly that have been published.

over time. I'm pretty sure when I was a kid I had the Star Wars version, but if you look at an actual list of all the different monopolies that have come out over the years, it's amazing. So first of all, there's unlicensed versions like Alpacaopoly with alpacas. But there's also a Best Buy version, which was licensed. And it looks kind of amazing. I want to play it. It had little store departments instead of properties to buy. There's a David Bowie edition. I don't know if that interest you. So two things. One other thing I say about sometimes I've taken the kids to Atlantic City. So my kids know, like, they've seen, you know, they're like, oh, that's actually park place. That's actually boardwalks since I know all the properties are streets in Atlantic City. But also, they should have a version of Monopoly with a land value tax. And so you get penalized for failing to. Yeah. Get it back to its roots. Also, I think they should have a version where the more you build, the more rents go down. So it's in theory if there are more hotels. and houses everywhere that they should put in depressing anyway. Okay. All right. What I was building up to is that there is also a new version of Monopoly. It is an app, an app version of the game that you can play on your phone or wherever. And it has become so popular that it's grossed more than $3 billion in revenue since launching in April of last year.

That's according to Hasbro's latest earnings. And beyond that, it is so popular that Joe. can you guess what comes next? No. It's so popular that Hasbro is launching a board game version of Monopoly Go. So a board game version of the app version of the board game. I love that. That's so great. Yeah.

That's great. Okay. We've come full circle. Anyway, the reason we are talking about Monopoly is because today we do, in fact, have the perfect guest. We are going to be speaking to Chris Cox, the CEO of Hasbro. And we're going to be talking to him about the development of... a monopoly over the years, but also all of their other games, including Magic the Gathering. Joe, you remember we did that episode with Richard Garfield and all the other sort of digital

things they have in the works right now and just get a handle on what a traditional toy maker is actually doing in games. So I'm very excited. Yeah, Chris, thank you so much for coming on all thoughts. Tracy, Joe, thanks so much for having me and for being huge monopoly fans. I learned to think You're welcome. You're welcome. I got to say, I am very interested in the Grateful Dead Opoli, where you go on tour with the Dead, presumably forever, and you travel from gig to gig, trying to get rich by purchasing album recordings. That sounds fun. Okay. Okay, Chris, you have a gaming background. I think you were at Wizards of the Coast. Is that right? Yep. I've been in the games industry since 1999, or in and out of it. I started at Microsoft.

in their PC games division. And after about three or four months there, I was transferred into a secret project codenamed Xbox. And then ever since then, I've been in and out of games, working on video games, physical games, games for kids, games for adults. And most recently at Wizards of the Coast, which I helmed prior to becoming CEO of Hasbro about two years ago.

Are you a game lover? Like, I mean, maybe it's obvious. But, like, you know, if you find someone who has had, a 20 plus year in gaming, is there a pretty good chance that they themselves as part of their hobbies and identities are just really into games? Yeah, I would challenge you to find a game that I wouldn't enjoy playing. I'm a gaming omnivore. I've been playing games since probably the earliest game I can remember playing is Candyland, which also is a Hasbro game. I think I remember playing that when I was four with my mom. And I've been playing some version of Wizards of the Coast game

since I was 10 years old. I started playing Dungeons and Dragons at my best friend Hans Schroeder's house in Cincinnati, Ohio. I remember seeing like these little metal figurines in his older brother's room that were wizards and dragons that had these like cool jewels built into them. And I was like, hey, what's that? And then they showed me a 20-sided dice and I was absolutely hooked. I started playing magic when I was in college. All of our Avalon Hill strategy games I geeked out to. And I have a pretty rich collection of very old PC games dating back to my first, like, Epson, 2,600 from like the early 1980s and my original Mac 128-bit PC. So Hasbro just released earnings.

And a lot of the discussion, a lot of the questions from analysts, was all about the gaming strategy. Talk to us about what the opportunity in games actually is for Hasbro. Why does this seem to be an area of focus for you? right now? Well, I think it's a couple of different things. First off, it's a very large business, either both physical games as well as digital games. So inside of physical games, we invented the role-playing game. We invented the trading card game, Magic the Gathering. We were one of the earliest pioneers on mass-produced board games. Milton Bradley started his eponymous board game company

back in the late or the early 1860s right around the Lincoln inauguration. The Parker Brothers started their game company back, I think, in like the 1890s. And so we've been a part of games basically as far back as you can really track them. So they're a huge part of our culture. They're a huge part of our business. They're a huge part of the identity of the company. And basically everyone plays games. It's a massive market.

You know, if you go across the U.S., A Hasbro game is in better than nine out of ten households across the U.S. Games like Monopoly, Clue, Candyland, they basically have ubiquity in terms of brand awareness. And, you know, as many people as play physical games, the number of people who play digital games, dwarfs even that. You know, take Wizards of the Coast. Wizards of the Coast games are Magic at the Gathering and D&D. and they're primarily sold through, you know, around 8 to 10,000 mom and pop style hobby stores around the world. About 70 million people play those kinds of games and shop at those kinds of stores.

They primarily sell strategy games, trading card games, role-playing games, and kind of like crunchier board games. The number of people who play those types of games on their PC phone or a console is 10 to 12, that. Around the world, it's like 700 million to 800 million play those kinds of games. So, I mean, that's a pretty healthy hunk of the world's population. It's growing. The games industry has been growing at kind of call it a 5 to 8% clip for basically as long as tracking goes back, go back to the 90s. And it just continues to expand in terms of the number of people who play games, where they play games, how they play games, and the technological innovation that fuels it. So Hasbro is all in, and I'm a big advocate for it as well.

So Tracy mentioned Monopoly Go, the mobile game, and $3 billion in revenue since its launch in 2023. First of all, like, I haven't played it. What is the game Monopoly Go? Because I take it, it's distinct. But then, like, what is the business model of Monopoly Go? How does it make money? Well, I think how it engages people and the business model go hand in hand. And Monopoly Go effectively takes the essence of the board game, the essence of the fun of the board game, which is dealmaking and lighthearted stabbing your friends in the back. Yes. And gamifies it on a phone. You basically go around boards, around the world, collecting properties.

You collect cash. You collect fun digital items. You collect kind of power-ups and dice. and then you're able to raid your friends and kind of like through a series of mini-games either set them back a little bit, challenge them to some fun kind of mini-games or adventures. And it creates that kind of dynamic that you see around the board when you're playing with your family or with your friends where someone's trying to slip a hundred from out of the bank or someone's trying to slip park place out of the slots in the board, even though it hasn't been built,

or they're pushing like a little extra house onto a row of three houses and hoping that you don't notice. And it's that kind of fun kind of mischief that I think makes the game great to play in person and that Scopely, our partner who's made the game, has done a fantastic job capturing the essence of and I think it's what really is driven the popularity of it.

The business model just kind of carries on that fun. The more that you play, the more friends that you connect and can play with and kind of create that fun-loving mischief with, the more fun the game is, the more engaging the game is, and just the more opportunities there are for you to extend the play. And really, the kind of the way that the game makes money is this concept of earning dice and buying extra dice,

because the dice give you the ability to make extra moves and extra turns. You don't have to pay a cent to play the game, and you can have a lot of fun playing the game for free. But if you feel a little bit of an extra challenge or you want to get a couple steps ahead of your friend who lives across the country, or you want to be the first to be able to raid the board in Sydney out of your friend group,

you might be incentivized to pay a dollar or two to get some extra dice and just get the jump on your, quote-unquote, competition. Wow. It sounds like capitalism on steroids. Like, say what you will about the original monopoly, but it respected property rights. You couldn't steal property.

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Is there anything surprising that you've learned from the Monopoly Go experience? I was reading through the earnings transcript, for instance, and there was a lot of discussion about seasonality, and you weren't quite sure what the seasonality was with something like Monopoly Go. Talk to us about how that sort of business aspect of it all is unfolding. Well, Monopoly Go is the most successful mobile game outside of China in history. So it's really an unpleasant. unprecedented scale of game and scale of building its engagement and building its audience. So when you have an end of one, there aren't a lot of other games that you can go compare against and say, oh, it's going to behave like X or it's going to behave like Y.

There's some games that are close. Pokemon Go, you know, Candy Crush, Clash of Clash of Clans, these kind of more casual to mid-core games that have a very compelling social engagement loop associated with them. And several of those, particularly some of the more casual versions of those, like some of the match three games, like a candy crush, do exhibit a degree of seasonality. Pokemon Go, particularly in its early days, certainly did, particularly when it was all about going outside and kind of experiencing locales. It was a little bit more weather-based back then. So there is a degree of that, but we're kind of learning as we go and we're learning with Scoply as we go. The good news there is Scoply's arguably one of the biggest and best mobile games publishers in the world.

They have a lot of experience with a lot of other games that are similar in audience type and engagement loops as a game like Monopoly Go. So we're able to leverage those. But a game like Scrabble with buddies or Yatsy with buddies, they're still successful games, but they're 10x smaller than Monopoly Go. So just given that scale and size and audience reach, there's going to be nuances that you're going to discover for the first time simply by being a pioneer. There is this phenomenon that people in the mobile gaming industry you talk about. I think they call it like the shark fin effect, which is like a game will get really popular and then it'll fade very fast. And I think it was that, you know, Flappy Birds was one. And I remember like people like played that like crazy for a little while and then it like disappeared.

I got into this game, Elto's Adventure. I heard people talk about that I forgot about it. There were a few others. This seems to be a recurring thing. Can you describe why that happens, why you see certain games explode in popularity, and then a year later they go? Like, what is the sort of impulse that that happens? And then, like, how do you think about avoiding that risk so that, okay, this year, everyone's playing Monopoly Go, and then next year they're moving on to something else? Yeah, this is probably a better question for the team.

because they're the experts, but I'll give you my two cents. So a lot of games have a very fun kind of initial loop, and they're very engaging for call it a half hour or an hour, and maybe as upwards of 10 to 20 hours. So, you know, they kind of almost operate, particularly in the mobile space as the equivalent of like a fidget spinner. It's something to kind of keep your fingers busy. It helps to occupy the time while you're on the subway or just in a waiting room.

I got really a time game 2048 for that reason, actually, is another one. Anyway, sorry, keep going. But at the end of the day, they don't really change up the game dynamic that much, or they don't really drive kind of like additional loops that engage you in new or different ways or different challenges. So a lot of the games that have that quote unquote shark thin effect have something that's really fun and really compelling. And they keep people for call it three days or something. seven days, but then they tend to tail off. You know, the games that tend to be enduring that tend to do very, very well, they tend to be games that they have not just an initial loop, but they have

multiple loops and multiple layers, the deeper you get into it. Monopoly Go is an example of that. Other games that have been super successful at that are games like Clash of Clans or Candy Crush saga. And what they tend to do is the complexity of the game. builds over time, the amount of things that you can do, the amount of mini-games that you can do gets bigger and bigger, but at a manageable pace. And they add in a social component to it so that it's not just you playing the game, but you feel like you're playing the game with a large circle of your friends and associates, which also makes it even more fun because the challenges just aren't you as a single player. The challenges are with you as a group of people. And so obviously

it's more fun to play with multiple people and creating social dynamics and kind of raiding each other or ribbing each other or having like some fun loving mischief with each other that makes the game endure. So the games that like do achieve hyperscale like a Monopoly go, they tend to maintain that hyper scale for a very long time. If you go back and look at just in the U.S., the top 20 games in the U.S. today, half of them have been in the market for over five years. And several of them have been in the market for, you know, upwards of eight to ten years. And, you know, sure, they have a big year one. They have a big year two.

And then they start to taper a bit after that. But they maintain at a very, very healthy rate. So this might sound like a weird question. But how do you know when a game is a hit? And how do you sort of judge the success of a game? Is it purely by the amount of dollars that it brings in, or is it virality or bringing people into like the Hasbro network? How do you judge success here? Well, I think it depends on the game.

So when you're looking at a mobile game or what we call games as a service, which usually are games that are either free to acquire up front or cost very little up front, but you tend to make money off of based off of how frequently and long people play. because there's just engagement loops that engage them and give them opportunities to power things up or customize the game, you tend to look at the retention rates on those games. And so usually you look at a D1, a D3, a D7, and a D30 retention rate on those games. And you're going to want to see games.

It will vary based off of the genre, but you're typically going to want to see a D1 retention rate in excess of 40%. ideally in excess of 50%. You're going to want to see a D7 retention rate, meaning how many people who started a week ago are still playing after seven days in excess of, call it 20 to 30%.

And then you're going to ideally want to see a D30 retention rate in the 10 to 15% range. If you have a game that's retaining users like that and engaging players at a pretty snappy clip, you probably have the makings of a really, really good and long-lasting business. So an example of a game that Hasbro does that has retention rates like that would be Magic the Gathering Arena. It's a free version of our most popular brand, Magic at the Gathering, which is a billion-dollar-plus trading card game. It actually invented the trading card genre.

And it has retention rates that are astronomical. They're at the high end of all those bounds that I talked about. And, you know, we actually measured loyalty on a game like arena in months and years, as opposed to days, like many mobile games, like a flappy bird, for instance, as good as it is, that tends to have a high churn rate. And so generally speaking, the longer you're able to engage people and the more fun they're going to have, the more opportunities you have to be able to make a fair profit off of the game. And then there's premium games, which have kind of a different model. A premium game is kind of what we all might remember from, you know,

when we were kids, buying games for a Nintendo or buying games for a PlayStation or an Xbox. You pay $50, $60, sometimes upwards of $70 up front. You typically get almost all the value from that initial purchase. Maybe you sell downloadable content. Maybe there's a subscription that you can join. But most typically, you get the value up front. And what you try to do there is you try to give a very high-end kind of blockbuster entertainment experience in exchange for that high upfront cost. And, you know, ideally you want to maintain people for the 20 to 100 hours of gameplay, but it's not as important.

What's important is that they have a really fun first five to 10 hours and feel satisfied by the game. Whereas in mobile, really the first five to 10 hours is just the beginning of the engaging. loop, you want to see players hang around for ideally weeks, if not months and years, and really kind of make it a part of their daily routine. So Tracy mentioned in the beginning that the serality of the fact that there's now a physical version of the mobile game of the physical version of Monopoly, obviously it's tweaked. You know, something that people talk about in culture generally, and I often wonder if it's sort of wishcasting and not really a real thing is like, oh, people wanting to like return to

the analog. And there are always people like, oh, I think people are going to want to read physical papers and nice heavy stock physical magazines and maybe be on their phones a little bit less. And again, I always wonder if it's wishful thinking. But in the game realm specifically, is this a real phenomenon where you see people wanting to have that sort of tactile physical experience that they previously had on games, or is this just a distinct opportunity specifically associated with the success of Monopoly Go? I think it's a very real phenomenon, and I think it's been what's powering the physical games portfolio for us and other companies for the last decade plus, and I think it's going to

power it for certainly the foreseeable future. People hunger for authentic connection, and a game gives people kind of an easy, rulebook for creating authentic connection. It's an easy way for families to get together and spend some quality time at a table, phones down, and people engaged on the totem that is the game. It's a great way to find an excuse to get together with friends on a regular basis to go through an adventure together like we do with Dungeons and Dragons. It's a fantastic way for people who are new to a city and want to plug in with people who have shared interests like we see with Magic the Gathering and the network of stores that we call the Wizards Play Network who put on

over a million play events per year across those stores that people can come in and find a friend who loves the game and has a similar passion to them. And, you know, I don't see that ebbing. If anything, I see that hunger for physical connection and that desire to kind of create a shared story through the adventure that a game provides as only growing to be more and more important to people as we digitize more and more. Since you brought up Magic the Gathering, one thing I've been wondering is how do you balance the sort of original attraction of the game with the expansion and the need to, you know, basically roll out new products and get people buying new cards. And one of the things I've been thinking about, you know, call me a Magic the Gathering Purist, but you've been doing a lot of collaborations with TV shows. And I think you just announced something with the Marvel universe. And I personally find some of these tie-ins kind of weird. Like I can't imagine playing cards

and being like, I attack with Rick from the Walking Dead, and then I block with Iron Man or something like that. How do you balance the originality of the experience or the initial attraction to the game with some of this new licensing-driven growth? I think what's great about this podcast, Tracy, is what you find weird, I find amazing. As a player, you know, hey, sign me up for Rick Battles.

Iron Man set against a bunch of space marines from Warhammer 40K, that sounds like a really fun gaming time to me. And I think that's the magic of what we've been doing with magic for the last five years. We don't want to just be trapped in amber. We don't want the game to just be the same thing that it's been for the last 30 years. We want it to change and we want it to evolve, but we also want it to be fully backwards compatible and continuously offering flavors that bring in more and more people to the table and just make the community richer and more vibrant. Now, the downside to it is there are some people who are traditionalists. There are some people who are completionists and they don't necessarily like the changes. But that tends to be

the significant minority. There's way, way, way more people who want to weigh into what, in my opinion, is one of the best games ever invented to play with IPs that they love, with cards that are instantly familiar to them. And we found what we call universes beyond, which are these tie-ins we do with other brands, to be by far the most successful new player introduction that we've ever done in physical cards. Wait, sorry, can you explain that last part further? What's the new move that has been so successful? It's called Universe is Beyond,

which is our invitation of other brands to come into our play platform and be able to experience the magic of magic. It's not an original strategy. It's actually a very time-tested strategy. You know, you look at games like Fortnite. They do constant seasons with outside IP that really spices up the game and invites new people in.

Lego has been doing it for forever. They started with Star Wars and have expanded to, they do Transformers now, they do Peppa Pig now, they do D&D now. It just makes the play system a richer playground for people to be able to experience. Now, we still have all the traditional elves and dragons and heroes and lore from magic, and we always have sets for those.

And we always make sure all the cards inside of magic. And I think at this point, we're getting close to between 20 to 25,000 unique cards that exist in the magic universe. All of those cards are fully compatible with each other. You can buy a pack of cards from 1993. And I wouldn't recommend cracking them open because they're very valuable if you buy them, but you could. And you could play with the pack of cards that you bought in 2003, and they would be fully compatible with each other. And, you know, I think enriching that play system with a lot of fantastic brands that have very vibrant fan communities just makes magic more magical to play. Bloomberg Tech returns to San Francisco, June 3rd and 4th.

Join me, Emily Chang, along with Tom Giles, as we convene the CEOs, investors, and innovators shaping what's next in technology. Powered by Bloomberg's global newsroom and unrivaled terminal data will break down the capital, connectivity, and big ideas driving the... industry forward. Be part of the conversation. Register now at bloomberglive.com slash tech. That's Bloomberg Live.com slash tech. Joe, after we recorded that episode with Richard Garfield, I went off to look to see if I could find my old Magic the Gathering cards. Did you find them? These would have been from like 1994 or 95 and I can't find them anywhere. And I'm so sad because not only do I think they are worth like a decent amount of money nowadays, but I would actually like to see them again. And I have this vision in my mind of exactly where they are. They were in an after-eight mint container. And I recall seeing it

somewhere, like in the past 20 years, but I cannot find it. You'll find it. I know. I have old baseball cards in a record collection somewhere, and I have no idea where there's. You know, something I'm interested in speaking of, like, culture is this sort of like intergenerational cultural transmission. And, you know, when I was a kid, I listened to the same music as my parents, they would put on music and I was in the room and so that's what I heard and that's what I got into and to some extent that doesn't happen the same way with music anymore because my kids might be on headphones or I might be on headphones so when I'm listening to music it's not just sort of blasting throughout the living room or wherever it is you know when you think about like these

like games like these like backwards compatible games like you know like magic and so forth I'm curious like how you see that playing out in the game space games games getting passed on parents play with their kids. Obviously, I played Monopoly with my daughter. I think we also play like shoots and ladders and stuff like that. But then there is this element that they have other avenues of finding games, whether it's online or on a phone that are not, you know, something I would have played. And I'm sort of curious about the phenomenon of like passing down games

and how you think about the durability of brands in this aspect. I think it's the primary way people learn about a new game is, through their parents playing around family board game night, whether that's a Friday or a Thursday or pick your poison. Experiencing the joy and passing on like a treasured memory from your childhood to your kids, I know my son loves D&D. He loves magic. He got that from me. The favorite game our family plays is Monopoly.

You know, we try playing, well, we play it less because my wife dislikes how much we cheat. but the kids and I have a lot of fun trying to make work. Wait, do you is admitting the cheats. Wait, do you play that if you land on free parking, you get cash in the middle? Oh, yeah. That's controversial. Where do you stand on that? Although that is often unnecessary for my kids and I, because we seem to always have a magical font of cash.

Our favorite version is the Cheaters Edition. We actually came out with a version of Monopoly, which was focused on things that you needed to cheat on, tasks you needed to do. And basically, like, we know the game of Monopoly is done at our house when my wife flips the board, usually around turn four or five. That's a good. That's a short game. But it's fun. And, you know, my kids love Monopoly now.

My son loves magic in D&D. And you do it with video games as well. Like, to me, games are such powerful IP. You know, they might not create, like, these cultural. moments that a big Hollywood movie does. But they create millions upon millions of very powerful personal moments. And that's why brands like Monopoly can translate so well from a board game to a multi-billion dollar mobile game back to a board game again because people have such intimate experience with them that has this deep personal connection usually resulting from a very fond memory

of siblings against siblings, friends with friends, or parents and kids circling around a table. You mentioned cultural moments. You know, I'm curious, like last year, I guess Mattel had that huge hit with the Barbie movie. I know you have all this IP. Are you doing anything similar in terms of sort of like big, like adult oriented movies around some of the brands that you have within the broader Hasbro world? Oh, yeah, for sure. I think at last count, Transformers is a $5 billion-plus box office franchise. I think it's in the top 10 box office franchises of all time.

We have a new movie coming out in September called Transformers One. It's the origin story of Optimus Prime and Megatron back when they were friends as young cogless robots on Cybertron and how the clash between them and the Autobots and Decepticons emerged. It's directed by Josh Cooley, who I think. did Toy Story 3 or Toy Story 4. And it's been getting really good feedback from things like San Diego Comic-Con. Fans are excited for it.

And we hope families will enjoy it too. And then we have, at last count, I think we have 35 entertainment projects in development. You know, you brought up the Barbie movie. Barbie herself is the executive producer of our Monopoly movie with Lionsgate. We have a clue movie in development. What does that mean Barbie herself is the executive producer? Yeah, Margo Robbie's production company LuckyCamp. Okay, that makes sense.

Not the doll. Okay. No, we did release a version of Barbie Monopoly last year, and it was one of the most successful Monopoly versions from last year. So there's a lot of tie-ins. So, yeah, I mean, we have a ton of content coming out. You know, Transformers is probably the movie that the toy industry kind of holds up as, like, great synergies between selling things.

product and creating a great story. You know, last year with Transformers Rise of the Beast, we had a 90% uplift in point of sale over the 12 weeks of the movie. And I think we did something like 30 or 40% POS point of sale uplift during the whole year from that movie. So, you know, Transformers movies aren't just fun. They sell a lot of toys. By the way, Tracy, I see Hasbro has the IP to Gem, which I think could be a huge hit.

Wait. Is this the old one from the 1980s? Yeah, yeah. People love a gem movie, I think. So I'm just saying, I'm giving a free idea here. I think there was an attempt. I wanted to talk about AI. And there's sort of two different paths we could go down here because, number one, I know

you're experimenting with some AI-based products. So like an AI-driven Ouija board, which sounds kind of fun. And then on the other hand, Hasbro, has got to be one of the biggest commissioners of like science fiction and fantasy art in the world. And I know there's a lot of discussion nowadays about how much of that is going to end up being AI generated. And I believe you had a big round of layoffs announced last year and they're probably still ongoing. A lot of those were in the art department. So can you talk to us about the impact of AI on your business, both in terms of new products and then also I guess how it would affect the

art of a lot of your games. Yeah, sure. Actually, just to correct it up front, we are going through a series of layoffs as part of restructuring our toy and commercial organizations, but that's not affecting Wizards of the Coast. They had some modest impacts, but that was actually mostly kind of been back office related roles. We really prize design talent, art talent, and generally creativity. It's what fuels our brands. We prize it both in internally in terms of the employees we have and the great talent that we're able to attract to the company. And we really prize it in terms of, you know, really the AAA top shelf artists that we work with,

both to help us drive concept art and new product development, as well as all the art commissioning we do for the thousands of new magic cards and D&D books and imagery that we do every year. You know, I would say for AI, AI is a big topic. We could probably do like three or four podcasts on that and its impacts on any given industry. I suppose I'll start with the headline, Color Me and AI Optimist in terms of coming from the industry of play. It's an incredibly playful, very high impact set of technologies that really can light up the average player, the average fans, creativity, really creates and enables amazing user-generated content. And as someone who builds games that really rely on storytelling, that relies on an end user's creativity and people collaborating around a table, I think there's really exciting possibilities for it. You know, that said, we're in a lot of undiscovered country as it relates to AI and we have to deploy it very, very responsibly and at a measured pace. because we got to make sure that creatives are paid for their work.

You know, we're a company that values creativity, and therefore we value creatives. So we're thinking through how do we do this in a way that's ethical, that's responsible, that gives voice actors, gives actors, gives artists, gives writers their fair shake inside of it. And, you know, I think it's going to take us a little bit of time and the industry as a whole to figure it out. But I'm pleased with how we're going about it. I'm sure there'll be instances where, you know, we have to police things carefully. You know, you'll see AI pop up in art now and then.

That's not something that we're doing by design. It's something that just happens when you work with hundreds of different artists who have different kind of motivations and different kind of thoughts on things. Generally speaking, in our finished products, everything will be human created and human finished. However, when we think about AI-enabled tools that kind of bring fun to life and it enables users to be able to create things, sure, I think we will use our art, we will use our IP, and we will try to use that to create ethically trained art and ethically trained AI tools that kind of bring imaginations to life. You know, if I just look at like my own D&D groups

and I play in three different D&D groups. Nice. I can't tell you a single person around the table who doesn't use AI in some way, shape, or form to help either craft their character, help inspire an adventure, bring imagery and audio to life. Wow. And so, you know, if that's just my little kind of ballpark

of 20 or 30 players that I play with on the regular, I'm sure that's happening across the vast tens of millions of people who play the game. And so when your users are telling you that they're using a tool and that they're valuing it, I think you have to take notice and you have to figure out how to harness it. Oh, this reminds me, actually. I remember hearing about the open gaming license controversy for Dungeons and Dragons. And there was a lot of debate and a lot of outrage initially about some of the changes you're proposing.

But since we're on the topic of, you know, user-generated content and Dungeons and Dragons, is famous for the amount of participation that gamers actually have in that. Talk to us about how that controversy, like what were the lessons learned from that? And how did it all end? Because I think it's been resolved somewhat at this point. Yeah, I mean, that was about a year and a half ago. And that was a serious case of foot and mouth disease from our perspective. We did it wrong.

And we apologized. And I think we quickly made amends. I think where we were coming from on that whole thing. And the open game license for people who don't know, it was something that was established about 20-ish years ago that basically opens up the rule set and some of the core content for Dungeons and Dragons to create a lingua franca rule set and set of content

for people to be able to play tabletop role-playing games. So what we were trying to do is we were trying to evolve it because a document that was created in 2002 didn't foresee the rise of video games. It didn't foresee the rise of AI tools. It didn't foresee even things like content streaming. So our goal there was to try to protect an end-user's ability to be able to make content and have fun and a creator's ability to create content and be able to make a living off of it,

while preventing kind of like a quick-serve restaurant from using the D&D brand to sell tacos or a big video game company to be able to create a video game using the IP in a way that wasn't fair to us as the kind of quote unquote brand owners or maybe do something that we didn't necessarily like with the brand or had content that was inappropriate, which happens when you have tens of millions of users making content. I think we found a fair and equitable solution to it. If anything, we embraced open source even more. We also are opening up our own distribution platforms like D&D Beyond to create

marketplaces where more and more creators and more users can be able to share their content and hopefully make a nice living off of their content. I think you're going to see more and more from that from us in terms of how we expand that marketplace opportunity and how we think about new ways that they can create content. for instance, on something we're calling a virtual tabletop, which is an Unreal Engine 5 powered kind of like sandbox where you can build full 3D models of like miniatures and buildings and special effects. And, you know, I think that'll be a wonderful opportunity for people and really leverage kind of the legacy of the OGL in a positive and new way.

That sounds really fun. What are your favorite games to play? Give us some recommendations and they don't all have to be from the Hasbro universe, but, you know, having spoken to you, it sounds like a lot of them are. Fortunately, many, many, many of them are. Well, certainly if you're into role-playing games and you haven't played Baldersgate 3, that's a seminal role-playing game. One, I think it swept all of the major game of the year awards. It swept all of the major role-playing game of the year awards. And it's just a fabulous game from our partners of Larian. I think they had a home run on that. I obviously think, my... Monopoly Go is a lot of fun, and there's several hundred million people who agree with me.

So I think if you're looking for something to tick some time away on your subway commute, that one's a lot of fun as well. I'm kind of a hardcore, crunchy gamer. I think you can tell based on my answers and a little bit nerdy, but actually my favorite game is Scrabble. So I really enjoy playing that. And I suppose if I was going to pick a competitor's game, what's a fun game that I play with my family from a competitor.

So I will pick two. If you're a little nerdy and want a fun kind of D&D light experience, Munchkin is probably one of my family's favorite games. That has a very monopoly-esque kind of vibe to it, where you're in co-opetition trying to be the first tiny creature to complete a dungeon and power yourselves up. And then, of course, ultimately, the other players who've been helping you, stabs you in the back at the end to prevent you from being first. And then another family favorite. This one, I think, is from Asmody out of Europe, is Ticket to Ride. That's just a really fun kind of travel-themed game where you become kind of a railroad tycoon.

So that's a fun one, too. Oh, both of these sound amazing. Sorry, I'm looking them up as you speak. That sounds great. Okay. Chris Cox, the CEO of Hasbro. Thank you so much for coming on All Thoughts. Hey, thank you so much for having me.

Joe, I thought that was a fun conversation. I just like talking about games, really. Tracy, are you ever going to invite me to one of your game meetups out up in Connecticut? I don't know. I would love you to come play board games, Joe. Really? Yeah. Okay, I'll come on.

What game are we going to play? Oh, you know, this isn't really a board game per se, but I would love to play Avalon with you. I think you'd be good at it. Okay. This is the one where you basically lie to your friends and annoy everyone that you know. I'm done with that. So in all seriousness, it is interesting to think about. game, you know, people are always talking about, oh, we want like real world connection.

If it's like, oh, third spaces and all this stuff. It is interesting to think, like, games are a little bit unique in that respect, in which there is this sort of like in person, put down the phone community event. Like there's, you know, people play games on their phone. People play them on their computers. But there is something like powerful about a board game from a sort of social perspective. Oh, absolutely. And I have to say board game cafes.

of which there seemed to be, there are more of those in New York than there used to be. Those are fantastic, like, spaces just to socialize. I love going to those. The other thing that I thought was really interesting was the discussion about AI generated art and the sort of balancing act there. Also kind of funny to discuss that in the context

of the Dungeons and Dragons licensing controversy. Also, I thought it was interesting, and I was a little bit had my mind blown that when Chris was talking about his own gaming community and coming up with the stories, that every single one of them is using AI for that purpose. Yeah. Which I, you know, you figure, okay, some people when they're like developing a story are going to use it.

But the fact that there's like 100% of his community is doing that is pretty powerful. Well, and also like, how do businesses even start to take that into account? And Chris mentioned this. But the idea that like, okay, you're working with hundreds, if not thousands of different artists. Some of them might be using AI. You know, you can ask them maybe to sign a disclosure or something like that. But it seems like you're never going to be able to like police it entirely because people are using it as a tool. By the way, can I just say like I feel if the CEO of Hasbro plays Monopoly on Cheat Mode or he's like adding in a little extra house to a property surreptitiously or taking $100 from the bank or doing the free parking stuff, I feel like that's license for all of us to cheat.

cheat. Or to buy the actual Monopoly Cheaters edition, which sounds kind of fun. Yeah, but it's more fun if you're not supposed to cheat and you actually do it, right? But I was actually kind of flabbergasted. I thought he would be a very strict, you know, by the book type when it came to gameplay. Maybe

this is the way to play it to just make it as chaotic as possible. I mean, it sounds like that's what Monopoly Goh is doing. And it sounds like that's really a big part of the fun for people. Gosh, there's a chance edition of Monopoly as well. Sorry, I'm just flicking through all the different monopoly editions again.

The Monopoly chance game is the high-stakes card-flipping version of the Monopoly game, and it only takes 20 minutes to play. That would be nice, because I would play more Monopoly with my daughter. If it didn't take, like, two hours. It's a thing. It's a pretty big time investment in a game of Monopoly. I need to tell you about the time I was in Guatemala, and I got caught up in a game of risk that went on,

I kid you not for 12 hours all night. I'm looking forward to hearing this story. I was trying to extricate. myself for hours by losing and it didn't work. And for various reasons, I couldn't just walk away from the table. Anyway, story for another day. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the Oddlots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Allaway. And I'm Jill Wisenthall. You can follow me at the stalwart. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez, at Carmen Armin, Dashel Bennett at Dashbot and Kill Brooks. Thank you to

our producer, Moses, Andam. For more OddLod's content, go to Bloomberg.com. where we have transcripts, a blog, and a newsletter. And you can chat about all of these topics with fellow listeners 24-7 in the Discord. Discord.discord.g. slash oddlots. I am certain that there are many games players in there. For sure. And if you enjoy Odlots, if you like it when we do these gaming episodes, then please leave us a positive review on your favorite podcast platform.

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