Hasbro has moved further away from Subbuteo after declaring it is going ‘all in’ on digital gaming in the next few years.
The brand, which bought then Subbuteo owner Waddington’s in 1994 and oversaw a failed relaunch of the brand in the early 2000s, has announced it will be focusing on producing video games with one or two new launches a year.
Speaking about Hasbro’s Q2 financial results, CEO Chris Cocks said: “I think between our board moves and between talent that we brought on board, most recently with John, but even before that, studio leaders we have like Ames Kirshen, who was in charge of Batman Arkham series of Warner Bros, James Ohlen, who was the head of creative design at BioWare, responsible for the first Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Mass Effect. We’re going all in on becoming a digital play company.”
The move is partly due to the success of its Wizards of the Coast brand, which owns Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons. It is also due to the success of Monopoly Go, a digital game that has brought in over $3 billion in revenue and is one of the most successful revenue-generating video games of all time.
“As we look at the business of play, it’s clear that digital is here to stay and a bigger factor than ever in how successful toy and game companies will grow and strengthen their brands,” Cocks said.
The move means a further move away from ‘consumables’ such as Subbuteo, which has no digital element, and makes any Hasbro-driven Subbuteo revival incredibly unlikely. The news will come as no surpise as Hasbro has abandoned Subbuteo as one if its own brands, shunning it at the recent London Toy Fair and farming out the license to current holder Longshore of Hong Kong.
Unfortunately for fans of the table-top board game Hasbro has been busy extending the Subbuteo license it holds with the UK trademark office until 2029, meaning it could be hoping to secure more licensing deals with the likes of supermarkets and clothing brands to use the Subbuteo logo.
Reported to cost around £50,000, the license has resulted in the likes of the Pretty Green Subbuteo set and clothing range in 2022 and a number of poor supermarket box sets and clothing items in the preceding years.
In reality the news of a digital move changes very little for Subbuteo fans. New box sets or items would be devised and produced by Longshore, not Hasbro, and recently the band exclusively told The Hobby it was considering a ‘pro’ set aimed at players of the flat base game that has evolved from traditional Subbuteo.
A new scoreboard was also launched in 2024 but the brand has not announced any new team or box sets for the year. The official Subbuteo website still has a COVID message on the homepage and the latest news was announcing the licensing agreement between Hasbro and Longshore back in 2020.
Official Subbuteo accounts have posted only a handful of times in 2024 as the brand continue to sink into obscurity – and it seems there will be little help from its owner as a new digital age begins at the company.
