Hasbro exec says to expect what’s next for Baldur’s Gate ‘in really short order’

Hasbro is spending at least part of its time at the 2025 Game Developers Conference teasing what’s next for the Baldur’s Gate series. It told IGN we should expect to hear more about how the company plans to capitalize on being in the “unenviable position” of following up Baldur’s Gate 3 sooner rather than later.

“I mean, we’re not in a hurry,” Dan Ayoub, senior vice president of digital games at Hasbro, said. “We’re going to take a very measured approach. We’ve got a lot of plans, a lot of different ways to go about it. We’re starting to think about, okay, yeah, we’re ready to start dipping toes a little bit and talking about a few things. And I think, in really short order, like I said, again, not to over-tease that point, we’re going to have some other things to talk about around that.”

Baldur’s Gate 3 fully launched in 2023 after several years in early access. It was developed by Larian Studios, whose experience developing the huge, beloved Divinity RPG series made it the perfect steward for the long-running Dungeons & Dragons adaptation. Baldur’s Gate 3 would go on to garner both critical and commercial success, winning just about every meaningful game of the year award in the industry and selling over 10 million copies by early 2025. As such, when Larian indicated it was moving on to other things, the spotlight was placed on Dungeons & Dragon owner Wizards of the Coast, as well as its parent company Hasbro, for news on a potential Baldur’s Gate 4.

“I’m never one to shy down from a challenge,” Ayoub said. “And developers love to have a high bar to go after. I think we’ve actually seen the team push some really interesting ideas, that they’re like, ‘Okay, we need to raise our bar. We need to go bigger on this.’ And things like that. So, I think that’s our hope, right? We would keep raising the bar and everyone just tries to go a little higher.”

Hasbro listed an opening for a Dungeons & Dragons senior narrative role on March 8, a job subsequently advertised by vice president of franchise and product Jess Lanzillo as being for “a unique IP development role” rather than traditional tabletop design. News also broke on March 19 that Wizards of the Coast laid off 90% of the team — or 30 workers — responsible for developing the Unreal Engine 5-powered virtual tabletop program Sigil. Ayoub’s surprising comments about the next Baldur’s Gate title out of the Game Developers Conference may have been an attempt to distract from these cuts. Nevertheless, it seems likely that Hasbro is keen to bring in folks to assist whatever studio has been enlisted to work on the next Baldur’s Gate project.