Just like the media production studios and the mobile gaming studios….
A lot of that seemed to be the ambition of Brian Goldner, who really believed in Hasbro's potential as an IP powerhouse.
It's no great shock that Hasbro began scaling back its ambition across different forms of media after he died. He was apparently the one who pushed for the Power Rangers acquisition because it would not only expand Hasbro's IP reach, it would give them another "in" into children's tv production.
No one else in Hasbro knew what to do with any of this when he was gone, and Cocks' mandate seemed to be to steady things and keep the company's head above water. Which he has, admittedly, succeeded in doing.
Hasbro's ambition is far less apparent these days. And while that does suck on some level?
gestures at the world it's probably the smarter play to scale back and focus on the things the company knows it can do rather than chase the dream of being a mini Disney.
But yeah... I'll echo CoffeeHorse here. It's easy to see the Atari brand getting revived as a niche retro brand today and wonder how Hasbro didn't capitalize on that, but that's a pretty bold faced case of Monday Morning Quarterbacking. Hasbro bought Atari in 1998 and dumped it in 2000, all before Goldner's tenure. The Hassenfelds still ran the place, for crying out loud. And in the late 90s/early 2000s? Atari was a dead brand. The Jaguar's (hilarious) failure was still fresh in everyone's mind, and the Atari library was full of old game titles no one had given a crap about since the NES Kool-Aid Man'd onto the scene in 1985. Trust me. As an 11-13 year old during Hasbro's brief ownership of Atari, no one in "the target demo" cared. At all.
Hasbro has its fair share of blunders you can rightfully criticize them for, but dumping Atari in 2000 isn't one of them. Sucks for them that the brand came around and became valuable again, but no one saw that happening at the turn of the century.
atari-investisseurs.fr
