Hasbro CEO Urges Games Industry to Rethink Costs, AI, and Pricing Strategies

Chris Cocks has a blunt read on the games industry: it's not broken, but it's heading somewhere unsustainable if developers keep operating the way they always have. In a March 16 interview with The Verge, the Hasbro CEO laid out a case for structural change across hiring, AI adoption, and pricing — and was unusually candid about how little the industry, including himself, actually understands about the economics driving all of it.

"I feel like I've spent a lot of time trying to understand the economics of video games, and I still kind of don't," Cocks said. "Based on the industry, maybe no one does."

The numbers he cited make the problem concrete. The games market is growing, but only at "mid-single digits" — nowhere near the double-digit expansion that would justify current production costs. AAA development now requires "a thousand man-years of effort minimum," while inflation is running "significantly faster than what your market is growing or what your pricing power can support." The result is a structural squeeze that Cocks argued can't be solved by cutting development budgets or pulling back on customer support. "That's a recipe for figuring out how you get more efficient so you can do more with the same," he said.

One of his more pointed suggestions was about where studios recruit. He questioned whether developers should default to San Francisco or Austin, Texas, when "fantastic areas of talent" exist in Southeast Asia, China, and Eastern Europe — ideally paired with teams who understand the specific market being targeted. It's the kind of obvious-in-hindsight cost lever that larger publishers have quietly used for years, but Cocks said it plainly where most executives don't.

He was equally direct about the odds stacked against any individual release. Any given game, he said, has roughly a 20 to 30 percent chance of being successful, which means publishers need to structure themselves to absorb a string of failures before anything lands. "You have to be able to cover a whole bunch of unsuccessful bets," he told GamesIndustry.biz.

On AI, Cocks gave a more nuanced answer than most executives in this space tend to offer. He's clearly a proponent internally: Hasbro runs a dedicated Peppa Pig AI that provides feedback on Peppa Pig toys, and has used AI to ideate product concepts and simulate focus groups and playtesting labs. But for Magic: The Gathering, D&D, and their associated video games, the pipeline is deliberately AI-free. "There are some brands that the audience, the creators, just don't want it, so we don't even have it in our pipelines for our video games or for Magic: The Gathering, or D&D," he said. He acknowledged that most gamers currently distrust AI in games, while predicting that someone will eventually figure out how to integrate it in a way that actually improves the experience. He also acknowledged he's been wrong about technology disruption before, adding: "I really hope I'm more correct on that than I was with NFTs."

For Hasbro specifically, Cocks described three revenue levers in gaming: extending high-retention brands, leveraging Magic: The Gathering Arena, and digital licensing, which he called "a super high margin, very large scale" operation that amplifies brand reach without the risk profile of direct publishing. The fourth leg is selective publishing investment, where Hasbro takes a longer view. "We're going to be patient, we're going to invest, and if we lose money in the short term, we're going to build up our community, build up our capacity," he said. On the product side, Hasbro's preferred model is full games at a fixed price with substantial playtime — designed to convert first-time buyers into repeat purchasers.

The interview also surfaced a brief mention of Dungeons & Dragons: Warlock, a new video game Hasbro has in development, slated for the "later part of 2027.