Eek. Licensing math tells me that Horn Abbot might be making $1.50 per game sold.

Meaning that someone at Hasbro is certain that they can sell upwards of 50-60 million copies of the games over the next several years.

Compare that to our chunk of the market where 10k is a pretty solid success. There is a 5000x difference.

No kidding. Hasbro is introducing a version later in 2008 in which you download questions from the Internet, so that might reduce the costs associated with producing the game and boost Hasbro’s profit per copy. That’s all speculation on my part, mind you.

Eric

I have wondered if BD-Live features in Blu-Ray will start enabling this kind of thing. (BD-Live is a new feature of the Blu-Ray spec requiring players to have internet connections and a pretty hefty bit of memory.

Meaning that your next gen DVD player is looking much more like a computer than the last gen.

Bd-Live support went live with the latest PS3 update, but I’ve yet to see a disc which supports it.

Ah, the perils of reading news stories about which you know something:

“Trivial Pursuit created the adult game category in 1982 and has always been one of the most recognized brands in the industry,” Hasbro’s chief operating officer, Brian Goldner, said in a statement.

Yeah, when I think back to 1981, if only there had been games designed for adults back then ...

10k may be a solid success for this sort of game in America, but in Germany, the SdJ winner routinely sells a lot more than that I think. Regardless, Hasbro probably bought the rights to Trivial Pursuit to make long-term investments, not because they think they can sell 50-60 million copies in the next few years. That would be a lot of games to shift even for Hasbro, I think.

Also, it’s possible the designers are making more than $1.50 a unit. I’ve heard it said (perhaps more knowledgeable readers can help me out here) that while millions of copies of Trivial Pursuit have been sold, none of its publishers have ever made a lot of money off of it.

o kidding. Hasbro is introducing a version later in 2008 in which you download questions from the Internet, so that might reduce the costs associated with producing the game and boost Hasbro’s profit per copy. That’s all speculation on my part, mind you.

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My guess is that this was the primary instigator of the sale.  Once you are into downloadable content, traditional licensing agreements don’t work very well - so a whole new agreement probably had to be designed… or just outright purchase.