Hasbro Announces New Playing to Win Strategy Heading Into 2025 And What Does That Really Mean?

Hasbro today held its Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2024 Financial Results call where CEO Chriss Cocks announced their new themed strategy they call "Playing to Win".



This new strategy is said to focus on Play and Partnerships. It is centered around 5 key essential building blocks.

1. Profitable Franchises: Asserting the fundamentals of profitable, play-focused brands.


2. Aging Up: Increasing the play and collectible appeal for fans aged 13 and above across Hasbro's brands.


3. Everyone Plays: Expanding reach in opportunity areas including girls and emerging markets.


4. Digital & Direct: Building video games, services, and e-commerce capabilities.


5. Partner Scaled: Driving profitable reach through outstanding retail and licensing partnerships.

You can read the full press release Hasbro put out about "Playing to Win" here.

Here are key take-aways that stood out to me during their financial call today:

In things we cover here, they stated a solid growth in Transformers but it was also noted they had a 12% decline in consumer products with Star Wars and Nerf being called out specifically. Hasbro's Chris Cocks said while their Nerf brand is solid overall he feels their Nerf business model needs to be reinvented.

They expect toy sales to be flat overall in 2025 with proposed expected tariffs playing a big part in that. They said they saw an uptick in POS (Point of Sale) in Captain America based products after the release of the Captain America: Brave New World movie.

They also said they expect to see Entertainment Brands drive toy sales up in 2026 and 2027. While they didn't give specifics, I imagine Entertainment brands like Magic The Gathering and Marvel will be the main driving force for that.

Right now when it comes to toys, building blocks and trading cards are the main drivers of growth in the toy industry.

Licensing will continue to be a major part of Hasbro's growth strategy and they touted their licensing business has grown by 60%. This includes toys, video games and more. They talked about seeing things like interactive theme parks and hotels based on their brands.

They announced a new collaboration with Mattel between their Play-Doh and Barbie. See the full press release about that HERE.

They talked about getting back to expanding more girl oriented products and focusing on more cheaper made toys in the $10-$20 range. No I don't think this means prices for things like Marvel Legends will go down but that they will be increasing more in the way of kid-oriented toys like their recentl MixMasher figures.

Video games will also play a major role in their growth touting both in-house games and games they license out to other partners. They announced one of their tentpole brand getting a new video game in a joint-publishing effort with Saber Interactive who does the Warhammer 40k games. They didn't specifically say what brand the game will be based on but at the beginning of the call their was a mention of a G.I. Joe video game coming. So I don't know if those two things are connected.

Magic The Gathering is another big player in Hasbro's growth strategy with new Entertainment collaborations with Legendary Entertainment and new cross over games with Final Fantasy and Marvel. For Marvel they will be starting with Spider-Man which will only have standard only cards. Same with Final Fantasy. This wasn't mentioned in the call but I have heard rumors G.I. Joe might get a crossover later this year like we saw them do with Transformers last year. G.I. Joe however again was not confirmed so treat it as rumor only.

Things not mentioned at all in the call was anything about Hasbro moving their headquarters out of Rhode Island to Boston.

So I am sure what is on many collectors minds is if Hasbro is getting out of the toy making business? I would say no, at least not all-together. They will definitely continue to move towards a licensing business model which has been pretty clearly stated by Hasbro over the last several years, but based on what I heard I don't see them getting out of the toy making business all-together any time soon.