Over 40 years after licensing Barbie for a Commodore 64 spin-off, Mattel has decided that this whole video game thing is for real and is setting up an internal production pipeline to release its own games. The maker of Hot Wheels and other popular toys just announced Mattel Game Studios, an organization of 300 developers tasked with creating and publishing original games based on iconic brands like Uno.
The new game studio/publisher hybrid will be split across offices in L.A. and Hangzhou, China, and will be nested under the company’s existing Mattel Digital Studios, which handles all of its existing licensing deals for third-party games on mobile, console, and PC. Masters of the Universe: Legends Unite, a couch co-op roguelike for mobile, came out in June. Mattel also teased UNO Wild, a unique new Uno “experience” currently being “soft-launched,” and that a new Hot Wheels game is “in active development.”
“Mattel Game Studios gives us the scale and capabilities to build and publish more original gaming experiences inspired by our iconic brands,” said the new head of Mattel Digital Studios, Marcus Liassides, in a press release on August 17. “Together with our successful collaborations across the industry, it strengthens our ability to reach fans through great games wherever they choose to play.”
As every company not already deeply immersed in game development has recently learned, however, making them is hard, expensive, and messy. Mattel’s corporate toy-maker rival, Hasbro, was the latest to retreat from the market following several high-profile cancellations and write-downs. The tech giants have all crashed against those rocky shores as well, with Amazon being the latest to give up on developing AAA games in-house.
I doubt things will be any different for Mattel unless it’s going into this whole thing with less grand ambitions. There have already been tons of popular and successful games based on Mattel toy brands. I’m not sure what the company getting more directly involved in the creative side of things will yield.
We’re already getting Barbie Rewind, a remaster anthology collection of decades of Barbie games, later this year. And Hot Wheels Let’s Race: Ultimate Speed just came out last year. Maybe Mattel can finally give us Hot Wheels meets Grand Theft Auto, or the modern Barbie cozy sim. Or maybe we’ll be writing about Mattel Digital Studios layoffs three years from now.