As Hasbro continues its push into expanding the video game offerings of properties under the Wizards of the Coast banner, the company has now hired Dreamhaven co-founder and Blizzard veteran Paul Della Bitta to take over the Digital Ventures division at the Dungeons & Dragons maker. According to Bloomberg, Bitta will take on a leadership position, and will work under Wizards of the Coast president John Hight.
Coinciding with Bitta’s hiring, James Ohlen, co-founder of Exodus developer Archetype Entertainment, will be stepping aside from his position. Hasbro’s vice president of corporate communications Abby Hodes said in a statement that Ohlen’s work felt complete, and that he stepped aside so he could hand off the leadership position to the rest of the team. She also noted that Ohlen had “asked to shift his creative focus” on the tabletop RPG products at Wizards of the Coast, namely Dungeons & Dragons.
“At this stage, James felt his work on the game was complete and that the polishing and tuning were in great hands with the team,” said Hodes.
Hasbro has been hoping to push further into the video games industry following the massive success of 2023’s Baldur’s Gate 3. While there had been plenty of games based on the properties of Wizards of the Coast in the past, Baldur’s Gate 3 had hit sales milestones that hadn’t previously been seen by games based on Dungeons & Dragons. Since then, the company has announced many deals with various developers to work on brand new titles.
While some of these titles are slated to be part of the Dungeons & Dragons universe, which includes the recently-announced Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons as well as the unnamed project in the works at Stig Asmussen’s studio Giant Skull, Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro have also been casting a wider net. One of the bigger games in development right now has nothing to do with Dungeons & Dragons or Magic: The Gathering—Exodus.
Exodus has been in the works for quite some time, and got a brand new trailer during The Game Awards 2025. The sci-fi RPG’s developers have spoken about all of the different games they were inspired by, which includes the Mass Effect series, as well as Guerrilla Games’ Horizon franchise and even Nintendo’s Metroid Prime.
As for Giant Skull’s title, Hight had confirmed back in August that, while there might be a new Baldur’s Gate game made in the future, Asmussen’s team is working on a different project.
“Baldur’s Gate is an incredible game,” said Hight. “And of course, we’re going to do a successor. This is not the successor to that game. We go to Stig [Asmussen] and his team to tell an incredible story and bring D&D to a very broad audience. Ideally, the game will appeal to D&D players because it will help them realise their imagination. But it’s also going to hopefully appeal to people that love playing action games, that love the Jedi games, that love God of War games.”
“D&D, as Stig said, it’s a playground and it really is for everyone. Hundreds of millions of people have either played D&D or been aware of D&D, and we want to perpetuate that for the next 50 years.”
