Hasbro has opened a new Wizards of the Coast game development studio in Montreal.
The team will officially operate under the name of Wizards of the Coast Studios and is set to hire around 200 people over the next three years. Wizards of the Coast Studios will work with local Hasbro-owned team Invoke Studios to operate a new game development hub focused on creating content for the popular Dungeons & Dragons franchise, as well as Wizards of the Coast’s broader digital games portfolio. An official opening for the hub is set for summer 2026.
Wizards of the Coast Studios will be led by Montrealer Dan Ayoub, a Concordia graduate who previously worked for many years at Microsoft, including at the Halo developer formerly known as 343 Studios (now called Halo Studios). More recently, he’s worked on D&D digital products and was promoted earlier this year to become the “Global Play Lead” for the D&D franchise.
At this time, it’s unclear what projects, specifically, Wizards of the Coast Studios will be working on. That said, it’s worth noting that one of Wizards of the Coast’s other games, Texas-based Archetype Entertainment’s sci-fi shooter Exodus, is being led by BioWare Edmonton alums who worked on the likes of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect. Of course, Wizards of the Coast is also behind the massively popular Magic: The Gathering trading card game, so it’s also easy to imagine some kind of work being done on that franchise at the Montreal hub.
Notably, Quebec’s nearly $1.5 billion gaming sector has become quite a big hub for D&D. Disney Dreamlight Valley maker Gameloft Montreal is working on a mysterious D&D game that will mix “survival, life simulation and action” elements with “unique cooperative gameplay.” On top of that, Belgium’s Larian Studios, the developer behind the D&D game Baldur’s Gate 3, has a Quebec City-based team that contributes to the beloved RPG.
Image credit: Wizards of the Coast
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