Board Game Arena

I was looking through the list of BGA games in the catalog, in progress, and available licenses, and besides Red Rising, I didn't see any board games that existed as an intellectual property before the board game implementation. I was hoping to start a discussion on why that is. Will we never see Disney's Villainous or Harry Potter Hogwarts Battle here?

This was brought to my attention because as an exercise to learn the BGA programming system, I made a game implementation before getting permission from the publisher. I knew I might be wasting my time if I never got permission, and I'm okay with it. I learned a lot for future projects. I have since contacted the publisher, and they told me that it isn't as simple as negotiating between them, BGA, and myself, but also they must bring in permission, and also likely expense, to the original IP owners of the world in which the game is based, which was more hassle than they thought it was worth at this time. That makes sense, but also I would have guessed that digital rights would have already been discussed in the original contract. Maybe the person I corresponded with wasn't familiar with all of the details.

Has anyone else here contacted a publisher of a game that is based on an IP? Similar response?

I know Formula D has had similar issues. Asmodée was of course granting the license to, well, themselves since they own BGA, but they had surprising issues with the FIA. The FIA owns rights for the reproduction of real world circuits in Formula D !

I don't know how it ended, but apparently it was not possible to bring these circuits to BGA without their approval. So I guess this applies to every game with third party content. And I don't think big companies like Disney or Warner are likely to grant rights to BGA.