Warner Bros Games has reaffirmed its plans to push into the live service, free-to-play and mobiles games market while relying less on the “very volatile” AAA console games business. Despite Hogwarts Legacy, a single-player experience without heavy microtransactions, launching to become 2023’s best-selling video game, WB Games still wants to double down on live service projects like Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League for its future plans.
Speaking at the recent Morgan Stanley Conference, the company’s CEO of global streaming and games, JB Perrette stated, “the majority of our business revolves around four main forms of IP in games, which are all billion-dollar plus businesses themselves.” The four franchises are Harry Potter, Mortal Kombat, DC and Game of Thrones.
Perrette goes on to state:
“The challenge we’ve had is that our business historically there has been very triple-A console based and so, as you know, that’s a great business when you have a hit like Harry Potter, it makes the year look amazing, and then when you don’t have a release or unfortunately, we also have disappointments – we just released Suicide Squad this quarter which was not as strong – it just makes it very volatile.”
Perrette says “the opportunity is to take those four franchises and be able to develop a much more holistic approach, particularly around expanding into the mobile and multiplatform free-to-play space, which could give us a much better and consistent set of revenue, and you’ll see us launching later this year some mobile free to play games, which we hope will start building that.”
WB Games says that it wants to move away from producing “one and done” games like Hogwarts Legacy and create free-to-play, mobile and live service titles that will ensure them a “consistent set of revenue.”
“And then secondarily live services, so rather than just launching a kind of one and done console game, how do we develop a game around, for example, Hogwarts Legacy or Harry Potter, that is a live service where people can come today and live and work and build and play in that world on an ongoing basis?”
It’s worth noting that the company’s latest venture into live service territory, Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, failed to meet the publisher’s expectations on top of a dwindling player count across all platforms. Additionally, the live service games market in the industry is far more volatile at the moment, looking back at failed projects like Marvel’s Avengers or the countless other live service games that were shut down in recent memory.
Suicide Squad‘s first post-launch season will release on 28 March that includes The Joker as the first playable DLC character.
Source: Video Games Chronicle
