WARNER Bros Discovery released Hogwarts Legacy early last year. A single-player game with no microtransactions and no live service components, it became 2023’s best-selling game. It sold over 24 million units with a retail sales gross of US$1 billion (RM4.74 billion).
On Jan 30 this year, the company released Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, a multiplayer, always-online, live service game. The game received middling reviews and poor sales.
By Feb 23, Warner Bros Discovery CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels said the game had “fallen short of expectations”, and by March 4, only about 200 people were still playing the game.
Despite the statistics, Warner Bros Discovery has decided to abandon what made Hogwarts Legacy a success and will move towards free-to-play, live service and mobile releases, like Kill the Justice League.
Warner Bros Discovery global streaming and games head JB Perrette revealed this at a recent speaking event. He also claimed that the company plans to execute this new focus on their “four main forms of intellectual property (IP) in games, which are all billion-dollar-plus businesses”.
The IPs are DC Comics, Harry Potter, Mortal Kombat and Game of Thrones.
Missing the forest for the trees, Warner Bros doubling down on what made Kill the Justice League a failure is par for the course. According to an industry survey in Griffin Gaming Partners and Rendered VC’s 2023 Game Development Report, over 500 studios are working on live-service games.
In a world where 500 live service games are competing for the attention and time of players, a majority of those games will inevitably – in the words of Warner Bros – fall short of expectations.
