“Hey, child—Psst! Ya wanna purchase some… um, some kinda Smash Bros.-style brawler with a buncha cartoon characters? How a couple of dwell service Harley Quinn recreation? Where ya goin’ child, hey child I’m speaking!” So goes the primary scene of my unpublished script “Warner Bros. has a tough 2024 in video games,” which opens with panicked crowds fleeing the WB govt suites whereas the fits pursue, their pockets bulging with unsold pre-order bonuses.
Suicide Squad stands out as the poster youngster, with WB Games chalking up an eye-watering $200 million loss to the sport, however it now seems the entire Multiversus saga is liable for one other big dent within the stability sheet.
On a latest name discussing the corporate’s outcomes, Warner Bros. Discovery president and CEO David Zaslav and chief monetary officer Gunnar Wiedenfels mentioned that the $200 million writedown is now a $300 million writedown, and laid the blame squarely on Multiversus.
“We took one other $100 million plus impairment because of the underperforming releases, primarily MultiVersus this quarter,” mentioned Widenfels (thanks IGN), “bringing complete writedown year-to-date to over $300 million in our video games enterprise, a key issue on this yr’s studio revenue decline.”
Zaslav sought to mollify these on the shareholding aspect that WB does, in truth, “recognise [the games business] is considerably underperforming its potential proper now.” Revenues this quarter had been down 31% year-on-year, not least as a result of at this level in 2023 Hogwarts Legacy was on its option to changing into the best-selling recreation of the yr worldwide.
On the identical name Zaslav mentioned that WB can be “focusing our improvement efforts on these core franchises, with confirmed studios to enhance our success ratio.” Rocksteady was a reasonably confirmed studio to my thoughts, however no matter. The 4 franchises he recognized had been DC (“specifically Batman”), Hogwarts Legacy, Mortal Kombat, and Game of Thrones.
“We’re by among the worst—and it hasn’t been fairly on the gaming enterprise—however we’ve 4 video games which might be actually highly effective,” Zaslav says, including: “We’re going to go away from attempting to launch 10, 12, 15, 20 totally different video games. I feel we’ve an actual likelihood now with focus to have the gaming enterprise be steadier.”
Part of that could be the rumoured director’s reduce of Hogwarts Legacy, an unannounced mission that Rocksteady was moved onto after Suicide Squad’s business failure grew to become clear. One would additionally hope that, regardless of how huge the Suicide Squad misstep, WB will do the sensible factor with Rocksteady and get them knocking out one other best-in-class singleplayer Batman recreation.
As for poor outdated Multiversus… nicely, it hasn’t helped itself. The free-to-play brawler had a weird launch interval, first changing into accessible to play in early entry and beta releases in 2022, earlier than Player First Games withdrew the title from the market and after some vital reworks relaunched it in May this yr. The solely enthusiasm appeared to return from Warner Bros. itself, which just about instantly acquired Player First Games in July.
Multiversus is cross-platform so no correct participant counts can be found, however it’s fairly apparent issues aren’t going to plan. The rescue mission has been launched in earnest not less than, with Player First Games saying a brand new characteristic known as Fighter Road that can make it doable to earn all characters free of charge, one of many huge complaints amongst gamers. A comeback is all the time doable. But when the bosses are spreading across the blame and your title’s abruptly on the prime of the listing… you do fear that is all people.
