While 2023 was an extremely high point for Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment – enough so that its release even outperformed that year’s Call of Duty – the following 2024 has also been the radical opposite of that. Since the release of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, it has been easy to point out the fallout for the firm. In one report, the game cost the publisher roughly $200 million in losses.
And although the firm still stands backing the title, it is evident no promised support it to arrive followed what its already on the roadmap for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. More recently, it appears that Rocksteady Studios is already transitioning to its next unannounced project internally. The team was also met with layoffs at the same time.
In a new development at the recently held Bank of America conference, which TweakTown transcribed, Warner Bros. still sees the value in video games as one of its “strategic assets” alongside other ventures the firm is already invested in.
It actually has been the area that has been dragging down the studio performance in the first half of this year. If you exclude games, everything else would have been flat or up, in aggregate. That is as much a reflection of what’s going on this year–we’ve had one miss with Suicide Squad–but it’s also a reflection of one of the strongest years ever last year. That’s the important point.
Yes, our gaming business is a strategic asset for Warner Bros. Discovery. There’s no question about it. We’ve seen with Hogwarts Legacy what the team is able to do, what our IP is able to do. The combination of those capabilities and our content IP can lead to the greatest game in the history of the company, the greatest console game of last year.
Gunnar Wiedenfels, Warner Bros. Discovery CFO
“To your point, it is just like the film business, a hit-driven business, actually even more so because to some extent the investments are greater, the development times are greater, and it’s unfortunate that we’ve had the two in sequence now, one of the bigger misses following one of the greatest hits,” Wiedenfels further explains.
Currently, plans at Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment remains to be in the air. While reports did surface suggesting that it will sell off its talent to other companies, there is a separate instance in which CEO David Zaslav expressed licensing its IPs to third-party developers rather than in-house development continuing the direction its heading. You can read the full report by heading here.
What are your thoughts on Warner Bros. current stance in gaming?
