WB Games: Multiversus flopped, focus on other brands

WB Games hasn’t had a particularly lucky hand in the last few months, apart from Hogwarts Legacy. Now things are changing so that things can go up again in the future.

As immensely successful as Hogwarts Legacy was, WB Games really dug in the toilet when it came to other brands. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was a mega-flop that cost the company around $200 million, and as it turns out, there’s another dollar grab.

According to the current financial report, the free-to-play brawler Multiverses was also quite a shot in the oven. Although it’s definitely a good game, the title still fell far short of expectations commercially. According to reports, the title is tearing another 100 million hole in the publisher’s coffers. WB Games’ attempts to establish something in the live service sector have therefore failed resoundingly.

Chief Financial Officer Gunnar Wiedenfels said: “We took an additional $100 million in impairment charges due to underperforming releases, particularly MultiVersus, this quarter, bringing year-to-date write-offs in our games business to over $300 million “This is a decisive factor in the studios’ decline in profits this year.”

It should be clear that this will not be without consequences and so WB Games wants to focus on the brands that have at least been successful so far, including Hogwarts Legacy, for which a sequel has already been confirmed.

Warner Bros. Discover CEO David Zaslav said: “We’ve been through some of the worst times – and it hasn’t been pretty for the gaming business – but we have four games that are really strong and have a real fan base that loves them, and we will focus primarily on these four. We’re going to go from launching 10, 12, 15, 20 different games. I think we now have a real opportunity to make the gaming business more stable through focus. We have four strong and profitable gaming franchises with loyal, global fans: Hogwarts Legacy, Mortal Kombat, Game of Thrones and DC, particularly Batman. We are focusing our development efforts on these core franchises and partnering with proven studios to improve our success rate.”

So no more experiments, but back to what has worked in the past? Sounds good. Hogwarts Legacy was a huge success and Rocksteady going back to the single-player Batman roots doesn’t exactly sound like a stupid idea either.