After the failure of Suicide Squad, Warner Bros. is moving away from AAA Single Player games and is focusing on Live-Service Games.
JB Perrette, head of gaming at Warner Bros. Discovery, calls AAA singleplayer games “sensitive.”
The best-selling game of 2023 was Hogwarts Legacy. However, despite the single-player game selling 22 million copies, publisher Warner Bros. Discovery will be steering its efforts away from single-player AAA console games and toward free-to-play games, real-time update services, and mobile releases, according to a Morgan Stanley speaker, in which Warner Bros. Discovery gaming chief JB Perrette spoke about the company's plans for the future.
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“The problem we face is that our business historically… has been very much based on AAA console titles and so, you know, that’s a great argument when you have a hit title like Harry Potter, it makes the year look amazing,” Perrette said. “And when you don’t have a release or unfortunately, we also have disappointments — we just released Suicide Squad this quarter which wasn’t that strong — it just makes things very sensitive.” Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was released on January 30th, and by February 23rd, CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels announced that the game “did not meet our expectations” during a conference call with executives.
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Perrette said that going forward, the company will focus more on mobile, streaming services , and free-to-play games that revolve around “our four core IPs in games, which are each billion-dollar businesses.” These are Harry Potter, DC, Mortal Kombat , and Game of Thrones. This plan to refocus on genres like streaming services echoes statements made by Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav back in November, though one major thing has changed. Suicide Squad has actually been released and has been called a flop by the company.
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While Perrette says that this failure is part of the reason for the shift in gaming strategy, this shift fails to acknowledge why Suicide Squad failed. Even though Suicide Squad is a AAA console title, it failed because of the corruption of real-time news services that crept into the otherwise functional third-person action game. Warner Bros. is essentially holding onto the element of Suicide Squad that led to its failure. In a time when research shows that over 500 studios are working on games with real-time news services, it seems less likely that any publisher wanting a slice of that sweet, sweet money will be able to deliver a game that truly captivates players. The result will likely be: more failed games that fall short of expectations and die within years or even months.
Source: kotaku.com
