By Last year during a company Q3 earnings call, Warner Bros. Discovery chief David Zaslav announced plans to overhaul the video game division.
He says Warner Bros. Games “consistently enjoyed among the highest ROIs of any of our businesses” and operated with “comparable” operating margins to bigger game companies like Electronic Arts, Nintendo, Ubisoft, Take-Two Interactive, Sony’s PlayStation and Microsoft’s Xbox.
He also said four IPs in particular were valued at or over $1 billion apiece in the gaming world – “Harry Potter,” “Game of Thrones,” “Mortal Kombat,” and DC.
As a result Warners intends to double down on its franchises and a new feature piece in Variety goes in to how Zaslav and CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels see the gaming division as key to the company’s push to profitability.
Wiedenfels says the company is going to get more aggressive in exploiting the investment opportunities of this sector. That has led to a desire to make their prized IP deliver more than “one great hit every three or four years” according to global streaming and gaming chief JB Perrette.
Perrette tells the outlet: “We want it to be ‘always on.’ And the good news is the gaming space is lending itself to that” in reference to the rise of live service and mobile and free-to-play title games – even as there has been a lot of pushback in recent years that has led several high profile live-service games in the sector to crash and burn.
The piece says the focus shift means we can expect less console and PC-based games with years between releases and more titles like mobile title “Game of Thrones: Conquest” which are ‘always on’. Perrette adds new DC Studio chiefs James Gunn and Peter Safran will be a key part of their DC gaming strategy moving forward:
“Frankly, there hasn’t been as close a relationship between the studio and the games business as there should have been. And James is actually a gamer, so having someone who’s passionate about it is super helpful. [WB Games is] actively working with [Gunn and Safran] on the core franchises within the DC Universe.”
One potential tactic is incorporating live game titles into their SVOD services as live games have much smaller churn rates compared to video streaming platforms – thus adding them to a streamer like Max could potentially reduce people cancelling their subscription.
Perrette indicates any such plans however won’t begin to be looked at until late this year, or more likely 2025. Warner Bros. Games right now is focused on launching its “Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League” game on February 2nd.
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