Warner Bros. chief executive officer and man who tosses finished projects into the bin for a tax write-off David Zaslav is calling out the WB Games business, saying that the interactive branch of the company needs to be more consistent in its releases.
During the company’s latest earnings call, while Zaslav was speaking on Warner Bros. Studios business, the branch that oversees film, TV and video game projects, he cited the games branch as the one that needs to pick up its slack.
“But even in an industry of hits and misses, we must acknowledge that our Studios business must deliver more consistently,” said Zaslav (per VGC). “This applies to our games business, which we recognise is substantially underperforming its potential right now.”
“We have four strong and profitable game franchises with loyal, global fans – Hogwarts Legacy, Mortal Kombat, Game of Thrones and DC, in particular Batman. We are focusing our development efforts on those four core franchises with proven studios to improve our success ratio.”
Warner Bros has previously expressed that it’ll be focusing on the four aforementioned franchises for the future of its video games business. But to say that WB Games is “underperforming” in any sense after Hogwarts Legacy was the best-selling game for 2023 smacks like gross misunderstanding of the games business.
Because if the goalpost of success for a Warner Bros game is to be on par with or to outsell Hogwarts Legacy, then WB Games will likely always be “underperforming its potential,” which is also just another way of saying “not good enough” to a team that clearly went above and beyond.
MultiVersus was even catching strays later in the call from chief financial officer Gunnar Wiedenfels, who blamed the platform fighter specifically for the games business not being as profitable as it was in 2023. Which, as you might recall from ten seconds ago, is the year that Hogwarts Legacy sold more than any other new video game released on the market.
Is there a timeline where Warner Bros releases a game that sells as well, if not better than Hogwarts Legacy every year so long as it continues publishing games? Sure, that could technically exist. Is this that exact timeline? Not very likely, especially if winning strategists like Zaslav and Wiedenfels are at the helm.
Source – [VGC]