Building the franchises at the center of gaming | David Haddad

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David Haddad, president of Warner Bros. Games, kindly complimented me on stage about building a community that came out for the GamesBeat Summit 2023 event. I joked that we were thinking about renaming the event “D3.”

He laughed and took this as a jab. After all, he’s on the board of the Entertainment Software Association, which runs the ill-fated E3 expo, which was canceled this year. I actually didn’t mean to broach that touchy subject so soon in our recent fireside chat. And I’ll get to that soon enough.

But we brought Haddad up on stage to talk about Hollywood and games not because of its seeming overnight success. Rather, we wanted to hear from him because he has been running the most successful game company inside a Hollywood entertainment studio for close to a decade.

The Warner Bros. Games business (often referred to as Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment) consists of 11 studios, 10 of which focus on making their own content across multiple platforms. The remaining studio provides backend support. It has about 2,500 people, and about 85% of them are focused on development. It publishes games on a global basis, and it licenses some of its game properties to others when it doesn’t have the expertise. While it sounds huge, I noted that the Call of Duty franchise has more game developers working on it.

And this year, Warner Bros. Games had a huge success with Hogwarts Legacy with more than $1 billion in revenues. Haddad the game from Avalanche Studio had sold 15 million units as of Q1 and it has (as of May) more than 19 million players in the game, including those with multiple accounts. Equally