Warner Bros. Admits MultiVersus Underperformed, Contributing to Another $100 Million Hit to Revenue in Its Games Business

ign.com:

Free-to-play Smash Bros.-style brawler MultiVersus has significantly underperformed, publisher Warner Bros. Discovery has admitted, contributing to a further $100 million writedown for the company’s games business in 2024.

Warner Bros. Games acquired MultiVersus developer Player First Games in July just two months after the game relaunched on PS4, PS5, PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X and S following early access and open beta releases throughout 2022 and 2023.

"Our team is excited to join the Warner Bros. Games family, and we feel that this will be great for MultiVersus overall,” Huynh said at the time. “We are working to make the MultiVersus game experience the best it can be and having our development team integrated with the publisher is optimum for the players."

However, speaking in a recent financial call, Warner Bros. Discovery President and CEO David Zaslav and Chief Financial Officer Gunnar Wiedenfels said MultiVersus' failure had added another $100 million to the $200 million writedown the company's games business had already suffered earlier this year.

"... we recognise [the games business] is substantially underperforming its potential right now," Zaslav said.

Wiedenfels added more detail: "We took another $100 million plus impairment due to the underperforming releases, primarily MultiVersus this quarter, bringing total writedown year-to-date to over $300 million in our games business, a key factor in this year’s studio profit decline."

According to SteamDB, at the time of this article’s publication MultiVersus had just 686 concurrent players, with a 24-hour peak of 1,741 concurrent players. MultiVersus’ all-time peak of 153,433 concurrent players was set over two years ago, before the game was pulled offline and overhauled. Microsoft and Sony do not make player numbers public.

What this all means for MultiVersus remains to be seen, but earlier this year, after Warner Bros. admitted the failure of Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League contributed