WB Discovery Wants to License Franchises, Which Include Batman to Harry Potter and More, to Other Studios

ign.com:

Batman. Justice League. Harry Potter. Looney Tunes. Game of Thrones. The list of intellectual property owned by Warner Bros. Discovery is massive, and an awful lot of it seems ripe for being turned into a video game. If you're thinking WB's been a little slow to leverage that library, it sounds like the company's leadership agrees, and is looking not just to make more of its own games, but to license out some of its biggest franchises to other game studios in the future.

Today on the Warner Bros. Discovery Q2 earnings, call CEO David Zaslav and president of global streaming and games JB Perrette responded to a question about the "strategic value" of games to Warner Bros. given recent "uneven performance". The company had just reported gaming revenue down 41% year-over-year due to underperformance of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League compared to Hogwarts Legacy's massive success last year. Does WB see games as a core part of its portfolio?

Seems like the answer is yes. Both Zaslav and Perrette explained that they wanted to grow the gaming business, especially in the free-to-play space, which Perrette says can help balance out some of the ups-and-downs of the cyclical console industry. That's part of why WB acquired Player First Games, developer of Multiversus, earlier this year.

Zaslav followed up by noting that not only did WB want to keep leveraging its eleven studios, but that there's "also a lot of interest among others in coming to take advantage of some of that IP for gaming, which we're looking at."

Here's both of their answers in full below:

Perrette: We look at the evolution of the storytelling in interactive entertainment as a space and say it's one of the unique areas in media that is growing, both growing in terms of time spent, growing in terms of engagement, and growing in terms of revenue. And so we still see this as a huge opportunity for us. We know that our franchises, particularly in a world where the gaming industry-launching brand new franchises