WB Games Will Focus on Always-On, Live Service for Its Biggest Franchises
WB Games is making some moves to grow its presence in live-service games, at least according to the company’s Q3 earnings call.
According to CEO David Zaslav, they’re going to focus on diving deep into increasing their presence, using some of their biggest, most well known IPs.
“Our focus is on transforming our biggest franchises from largely console and PC based with three-four year release schedules to include more always on gameplay through live services, multiplatform and free-to-play extensions, with the goal to have more players spending more time on more platforms,” he says, as quoted in the earnings call transcript.
Some of the franchises named include Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, and Batman. Mortal Kombat also came up, especially with the latest release in the series having sold well in the weeks since release.
The plans are certainly ambitious, and Zassav is clear that they are targeting profit. We’re used to these systems by now, but the intention is to make it irresistible to just keep buying more and more even after the box price.
“We are currently under scale and see significant opportunity to generate greater post purchase revenue,” he said.
WB isn’t a stranger to live-service games as a publisher, so it’s not coming from nowhere. Recent ventures include the delayed Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, which many responded to pretty negatively when that game was revealed to be a live- service title. WB is also behind the (temporarily) shuttered Multiversus , a Super Smash Bros-like crossover fighting title featuring WB characters like Batman, Bugs Bunny, and characters from Scooby Doo, Rick and Morty, and Game of Thrones. After release in Early Access and then open beta, it was shut down with a
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