Sony’s live service plans may have hit a speed bump, but Warner Bros. is going all in on ‘transforming our biggest franchises.’
Since it’s financial report season this week, with everyone from Nintendo to Take-Two revealing how well they’ve done over the last three months, there’s suddenly been a lot of talk about live service games, with Sony revealing they’ve cut their plans for 12 new titles by 2026 in half.
They are only delayed though, not cancelled, and given how lucrative games like Fortnite and Apex Legend can be it’s going to take a lot to knock other publishers off the bandwagon. As a case in point, Warner Bros. has stated that it plans to make live service games based on all its properties.
The announcement was made by controversial Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav, who didn’t confirm any specific titles but did talk about Mortal Kombat, Batman, Harry Potter, and Game Of Thrones as being $1 billion gaming franchises – which gives a pretty clear indication of what to expect.
Warner’s engagement with the games industry has always been highly volatile, sometimes releasing multiple titles a year and other times only one or two.
Despite the overall quality being good, the last several years have been particularly lean, but it has had huge success recently with Hogwarts Legacy and, to a lesser degree, Mortal Kombat 1.
Strangely, it’s never really leveraged the Game Of Thrones IP outside of mobile titles and it’s superhero output has slowed to a trickle. It’s now eight years since Batman: Arkham Knight, while last year’s Gotham Knights was a huge flop. A Wonder Woman game is supposedly in development, but it’s never been shown in public and there’s no sign of an Injustice 3.
‘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,’ said Zaslav, via Seeking Alpha.
‘Ultimately we want to drive engagement and monetisation of longer cycles and at higher levels. We are currently under scale and see significant opportunity to generate greater post purchase revenue.’
Zaslav has no experience in the games industry, so it’s unlikely he’s had much personal involvement in the decisions, but all it probably took was someone showing him how many people play games like Fortnite every day.
He doesn’t specifically say that Warner won’t make single-player games anymore, but he certainly implies that will no longer be the focus. Although things like a Hogwarts Legacy sequel are virtually guaranteed.
Warner has dabbled with live service games before, including various Mortal Kombat titles on mobile and Super Smash Bros. clone MultiVersus, which was initially popular but quickly faded away.
It’s most high profile involvement in live service games has been the debacle surrounding Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, which has been delayed multiple times and allegedly had all its microtransactions and loot boxes stripped out of it when Warner realised that the market was beginning to turn against such practices.
It doesn’t seem as if it’s learned much from that experience though and given these comments it’s going to be interesting to see exactly how it works once it’s finally released in February.
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