In any case, this is the message that the leader conveys in his interview with the Axios site. While his year is going for the best thanks to the box of LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga (3.2 million sales in two weeks) and MultiVersus (more than 20 million players in one month), the boss of WB Games assures that its family of 11 studios is working peacefully today and that it is not threatened by the new management put in place on April 8, 2022. A management that has already been talked about, in particular for having canceled any screening and distribution of the film Batgirl when it was finished, or by stopping the international deployment of HBO Max in favor of another platform that is still uncertain. The fact is that Warner Bros. Discovery still has $49.1 billion in debt to pay.
But on the video game side, everything is going well, in the end. According to David Haddad, WB Games is making money and its teams have been supported as they should be, with no layoffs or cancellations coming from new management. No pressure either to release games early: the many postponements of Gotham Knights (October 21, 2022), Hogwarts Legacy: Hogwarts Legacy (February 10, 2023) and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League (2023) can attest to this.
And if mobile is not the company’s priority, as evidenced by the resale of Playdemic to Electronic Arts, WB Games still has a major title in the cards with Harry Potter: Magic Emerges, a game developed by NetEase Games which has already been a hit in China. In a recent interview with GamesBeat, we also learned that Game of Thrones: Conquest has been quietly approaching $1 billion in player spending since its debut in October 2017.
“I am convinced, even more now, that we have an essential role to play within the company. The management of Warner Bros. Discovery has expressed its strong belief that growing the games business and integrating it into the overall business strategy is essential“, comments David Haddad.