Warner Bros. reiterates plans to increase focus on free-to-play and live service games

Warner Bros. Discovery has again said that it sees the biggest growth opportunities in gaming in the free-to-play and live service spaces.

Speaking at a Morgan Stanley conference, JB Perrette, the company’s CEO of global streaming and games, said “the majority of our business revolves around four main forms of IP in games, which are all billion-dollar plus businesses themselves”.

They are Mortal Kombat, Game of Thrones, DC and Harry Potter. While last year’s Harry Potter spin-off, Hogwarts Legacy, was 2023’s best-selling game, this year’s Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice has failed to meet the company’s expectations.

“The challenge we’ve had is that our business historically there has been very triple-A console based and so, as you know, that’s a great business when you have a hit like Harry Potter, it makes the year look amazing, and then when you don’t have a release or unfortunately, we also have disappointments – we just released Suicide Squad this quarter which was not as strong – it just makes it very volatile,” said Perrette.

Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav said in December that the company was focused “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”.

Perrette reiterated this during this week’s Morgan Stanley conference.

“We think the opportunity for us, which again, this a multi-year [opportunity], because games is certainly a bit of a long cycle business too, but the opportunity is to take those four franchises and be able to develop a much more holistic approach, particularly around expanding into the mobile and multiplatform free-to-play space, which could give us a much better and consistent set of revenue, and you’ll see us launching later this year some mobile free to play games, which we hope will start building that.

“And then secondarily live services, so rather than just launching a kind of one and done console game, how do we develop a game around, for example, Hogwarts Legacy or Harry Potter, that is a live service where people can come today and live and work and build and play in that world on an ongoing basis?

“And so, we think we’ve got the franchises, we’ve got some of the greatest studio capabilities, and we have a roadmap and a strategic investment plan to try and build out that business, and we think there’s meaningful growth over the course of the next couple of years.”

It was announced on Monday that the Epic Games Store version of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has been delayed again at the last minute, from today to March 26.

It has also been confirmed that Suicide Squad’s first season of post-release content, which will include The Joker, will launch on March 28.