Concord – one of many live service failures (Sony Interactive Entertainment)
The video games industry’s obsession with live service games seems to be coming to an end, as Warner Bros. admits it lost $300 million chasing Fortnite.
Given how much video games cost to make, publishers are always looking for ways to increase the odds of their games being a success, which usually means sequels or licensed titles that can avoid the risk of creating something entirely new.
Whenever there’s a new genre or bandwagon they also try and jump onto that, in the hope it will be a shortcut to success. Back in the early 2000s, every publisher made their own MMO, to rival World Of Warcraft, before eventually realising that there just wasn’t room in the market (or people’s free time) for more than a couple of successful ones.
20 years on and almost exactly the same thing has happened with live service games trying to chase the success of Fortnite. And after the failure of Suicide Squad, Concord, and MultiVersus it seems that big publishers are finally starting to give up.
Warner Bros. already admitted it lost $200 million on the disastrous Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League and now it’s revealed that Super Smash Bros. style fighting game MultiVersus, which is also a free-to-play live service game, has cost them another $100 million.
The push for live service titles – despite single-player game Hogwarts Legacy being by far the company’s biggest hit – was driven by Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, who has no games industry experience and is not the sort of person to admit mistakes in public.
Nevertheless, in the company’s latest financial call he said that Warner now intends to make less video games overall and concentrate on just four franchises.
‘We have four strong and profitable game franchises with loyal, global fans – Hogwarts Legacy, Mortal Kombat, Game Of Thrones and DC, in particular Batman,’ said Zaslav.
‘We are focusing our development efforts on those four core franchises with proven studios to improve our success ratio.’
Although there was no talk about MultiVersus being shutdown that was certainly the implication; while emphasising Batman over DC was no doubt a nod to the failure of Suicide Squad, and to a lesser extent the Batman-less Gotham Knights.
In fact, it’s been almost a decade now since a big budget, non-VR Batman video game, which seems a baffling state of affairs to be in. Although the talk of using ‘proven studios’ does increase the chances of Arkham Asylum creators Rocksteady working on a new title.
Hogwarts Legacy 2 is already in development and while soft reboot Mortal Kombat 1 fared notably worse than other recent entries there’s no doubt another one already underway.
The only mystery is what Warner might be planning for Game Of Thrones, which has never had a big budget console adaptation. It might seem an obvious fit for Shadow Of Mordor developer Monolith Productions but they’re currently working on a single-player …read more
Source:: Metro
