In News Shocking No One, Warner Bros. Still Plans To Expand On F2P Live Service Games

Back in November, during an earnings call, WB Games shared plans to begin focusing on free-to-play live service games based on its stronger IPs. During that call, CEO David Zaslav stated that the company planned to transform its “biggest franchises from largely console and PC based” games with release schedules that take three to four years per game to “free-to-play extensions with the goal to have more players spending more time on more platforms”.

Recently, the company’s CEO of Global Streaming and Games, JB Perrette, reiterated those plans at the Morgan Stanley conference. According to Video Games Chronicle, he noted that the bulk of WB’s business “revolves around four main forms of IP in games” and that each are billion-dollar businesses. Those IPs include Mortal Kombat, Game of Thrones, DC, and Harry Potter.

He goes on to discuss the fact that when dealing with console games based on these IPs, there is a risk that the game may not do as well as hoped. The most recent examples of this are the Harry Potter game doing well, while Suicide Squad failed to meet expectations.

Rather than spending years developing a single game and dropping it in hopes of making money off of the sales, Warner has decided that focusing instead on multiplatform free-to-play games that players spend a lot of time in will give them “a much better and consistent set of revenue”.

Translation, they’ll probably make more money in the long run off of microtransactions than they will one-off sales.