WB Games Wants To Focus More On Live Service Games

Suicide Squad team picture

WB Games – the publisher behind games like Mortal Kombat 1, Gotham Knights, and Lego Star Wars – has had its ups and downs in recent years, with a few games that, to say the least, didn’t quite land as perhaps it had hoped. In an earnings call today, Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav laid out the company’s plans to maximize its returns in gaming, and it’s certainly raised some eyebrows.

During the earnings call, Zaslav mentioned that the company had many big properties under its belt, like Batman and the DC universe, Mortal Kombat, and Game of Thrones, but said the company could be doing more with them. To that end, his plan is apparently to make sure games built on these properties are always extracting dollars from pockets.

That’s right, folks, WB Games wants to focus more on live service games. It’s a rallying cry we’ve heard from executives from all the corners of the globe, so WB isn’t exactly unique in this regard, but it’s always surprising to see one lay it out on the table so clearly.

Here’s what Zaslav said:

“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. Ultimately we want to drive engagement and monetization of longer cycles and at higher levels.”

Look at that, it’s got all the buzzwords. Always on, live services, free-to-play, engagement, monetization — all the hits. Basically, WB Games wants you playing its games for longer, spending more money on them, and being connected to the internet the entire time.

This shouldn’t really come as a surprise to anyone, in fact we’ve already seen it happen Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League for the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. That game is a sequel to the excellent single-player Batman: Arkham series, set not long after the events of Arkham Knight. Unlike those games, however, Suicide Squad is a live service co-op game with more numbers-go-up gameplay and battle passes than you can shake a stick at.

Sure, you could play Suicide Squad alone, with bots filling in for your teammates, but the core premise is that you play online, with other people, and pay for a battle pass and microtransactions and all that junk. It’s a far cry from the Arkham games that came before it, and boy did fans notice — the game’s gameplay premiere was so poorly received the game was pushed back by almost a year.

In the meantime, look forward to hearing about, I dunno, Lego Battle Royale or something.