Warner Bros. Intends to Leverage Its IPs and Make More Games, License Franchises to Outside Studios

Warner Bros. Discovery intends to leverage its intellectual properties and publish more video games based on its biggest franchises, the company said at its second-quarter earnings call on Wednesday. In addition to developing games in-house, Warner Bros. is also looking to license its IPs out to other studios. Warner Bros.' Hogwarts Legacy, based on the Wizarding World IP owned by the company, was the best-selling game of 2023, but few WB properties have been utilised to their fullest potential in the games medium.

During the Q&A section of Warner Bros. Discovery Q2 2024 earnings call (as first reported by IGN), CEO David Zaslav said there was “a lot of interest” among outside parties to turn Warner Bros. IPs into video games. “We have 11 studios here, and we have a lot of IP,” Zaslav said during the call. “And there's also a lot of interest among others in coming to take advantage of some of that IP for gaming, which we're looking at,” he added.

JB Perette, CEO and president of global streaming and games, also said that Warner Bros. franchises were in “high demand” and could help launch new games. The executive also identified the free-to-play segment in gaming as a focus area for the company that has seen mixed results with its triple-A first-party titles.

Last year, Hogwarts Legacy, based on the popular Harry Potter franchise, sold over 22 million copies, becoming the biggest game of 2023. In 2024, however, Warner Bros. Games released Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, which turned out to be a critical and commercial failure, leading to a 41 percent drop in Warner Bros.' gaming revenue in the second quarter of 2024.

“You still need a great game, and the reality is... in a short period of 12 months, we went from having the record year in 2023 with Hogwarts Legacy to unfortunately having the opposite side of that spectrum with Suicide Squad,” Perette said during the earnings call.

Zaslav and Perette were responding to a question on the “uneven performance” of WB's games over the last couple of years, the “strategic value” of video games for the conglomerate and whether it viewed games as a core part of its massive portfolio.

While Warner Bros. Games, part of the conglomerate's Global Streaming and Interactive Entertainment unit, has published games based on popular Warner Bros. franchises like Batman and Harry Potter, a number of big properties like Game of Thrones and Superman remain underutilised when it comes to the interactive medium.

According to Zaslav, the company needs to change that and maximise the potential of its IPs as video games. “... we need to get bigger, and the IP that we own and the value that it has in the gaming space is something we're looking to take advantage of,” he said responding to the query.

At its third-quarter earnings call in November 2023, Warner Bros. had said that it would transform its biggest franchises into live service games, with a focus on extended the life cycles of its releases. “Ultimately we want to drive engagement and monetization of longer cycles and at higher levels,” Zaslav had said at the time. “We are currently under scale and see significant opportunity to generate greater post-purchase revenue.”

WB placed its biggest bet on the live service model earlier this year when it released Rocksteady's Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, with planned post-launch content drops. The game, however, faced criticism over its live service model and underwhelming sales resulted in Warner Bros. taking a $200 million loss on the title. In our own review, we felt the game was crippled by its decision to move away from Rocksteady's expertise in single-player narrative-focussed titles.

In March this year, however, Warner Bros. reiterated its commitment to the live service model of games despite the sub-par critical and commercial performance of Suicide Squad.