It’s very easy to forget certain “failings” when a whole bunch of other failures are going on around you. After all, you can only remember so many busts at once, you know? When it comes to Warner Bros, they went from being one of the most beloved publishers of content across the spectrum to being one of the most hated businesses around because of the recent dealings, mergers, and bad decisions that they’ve made. Or, more accurately, that CEO David Zaslav has made ever since becoming CEO. He has hurt movies, TV shows, cartoons, and even video games! It truly seems to never end with him.
However, true to form, he’s attempting to “steer the ship” back to a “proper course,” and on a special financial call that IGN got wind of, he made it clear on the gaming side that four franchises would be the focus for the gaming arm of the company:
“We have four strong and profitable game franchises with loyal, global fans: Hogwarts Legacy, Mortal Kombat, Game of Thrones, and DC, in particular Batman. We are focusing our development efforts on those core franchises, with proven studios to improve our success ratio.”
There’s a lot to unpack with that statement, and not just on the Batman front, but that’s where we’ll start.
Zaslav is smart to go right to Batman, as that’s been the “money maker” across numerous generations of titles. Heck, Batman even helped start the LEGO superhero trend that even Marvel eventually got on board with. Then, there were the Arkham titles, which elevated the entire superhero gaming genre to the next level. However, with the third mainline game in the trilogy, and then the 2024 “follow-up” that featured the Suicide Squad, the quality dipped heavily. People often times refer to the trilogy as something that “peaked” at the second game and then had a huge dropoff.
The game with the Suicide Squad was a misfire before it ever launched because it had been given the direction by Warner Bros and Zaslav to become a live-service title, even though Rocksteady had never done such a title before. Sure enough, it bombed hard and cost the company over $200 million.
So, if they want to bounce back, they need to return to what made the Batman titles special, which, ironically, a recent VR release seems to have done. Recapture that feeling and then build off from there. As for the other franchises named, they just need to be true to them and not screw them up.
