Jason Schreier made a surprising claim about the current state of WB Games.
As we recently reported, WB Games shocked the video game industry when they cancelled the Wonder Woman game, and also closed three game studios in Monolith Productions, Player First Games, and WB Games San Diego. Given the notoriety of WB Discovery’s current CEO, David Zaslav, it would be natural that gamers assumed that he was the reason that their games division is in turmoil.
But in the latest episode of Kinda Funny, Schreier revealed that the problems stemmed from far before Zaslav joined the company after Discovery’s merger with Warner Bros. in April 2022. His sources point the finger at David Haddad, who recently announced his exit from his position as the head of WB Games.
As Schreier explained, WB Games was thriving when Haddad first took over the games division in January 2015. As we checked for ourselves, Haddad came in just in time to oversee the releases of Mortal Kombat X, Batman Arkham Knight, and Lego Dimensions. Months before, WB Games also released Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor and Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham.
Schreier alleges that Haddad’s lack of true leadership led to the division making a complete 180 in the decade that he had been at the forefront. He claims Haddad was a classic example of management guilty of executive indecision. As Schreier puts it, Haddad refused to make calls, AKA big risky decisions, because making calls exposed him to risk. And those risks could mean that he could lose his job, so it was better for him to stay seated.
But because of his indecision, backed up by the rest of WB Games management, Monolith Productions and WB Games Montreal floundered with no games to show for it. WB Games would pretend to hear out their pitches for new games and not approve any of them in the time that Haddad was in charge.
And we can fill in some of the gaps ourselves on why WB Games made mistakes in other games and franchises. When the NetherRealm fandom came down on Mortal Kombat One, for example, more proactive leadership could have taken quicker action, if not to make sudden changes to the game, at least to address the fans and their concerns.
Subsequently, WB Games’ poor management of the marketing and promotion of Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League can be partly attributed to management requiring Rocksteady to make them a moneymaker, but lacking the conviction to defend the choices they made. They left it up to Rocksteady, who had been beloved by gamers for years, to take the blunt of the blame for them.
Schreier also explained that Haddad came from Vivendi, as well as various toy and entertainment companies, prior to WB Games. He decried Haddad’s MBA approach of avoiding decisions, and his lack of vision.
Schreier concluded:
“Having the wrong people in charge, who won’t make decisions, and had no vision for a really long time, can be cataclysmic.”
And so we understand that bad management in the video game industry can be more than the stereotypes of the greedy capitalists who overwork their staff, or the micromanagers who could keep projects like Duke Nukem Forever or Star Citizen go on extended development for years.
It can also come in the form of a high ranking executive, who’s afraid to take risks in business, and is willing to coast on the success of others. Subsequently, those kinds of managers can’t be relied upon to be able to turn around a business when the chips are down.
