The gaming department of Warner Brothers has caused some of the most painful flops in recent years: Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is considered a huge failure. The new game for Wonder Woman had to be discontinued while still in development. This has implications for their currently strongest gaming brand, the game for Harry Potter: Hogwarts Legacy 2.
What is going on at Warner Bros? The gaming department of Warner Bros, WBGames, has had to endure some catastrophic failures in recent months:
- Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is considered a textbook example of a failed service game. On Steam, it currently has peaked at just 500 players.
- Multiversus and Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions also fell far short of expectations. Multiversus started strongly, but has now lost almost all its players. The Quidditch game was already a failure at release and is turning into a total catastrophe.
- The new Wonder Woman project was discontinued during development.
Hogwarts Legacy 2 will not be a service game, says insider
This is now the consequence: The plan now seems to be to continue with what they are successful in: Hogwarts Legacy sold 34 million copies.
As the renowned video game journalist Jason Schreier reports (via YouTube), the consequence now is that Warner Bros. is turning away from the “Games as a service” model and developing games like the new Batman game and Hogwarts Legacy 2 with a different focus. The gaming journalist Jason Schreier, who is known for his good contacts in the gaming industry, says in a podcast:
Hogwarts Legacy 2 will not be a games-as-a-service game, the new Batman will not be a games-as-a-service game, and Wonder Woman also would not have become a games-as-a-service game. This is not a company that relies on games-as-a-service. They want to go for big brands.
Why service games now have such a bad reputation
What does this mean? “Games-as-a-service” is now a negatively connotated method of how games are developed: Originally, “games as a service” referred to something positive: games are further developed after release, receive expansions, regular patches, and updates. In the past, this was only how MMOs and MMORPGs were developed. Today, even classic single-player games are produced this way. A strategy game like Europa Universalis IV has been developed for 11 years and has received so many DLCs that it costs almost €400 on Steam to buy the complete game.
After some failures, “Games as a service” now appears to result in an unfinished product hitting the market, from which important parts have been cut out that are then later provided and sold at an extra cost. This creates the impression that even expensive games are being released as “unfinished and unpolished”.
Often the game is then not developed further as promised, but the project is discontinued while still in an unfinished state.
This has nothing to do with the original idea of “Games as a service”: Normally, games should be released that are complete at launch and can be played well, but improve over the years.
Successful MMORPGs like WoW are examples of such successful service games. But the recent titles from Warner Bros are examples of how not to do it.
Fans now hope that the decision will lead to Hogwarts Legacy 2 being released as a classic single-player role-playing game and that it will have an appropriate length and depth of gameplay at release, which will not be chopped up and delivered later: The 15 best free MMOs and MMORPGs on Steam
