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The good news out of Warner Bros. Games, according to a new Bloomberg report, is that after the flop of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, Rocksteady Studios is looking to make a new singleplayer Batman game. The bad news, however, is pretty much everything else.
It’s been a rough year for Warner. Hogwarts Legacy was a huge success, but the multiplayer Harry Potter game Quidditch Champions hasn’t added up to much—there are currently just 90 people playing it on Steam—while Multiversus fizzled out quickly and recently halted development, and Suicide Squad also tanked badly and threw in the towel after just one year of post-launch content. Those failures cost a lot of money: In November 2024, Warner announced a $100 million loss “due to the underperforming releases, primarily MultiVersus this quarter,” which landed on top of a $200 million loss driven by the failure of Suicide Squad.
The future is not much brighter, according to the Bloomberg report. Sources say the company has already put more than $100 million into the Wonder Woman game announced in 2021, but it was reportedly rebooted and given a new director in early 2024 and remains years away from release, if it makes it to release at all—apparently even that’s not a certainty at this point. WB Games Montreal had apparently hoped to work on a major update to Gotham Knights—another superhero flop—but were told no; the studio eventually began work on a game based on the Flash, but that was scrapped after the 2023 film bombed at the box office.
The one clear bright spot amidst all this confusion is that Rocksteady, having tried its hand in the live service shooter genre with Suicide Squad, is now looking to return to the work its known for. Rocksteady earned acclaim for its singleplayer Batman: Arkham games, and as a side note each of the Arkham games, the most recent of which is nearly 10 years old, currently has a higher concurrent player count on Steam than Suicide Squad. But that ambition is years away from fruition.
Numerous sources laid the blame for Warner’s videogame troubles on a lack of coherent direction under the leadership of CEO David Haddad, who announced in January that he’s stepping down. JB Perrette, CEO and president of global streaming and games for Warner Bros. Discovery, said the company will “get right back to profitability in 2025,” but acknowledged it will take longer to get back to levels of profitability the company expects.
“It will take two to three years to rebuild, reset to levels we want to be at,” Perrette said. “But the bounce back is immediate as far as going from loss-making to profitability.”
So there’s a light of hope for fans of the Arkham games that maybe lessons have been learned, and some proper new Bat-action will be in hand someday. It’s no guarantee, of course: Recall that Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson very recently indicated after the failure of Dragon Age: The Veilguard to meet expectations—not a flop, just not as big a number as the C-suite wanted—that live service games are what people really want, and it’s possible that whoever takes over from Haddad will reach the same conclusion, especially if we see one or two more breakout live service hits over the next year or so. Whatever happens, the only thing we can say for sure at this point is that it’s not going to happen anytime soon.
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Kurt Indovina
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