Warner Bros. Might Be Right To Back Live-Service Over Single-Player

There are two basic ways in which games make money. Firstly, they sell copies. You pay money one time and get a game, to do with as you wish. This is how gaming, and most forms of art and media, have always worked. Whether you're buying a book or a painting or a ticket or an album, you pay money and get a thing. So you need to make more money selling the thing than it costs to make and market the thing in order to make a profit. But these days, there is another way in which games make money, and it is perhaps the most disruptive development ever to happen to gaming.

This would be the introduction of battle passes, seasonal events, lootboxes, and all that Games as a Service mumbo jumbo that we call live-service. With a live-service game, you can keep making profit forever. You might sell at a lower price point than the games you just sell once for good money, maybe your live-service game is even free. And you might have a smaller playerbase too. But so long as you get enough of this smaller contingent of players happy to regularly pay a little bit of money and stick around for the long haul, you'll make far more profit than you ever could through the standard 'sell for cash' one and done method.

In an ideal world, this would be a utopia. It would mean games were cheaper and we would only pump money in when we wanted to or could afford it, while the cons♍tant revenue stream would inspire greater risk-taking as the chances of an expensive flop would theoretically be lessened. Unfortunately, we do not live in a utopia.

Why Is Warner Bros. Doubling Down On Live-Service?

harley quinn lying down in suicide squad kill the justice league — via Rocksteady

What mostly happens is these live-service games don't feel like they were designed to be live-service, and so end up feeling hollow and repetitive, in the vain hope that someone somewhere will pour enough money into them. Worse is when they're made by studios known for single-player experiences or have a stellar IP attached that is wasted in this pursuit of immense profit. This was the case with Anthem, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Marvel's Avengers, and 168澳洲幸运5🃏开奖网:Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League - AKA the holy trinity at the church of latter day live-service failures. But while EA FC, Fortnite, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Call of Duty make enough money to justify two or three or ten projects cratering so long as you eventually find a golden goose that defies biology by also being a cash cow, studios will keep crashing ⛎and burning.

This is why it's less surprising than it seems that Warner Bros. Discovery CEO and president of streaming and g♔ames, J.B. Perrette, wants to push on with live-service. Warner Bros. will have been disappointed by Suicide Squad's sales, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:lack of player retention, and critical reception, and only recently watched 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Gotham Knights fizzle as people were wary of the percentile upgrades closely associated with the battle pass economy. Warner Bros. also oversaw the biggest selling game of 2023 (mathematically the best year for gaming in two💫 decades) in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Hogwarts Legacy.

It would make sense to look at these numbers and realise live-service is a near impossible market to break into, while single-player games are frequently successful and tend to be highly popular. But as much as I hate to admit it, what Perrette says makes a lot of sense too, so long as you only care about profit and not the quality of your games or the liveliho𝔍odsꦚ of your developers.

Single-Player Is Not As Safe As It Seems

hogwarts legacy player character next to house elf and prof weasly

Hogwarts Legacy sold in such unimaginable figures because it's a 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Harry Potter game. Warner Bros. owns a lot of things, but nothing with the pull of Harry Potter. That's because short of Pokemon, nothing has the pull of Harry Potter. The basic interpretation of the numbers might be that Warner Bros. should make more games like Hogwarts Legacy, but whether it chooses Looney Tunes or Scooby-Doo or 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Game of Thrones or 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Mortal Kombat or Barbie or even DC, it has nothing that people love the way t🐼hey love Harry Potter.

Other Harry Potter games, be they Hogwarts Legacy 2 or something else, will doubtless be greenlit in the wake of these sales figures, or perhaps already have. But Perrette is mainly concerned with making a live-service Harry Potter title, saying "How do we develop a game around, for example, Hogwarts Legacy or Harry Potter, that is a live service where people can live and work and build and play in that world on an ongoing basis?". Plus with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:around the franchise's neck, it's not a horse you bet the house on. There will be 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:other live-service failuᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚres from Warner Bros., which will likely cause job losses, as well as resulting in years of wasted work in the name of something that isn't worthy of its IP or the effort expended. But if one, just one, hits, then all the losses are worth it.

I'm not happy about this news. I don't even expect Warner Bros. to find that hit when the company cannot let go of old trends or disguise its money-grubbery very well. Ultimately I still think this is the wrong path for the company to walk when it feels more and more like audiences are sick of interlopers and the live-service bubble has burst, with only those on the scene before the closed shop able to rake in the cash. But it's not as brainless as it has been billed as - it's just a sign of the times.