The company is leaning into new strategies to “balance” its gaming business

Recent reports have suggested that gaming revenue for Warner Bros. Discovery has declined by 41% due to the weak performance of Suicide Squad :Kill the Justice League. The decline has played a part in the overall four-percent decrease across the studio’s revenue across all various departments.

There are yet to be exact figures provided regarding the overall earnings of the game, but from an earnings call in February, the chief financial offer Gunnar Wiedenfels had stated that the game “had fallen short of our expectations”.

One of the key reasons of failure was the immense success of Hogwarts Legacy from last year. This meant that most gamers were only playing Hogwarts Legacy and were uninterested in signing up for Suicide Squad.

However, another factor was of rifts within Rocksteady, during development. There were multiple reports of tumultuous development due to toxic cultures and constant shifts. The game also had a bad start due to multiple delays, after an infamous showing at PlayStation’s State of Play showcase in February 2023.

During an earnings call, the CEO David Zaslav and the president of global stream and games JB Perrette were questioned on the failing performance of the sector and new solutions.

Perrette has proposed promoting more free -to-play games to attract more consumers and Zaslav noted the possibility of licensing various franchises to other studios.

“We know that our franchises, particularly in a world where the gaming industry launching brand new franchises is getting harder and harder for a number of reasons, including IDFA deprecation and more challenges with marketing and customer acquisition,” Perrette said

“And that franchises like the ones that we have are in high demand, and can help in launching games. You still need a great game, and the reality is, we’ve had the unfortunate- in a short period of 12 months, we went from having the record year in 2023 with Hogwarts Legacy to unfortunately having the opposite side of that spectrum with Suicide Squad. And it is still the hit-driven nature of some of that business, but one of the areas we are particularly leaning into, which is about half of the $200 billion games business, is the free-to-play space.”

Perrette had later stated, that with this vision in mind , the company had acquired the MultiVersus developer Play First . The main aim was to strengthen their capability and reach more consumers within the free-to-play market.

On the other hand Zaslav added : “We have eleven studios here, and we have a lot of IP. And there’s also a lot of interest among others in coming to take advantage of some of that IP for gaming, which we’re looking at. Because as JB said, we need to get bigger, and the IP that we own and the value that it has in the gaming space is something we’re looking to take advantage of.”

Meanwhile Rocksteady has stood firm with the game Suicide Squad by launching its second season featuring new updates. It is yet to be seen as in how it changes the games fortune in the near future.