Warner Bros. Says It's Focused On Transforming Its "Biggest Franchises" Into Live Services

Nope. I will continue to ignore such manipulative, soulless mining of human beings. And they will continue to make gajillions screwing their customers.

Honestly it's already kind of completely strangled the life out of Mortal Kombat 1 for me, the game just feels so hollow and empty. It's fun to play but it's just so nothing, I don't think I'm even going to bother with the new Invasions season or with checking out Omni-Man when he comes out.

Why don't they focus instead on making good games that don't try to nickle and dime people?

Gosh but why do they have to “transform” game series people already like into live service? Make new ones at least man.

Oh right money.

Yeah, it shows.

What bothers me most, is how they will get away with it, too.
For every person like myself, rushing to comments sections to say "not me, I won't buy into it!" there are two others who will spend money on these live services games when nobody's looking, and two average Jamie Doe citizens who don't know about this stuff and buy their kid V Bucks (and other digital currencies).

What could possibly go wrong? 🤪

sniff sniff what’s that smell? Burnt rubber? Did something crash?

@HammerKirby Because honest business doesn't look as profitable to shareholders.

That’s a big yikes.

All I wanted was a Superman game but not anymore if this is how they are doing things.

And that’s gonna end so well

"We are focused on more people giving us more money more often."

Sounds awful. Good thing I don't care about them.

Zaslav’s already proven he can fail at the highest level. Funny to see him talk about video games.

Honestly though, I think we’ll see the lines blurred between live services and single-player one and done experiences. I just finished Gotham Knights (it’s bizarrely really good) and I noticed the similarities between that and the newer Assassin’s Creed games where they build a game that’s able to be finished on day 1 but the structure lends itself to have content bolted on. I don’t mind it as long as it flows naturally.

David Zaslav sounds like a wonderful, intelligent human being that understands the gaming industry and people who like to play video games

I don't need my games provided to me as a service lol. I suppose next, companies will be thinking they are doing us a favour and we should all be grateful...

Booooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

👎

There's no hope for western gaming isn't it, all becoming live service hell. Oh well, there's always japanese, nintendo, and retro gaming for me. And I guess western indie games is still okay.

I don't even bother with western AAA games now, including sony 1st party games, since they're western (california) company now 😕

WB is the worst of the worst, and have been for ages. I'm not sure why people would act shocked about any of this.

And.. I lost all interest in their future games.

@Nancyboy every company is focused on this except nintendo. the only way to enact change is to vote with your wallets. and yeah, that might mean more layoffs as companies come to grips with what people will and won't tolerate... i say all of this as someone in the industry who could easily be affected if the next version of our game doesn't do well.

I'm so sick of seeing David Zaslav making nearly every form of entertainment worse. Like I thought SE was late on the live service bandwagon, but David Zaslav is here to fail some more!

I understand the reasoning behind making live service games from a financial standpoint. They can be a great source of money. As much as we hate them.

But what these higher ups don’t realise is that live service games require commitment. We can manage a couple of the ones we like, but there is no way we can keep up with every game if they were all live service. One or two may make money, sure, but there’s gonna be a bunch that will die out because not enough people can make the time to play them!

Even if the internet liked live service, we simply can’t keep up. It’s hard enough keeping up with one! It feels less fun and more like work in some cases…

TLDR, even if people liked live service, putting all your eggs in one basket is incredibly stupid

No, thanks, I have no interest in live service games. I respect games and companies, so I want to be a respected customer, not an ATM they think they can draw more and more money out of, so all I get is more soulless and more grindy games.

@LadyCharlie similar to the new COD game. Im telling my friends at work that im not getting it as its been rated the worst campaign in cod history and was origionally DLC for MWII but they decided to charge £70 for it instead.... 4 of them went and pre ordered 🤷‍♂️ you can lead a horse to water but you cant stop it buying COD 😂

Please never stop using this thumbnail

On topic, this is just a yikes from me, and I hope they don't insert this stuff/online requirements into the upcoming Batman Arkham trilogy port.

Well, there's still Wintendo. I'll take my wins where I can get them.

Warner Bros. Says It's Focused On Transforming Its "Biggest Franchises" Into A Smooth Paste Into the Ground Until Their Game Division Get’s Consolidated Off.

Love that you guys keep using that thumbnail. Hillarious.

Warner Brothers games are a big no. MK11 was the last one for me and I'm not supporting them in any way especially with how incredibly inept David Zaslav has been with HBO I can only see the games devision being more money grubbing. Bet next we'll hear they have this new concept of loot boxes.

Do what you want, Warner Bros. I've not bought any of your games, or indeed any other of your products, for a long time anyway. And I've no intention to change any time soon.

I don't take lying straight to my face kindly.
"Gameplay first" my a$$.
Live service has always been monotization first.
I can think of two exceptions but in 99% of the time "live service" is just as toxic as "online casinos"

Haha those executives just don't get it . only 1 out of 20 live service games do work all the others just cost hundreds of millions. Games like Fortnite are not reproduceable. Epic had a huge portion of luck with the game too.
I wish them good luck, since I rarely buy games von WB anyways I will not miss a lot.

how about make good games, istead of trying to chase a dead trend, Nintendo is facing several challenges in trying to adapt it franchises to a live service format, even Sega have to cancel Hyenas(they bigest hope for a live service game)

This comment feels even worse knowing they just released a great non-GaaS game this year in Hogwarts Legacy to record profits. Plus the seemingly inevitable failure that Suicide Squad looks like it's going to be...just a head scratcher how the lesson this guy took from all that is "Let's follow the model of the thing that doesn't look like it will work out!"

Ironic given that Warner Bros' biggest video game launch ever by a wide margin is Hogwarts Legacy, which is a single-player open-world RPG with no live-service elements whatsoever. Prior to Hogwarts, their biggest game launch was the Batman Arkham games, which were single-player open-world games with no live service elements.

Meanwhile, Warner Bros' biggest live service game, Multiversus, was massively popular for about 15 minutes and then proceded to collapse so hard that it was discontinued (for the time being). Also, Mortal Kombat 1 is currently underperforming and Suicide Squad looks to be a historic failure comparable to the recent failures of the DC cinematic universe movies.

I love and hate games that fund themselves with sales of skins etc. I never change the appearance even if it's free I wouldn't, unless there is beneficial reason to change then I never do. So games of this nature are free for me, I have never paid a penny to play many hours of Fortnite.
My issue is that they do those manipulative practises to my child which I think stinks. For adults I feel the buyer should always be aware of what they are getting into, and in most part responsible for their own actions. But that is not the case for children which is often the area that they push this the hardest.

No thanks. Take those resources and just make sequels or 1.5 style expansion packs. Slight gameplay adjustments for 5-15$ dlc packs is not appealing to me in the slightest.

David Zaslav is a ****. Warner Bros. has been tossed around like a prom date this past decade and still ended up with the pervert creep bully in the end. No happy endings here.

The most endangered species: the HONEST MAN, Will still survive annihilation, Forming a world, state of integrity. Sensitive, open and strong.

Boo hiss.

Take your “game service” and shove it. 😤
Not everything can be or should be Fortnite.

I would gladly forget all about WB games now except I seem to recall they bought the rights to Atari/Midway’s stable of games like Gauntlet, Paperboy, Robotron, Smash TV, and Rampage. I guess rather than release a decent collection of arcade ports now, they’ll do a subscription service with microtransactions if you want CRT filters or taté mode.

Retro gaming seems more appealing every year…

That's a world I definitely don't want to live in.

Screw GaaS.

Yeah, I can’t really see an upside to this. I can maybe understand one or two live-service games, but making it your entire business just seems tone-deaf, not to mention somewhat limiting.
Hopefully this is a line of thought that goes nowhere.

Corpos gonna corpo.

They are releasing a full on AAA game next week, optimized to run at a very reasonable file size and looks good running on a potato. So how's about we ignore that monumental feat and get back to milking customers with Micro's eh!?

Last WB game I've bought was LEGO City Undercover, both on Wii U and Switch, but I consider the Wii U version a Nintendo game (as in it is the more stable of the two) while the Switch version a WB game, and seeing how buggy it still is, I'm guessing this is a constant with their games.

Good thing they haven't bothered doing games I'd like to see based on Looney Tunes, Tiny Toons or Animaniacs. I was considering getting the recent Batman Arkham games on Switch, but probably not anymore.

WB who? ive been ignoring such publishers for as long as i can remember. ✌️

I wonder if dev costs have gotten unmanageable for standard games. With Gaas you can bail if it doesn’t make money but short of cancellation for standard games you gotta hope the market accepts a game and you get your money back.

@Alpha008 This is exactly right. Live Service games are a commitment and there is only so much time in the audience to go around. I never even got into Splatoon 3 due to time, and that's one of the most innoccuous live-service style games around!

They did the same with Hollywood blockbusters too. It was one thing when one or two a year came out - people would go see them. But when 12 movies a year all have budgets of $500 Million plus and are expected to break $1 Billion to be considered profitable, many of them are going to fail to do that. There is only so much wallet-share out there.

Not surprising to hear from an absolute garbage publisher for an absolute garbage media corporation.

Rest in Pepperoni WB 🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️💀

Aren’t all live service games dying?

@Erigen I mean, it's Warner Brothers

I remember my childhood best friend and I spending hours, probably well past midnight, to unlock all of the costumes, artwork, etc. in MK Deadly Alliance. It was glorious, and it only cost us our time and effort. It's a cherished memory I have. This Live Service nonsense is the antithesis of that. I understand wanting money for your products (...and "services"...), but these greedy jerks needed to draw a hardline 15 years ago. This is just sad

NO ONE wants Games as a Service. It's a dying model. Yes, Fortnite and Minecraft will continue to dominate, but for those two games, there are dozens that are DOA. I think Sony moving to this model away from their focus on quality first party titles is going to be a very bad move.

Warner Bros. doesn't seem to understand video games. They only care about Mortal Kombat and sometimes Batman. We still don't have a Williams/Midway/Atari Games compilation on the Switch. Come on, wake up and read the room.

If y'all are turning your games into live scam service, at least make the game free to play. Turning it into a live service and still asking for $60 for the unfinish garbage is just pure scamming. Also whatever did happen to MultiVersus?

thats going to be a hard pass from me their basically becoming like ea,2k,and konami.

This will get me to stop buying WB games

@Ocaz No , its s**t coming from Warners mouths

@kingbk yes we do have a Atari compilation on switch it’s the Atari 50th anniversary collection

It's amazing to me, I mean just mind boggling, that the announcement of a single live service game sends gamers into a frenzy, but Sony announcing that 60% of their total development budget was going to be spent making 12 live service game didn't even make a dent in the fanatic loyalty people have towards PlayStation.

This is tied to Sony as well, given that Sony is currently in talk to buy WB studios (and Neither Realms), it's not at all surprising to see WB get on board with Sony "nothing but live service" vision.

Sadly for WB, Sony is already realized they are doomed. The 12 live service releases of 2024 is already down to 6, with 1 completely scraped and the other 5 getting delayed indefinitely, likely as they try to change the gameplay and remove live service elements.

And they fired the COE that took them in that direction.

Way to so quickly kill a franchise I love so dearly before you even make the next game.

What bothers me the most is that the majority of these 'live' services will be dead on arrival, leaving the hard working people below the suits facing the chopping block.

After I read the article I had a mouthful to say but it looks like pretty much all of you hit the nail on the head of what I had to say. So many of you made good points! This is unfortunately the route of gaming for as long as there's profits to be made from it. After 100% Everspace and now I'm all over Hades those games have really given me hope that there's still old school developers out there that just want to make the best game for the consumer. All bells and whistles included in one price! (Yeah I'm aware Everspace had DLC but I got the Stellar Edition Switch for dirt cheap ) I can only imagine if Hades was the standard for game content and fun factor.

This is all good and fun until you get the bedroom that is on the edge of the houses Wi-Fi connection.

@HeadPirate if Sony has indeed woken up, that is indeed good news.
@Ganner Great comment!! Thoroughly enjoying Hades and Everspace Stellular Edition as well, so I just had to chime in something!!

WB has ruined MK period. The sales numbers alone show it. In todays world selling 15ion of a 5 year old
game is not much of a success.

good that i already dont care uch for most of their franchises.
so yea i wont buy their games

@RiasGremory
I can't remember a games-as-a-service game from Konami. They''ve been doing some nice things last year.

Was going to ask my wife to pickup the Kollector's Edition (PS5) for me as a Christmas gift, but I'm guessing there's a reason GameStop's site still has the game NEW in Stock (Kollector's Edition).

This is why anyone and everyone with a Heart/Mind of Greed SHOULD NOT RUN/MANAGE a VG company. They straight up start destroying an Awesome hobby to fuel their Greed.

I'm glad Bungie is learning the Hard way, and GameStop messing with membership benefits and employees benefits is going to lead them down that same path...

I know I veered off track and rambled with this comment, but I'll end it on this...Warner Bros...Think really hard about your decisions, MK has always been an Amazing IP, don't go lynching it now to test the waters of "How much money can I milk from this game for so little effort?"

pirating games led to this slowly but surely

The image for this announcement is perfect.
MK fatality'd itself.

@ChakraStomps Nah, it was mobile games and things like League of Legends. Console game developers saw how much money those free games were making via in-game shops and predatory mechanics and decided they wanted that too, but with a $60 pricetag upfront as well.
Although one could argue that the rise of freemium games was caused by piracy, since some dev decided "players will not steal my game if I literally give it away for free and make my money back in different ways after they've been hooked".

@HeadPirate
Thank you. This gives me hope again for Sony.

Well, looks like future MKs will be dead to me.

I'm already regretting MK1, haven't even played it in a month and barely played it before that. Played MK11 for 2 years straight and even went back to finish the Platinum Trophy for the PS4 version on my PS5 when I got it.

Bye Bye, Mortal Kombat....a series I've been playing since the first release in 1992. The last 31 years have been fun.

Lol what a waste of time and money.