Warner Bros says MultiVersus is one reason its games division is ‘substantially underperforming’

Warner Bros Discovery has acknowledged that its games business isn’t doing as well as it could, with the re-released MultiVersus highlighted as a recent disappointment.

In the company’s latest earnings call, CEO David Zaslav said that while he believed its Studios business – which encompasses film, TV and video games – would see improved revenue in the future, he acknowledged that the video game arm is a current weak link.

After mentioning upcoming film and TV projects, Zaslav said: “But even in an industry of hits and misses, we must acknowledge that our Studios business must deliver more consistently. This applies to our games business, which we recognise is substantially underperforming its potential right now.

“We have four strong and profitable game franchises with loyal, global fans – Hogwarts Legacy, Mortal Kombat, Game of Thrones and DC, in particular Batman.

“We are focusing our development efforts on those four core franchises with proven studios to improve our success ratio.”

Zaslav notably didn’t include MultiVersus as one of these “strong and profitable game franchises”, and later in the call CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels blamed the fighting game for contributing to a further year-on-year hit of $100 million in the games department in Q3.

“Results were impacted by games, for which we took another $100+ million impairment due to the underperforming releases – primarily MultiVersus – this quarter, bringing total writedown year-to-date to over $300 million in our games business, the key factor in this year’s Studios profit decline,” he said.

“In Q4 we expect games to be flat to modestly better year-over-year, as last year’s launch of Hogwarts Legacy on the Switch platform in November is offset by lower costs.”

MultiVersus was a hit when it initially launched in July 2022, seeing 153,433 concurrent players on Steam at its peak. The player base quickly dwindled, however, and the game was closed down for almost a year.

It returned at the end of May 2024 and hit a peak of over 114,000 concurrent players, but this too has dropped and the game now hits peaks of around 1,700 per day.

It’s not clear how many of the free-to-play game’s active players are actually spending money on it, however.