Despite an incredibly successful year following the release of the single-player, content-complete Hogwarts Legacy, WB Games is looking to bolster their games-as-a-service selection in the future. At a Warner Bros. earnings call today, company CEO David Zaslav emphasized their intent to pursue ongoing monetization in their games.
Here’s the exact quote from Zaslav pulled from Seeking Alpha’s transcript:
Our focus is on transforming our biggest franchises from largely console and PC based with three-four year release schedules to include more always on gameplay through live services, multiplatform and free-to-play extensions with the goal to have more players spending more time on more platforms. Ultimately we want to drive engagement and monetization of longer cycles and at higher levels. We have put specific capabilities. We are currently under scale and see significant opportunity to generate greater post purchase revenue.
Zaslav also confirmed that players have dumped over 700 million hours into Hogwarts Legacy since release. Nonetheless, the company clearly wants to pursue more long-term products. These longer monetization cycles have been a trend in gaming lately, though most have not found success. Even WB’s own Multiversus has been shut down for months, with a murky promise of a re-launch in 2024.
We’ll see if the plan pans out for Warner Bros. In the meantime, we’ll have to see if the Arkham Trilogy sells favorably for them when it launches next month on Switch.
Source: Seeking Alpha (Thanks to Shinobi602)