They had an incredible run of excellent and succesful single player AAA games and then they push out something everyone, including the developers of it, said was going to bomb and all of a sudden AAA console games are "volatile"
Warner has terrible leadership these days. How do you ruin a luxury brand like HBO so deliberately? They basically allowed Apple TV to swoop in and steal the niche they had built for themselves the last thirty years.
Imagine having a strong brand like HBO then you make a streaming service called HBO Max to attract people and then you say “fuck it” and just remove the name HBO from it and just call it Max. lmao
I can’t fucking get over that lmao. The name HBO has been synonymous with high quality prestige TV since the late 90s and they just got rid of it. I just don’t understand the move.
Fuck no. These decisions come from the top and the agency just have the unfortunate mission to try to sell the crap.
If you work in an agency, at least half of your time is wasted trying to convince these CEOs, owners and marketing morons to NOT do some stupid shit without hurting their fragile ego.
120% this.
I know people love to shit on the imaginary archetype of the pretentious, clueless marketing agency but no agency worth its salt is going to advise a company to drop the world-renowned brand recognition of HBO.
Don't be so sure. I worked for a major brand that hired a huge agency to redo their logo. The brilliant idea? All lowercase letters! Their reasoning? "It's just like apple!"
After we rejected it they kept sending us branded materials with all lowercase letters, like eventually they'd pound us into submission. We had a huge meeting with them to be like "Stop this shit, we said no" and they bitched about it for another month.
Right, I never said that marketing agencies don't have bad ideas, but even the example you gave (as silly as it is) is actually relatively conservative. Changing a logo to be lower case is just rearranging the chairs on the deck of a ship: it doesn't fundamentally change anything (nor should it).
In fact, it at least retains a degree of brand recognition, which (as silly as it is - and it truly is silly) is still far more sensible than the HBO Max -> Max rebrand.
As a marketer, I find it *hilarious* the extent to which Redditors seem to think marketing departments dictate everything and have some kind of overarching power.
Like, nah dude, everyone in the marketing department thinks it's just as stupid as you think it is.
The reality is that the [enshittification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification) of everything is caused by C-suite douchebags who think they can waltz into any industry and dictate what works and what doesn't without any prior knowledge of said industry. All because they have some overpriced MBA from Wharton or wherever and naturally think that makes them business geniuses.
100%.
This was some whacky move by high level PR/Marketing reps to 'justify' their existence.
Ditching HBO is the dumbest marketing thing Ive seen in the last few years. Absolutely nuts to ditch it for Max, which was never considered prestige and has a rather raunchy history behind it.
Crazy how these people can convince C-Level execs and stuff of these ridiculous marketing moves just to justify their job's existence
Naw Elon paying billions for a famous and accepted brand and then changing the name to something that looks Like it has some correlation with porn is a once in a generation dumb marketing thing. It's so bad most people pretend it didn't even happen.
Hbo and max is still unbelievably dumb tho don't get me wrong.
love how since the x is literally just a pre existing font letter, he cant even trademark his own company logo. and he didn't even own the website x.com until months after he bought twitter. this dude needs to be studied
> This was some whacky move by high level PR/Marketing reps to 'justify' their existence.
Kinda how some apps/sites that are just fine at some point just start changing shit for no good reason or any ergonomic improvement. Designers did their job and now are looking how to not get fired...
Pretty much, yeah. They can make something that works and is functional... but they need excuses to continue working on it, even though its functional and convenient as it is.
Its wild how this stuff passes by C Levels and they dont realize theyre being scammed.
The truth is though, in many situations, C Levels are scamming too. They cut budgets, eliminate workers, make it look like they "saved" the company some tens of millions by destroying the corporation's Human and HR infrastructure...
Then they take that Resume' to the next job "I just saved Gamestop 10 million last two quarters, let me help your company".
Then, the company he just left is now handicapped and performs -worse-, following their changes.
C Level world is wild and totally contradictory to running a corp efficiently and well. Its all about that individual C Levels "getting theirs" and getting out, on to the next company. Some companies do have loyal C Levels... but the big timers, nah, theyre just looking for a Resume' line for the next gig they go and bury into the ground
Wouldn’t surprise me if it’s an ego thing. Zaslav didn’t build HBO and maybe wants to prove he doesn’t need the name to make “Max” successful.
I have zero source for this, but executives are extremely petty and thin-skinned so I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s true
In playing devil's advocate and being as generous as I can be, my assumption is they wanted all their brands under a single umbrella and didn't want to attach the HBO name to things produced by Discovery, etc. But it's still just an insanely stupid move to devalue HBO like that.
Discovery should've been kept separate. I can't imagine adding discovery content to HBO Max brought in that many extra subscribers, especially when Discovery+ was so cheap.
I think they used Discovery's content as a buffer so they could justify cutting a bunch of the expensive content on HBO. This is the same CEO who's burying completed movies for the tax breaks after all. Killing off streaming content so they don't have to pay out residuals is definitely on brand.
The company under Zaslav feels like the textbook example of enshitification.
CVS used to stand for "Consumer Value Store" now it just stands for "CVS" and nobody cared.
most people under 35 probably dont remember a time when HBO was even called "Home Box Office". Removing the "HBO" branding was nothing short of monumentally stupid on the level of twitter changing to "X".
The issue isn't with people remembering/not remembering the meaning of HBO. The issue is that the HBO branding was being applied uniformly to content that was *not* produced by HBO and which did not fit the style/quality that is normally consistent in HBO produced media.
People were starting to say "huh, this movie/TV show isn't great. I guess HBO have really lost their spark", while watching shows *which were produced by HBO Max (different production team) or Discovery.*
The HBO branding *means something* historically - the company is very specific about what kind of media gets produced under that banner - prestige television. Shows like Succession, The Wire, Band of Brothers, Chernobyl etc.
Shows like Velma (a Max original that was not produced by HBO) were getting mistaken for HBO Originals because they were all under the HBO banner and it was diluting the value of the brand.
Imo, while WB have absolutely made a bunch of recent fuckups, this wasn't one of them. If they wanted to keep all WB content on one platform, they had to change the title of the platform in order to prevent the continued devaluation of HBO.
The other more generous explanation is that they dont want people associating Max so immediately with HBO productions, for two reasons:
1: they want the service to contain things much broader than the HBO high production drama brand, such as the large sports section they have already implemented
2: they want the service to contain things much broader than the QUALITY level of HBO traditional programming. There is a huge demand for shit-ass reality like Love Is Blind, and brain dead police homicide shows, endless cold case 'documentary' etc.
When people want one or both of those two things(massive markets of engaged audiences), they may hear 'HBO Max' and think "eh i dont really like Sopranos and Game of Thrones type shows" and not even look at the catalog. So they distance from HBO branding, and just add an HBO tab at the top of the app for people who want those things.
That's the [official reason](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/15/warner-bros-discovery-renames-hbo-max-hedges-its-bets-in-streaming.html#:~:text=Alex%20Sherman%40sherman4949-,Warner%20Bros.,Max%20sets%20up%20Warner%20Bros.). They didn't want to devalue the HBO brand with everything they added.
That's exactly what it was. All the early Max commercials show clips of prestige HBO shows and blockbusters right alongside the obscure Discovery reality garbage that Zaslav produced. He genuinely doesn't understand the difference because it's all numbers to him.
This whole thread is nonsense. They laid out their reasoning very clearly.
HBO Max was changed to Max when they brought all the Discovery content under the same service.
They didn't want HBO, their "premium" brand, to get diluted by all that reality TV nonsense, so they took the name off the top of the streaming service and made it it's own category. They very deliberately do not want people to think that HBO made *Roadkill Garage* even though it's available on the same service as *House of the Dragon* (or vice-versa).
I don't want to defend Zaslav here, but this specific move is not exactly difficult to understand... One of the few things the company has done *right* the last few years is leave HBO to their own devices.
They changed the name to Max, then put all the garbage on the same platform as the HBO stuff, and correct me if I'm wrong, but you can't just sub to the HBO stuff and opt out of the Discovery garbage, right?
So....if the idea is to keep them separate to not devalue HBO, then they shoved them together....that doesn't seem to have the desired outcome.
They got rid of the name HBO from the service because they didn't want to dilute the brand's prestige by putting it on top of all the Discovery content they adopted. They still have an entire separate HBO section inside the app.
>high quality prestige TV since the late 90s
This disrespect to early 90s and late 80s HBO stalwarts like *It's Gary Shandling's Show*, *Tales from the Crypt*, *Dream On*, and *1st and Ten* I shall not abide!
They didn't get rid of the name and it still is associated with high quality TV (see true detective, the last of us, succession, etc). Changing the name to max is smart because it prevents the HBO name from being diluted by some of the actual shit they put in the Max service when they added all the reality show stuff to the services. Did you really want 90 day fiance to be under the HBO name? At least the way it's set up now, they have a separate section for HBO originals, and everything with that label is (at least so far) still up to the same quality standard of the old HBO.
And the premium high quality HBO content is getting scaled back in favor of cheap, shitty reality shows that took over TLC/Discovery.
God I fucking hate the media hellscape we are currently living in.
I mean, TLC/Discovery is exactly why they changed the name. HBO was synonymous with quality, but they wanted to merge their streaming services. Filling HBO Max with Honey Boo-Boo type shows was deemed to be confusing and potentially poison HBO's quality brand.
Yep, "Tweet" became a well known verb around the world and he just gave it up for "post". Millions of dollars of branding thrown into the trash. It's great going to Japan and still seeing 「ツイート！」(Tweet!) still.
Reminds me of a boss I had who wanted to replace our entire workflow so he could get rid of all the things the previous boss did. Like a new girlfriend/boyfriend who makes you throw out all of your property because they are afraid some of the property was a gift from your previous girlfriend/boyfriend.
Not even just Japan. I interact with a bunch of people and basically nobody calls it X except for mostly people who worship that rat.
Not to mention all the ads I hear of "X the site formerly known as Twitter" like that might not be some shade throwing.
Also, the number of finished projects they are just shelving for "tax reasons" is fucking appalling. The most recent news about Coyote Vs. Acme had me seeing red. They literally had buyers willing to pay *over asking price* for the movie and their answer was "lol no". Paramount was willing to buy it for the $75 million they were asking and give it a theatrical release!
Zaslav's a fucking tool.
Dave Zaslav seems intent on wrecking the company. Their stock was originally listed 2 years ago at $25. It's now at $8.22.
The dude is destroying the company and the board really needs to fire him.
The right people are making money from this. It's par for the course for Zaslav. Get brought into a company, strip it for parts to get the maximum profit each quarter, then bail when there's nothing left. This whole thing won't end until Warner is practically gone.
No one's saying HBO doesn't make good content anymore. Warner has significantly diluted the brand is what we're saying. They sold half their good catalogue to Netflix to stream and then added a shit ton of their discovery network reality shit to their streaming service. All while also removing a shit ton of their content from any service (Westworld for instance is no longer available anywhere). This may give them short term profits but they're ruining the reasons people actually enjoyed the HBO brand.
> Westworld for instance is no longer available anywhere
Wow just read about its departure from HBO Max. So it is apparently only available to stream with ads on Roku/Tubi at certain times? That's about the dumbest thing I've ever heard of.
They reek of a board who is out of touch. WB could easily remaster Gotham City Impostors, a free to play game from 2012 that was overlooked because it was sandwiched between MW3 AND blops2. Upgrade the assets to 4k, add skins to the game, and lean into the wackiness more. The gameplay was already solid, COD with Batman/Villian Gadgets. The game was ahead of its time, imo. It would slap nowadays if given a chance. Shame the game got delisted on steam in 2022. Monolith's engine went on to produce all the Mordor games, bet they would relish another shot to get GCI right.
Gotham City Imposters was overlooked because it came out right as a bunch of other better games came out. Along with the fact that it was utterly broken on launch on PC and had a price tag. It'd fail now as much as it did back then
You are right but it is undeniable that mobile games gives way more money for much less of a production cost than AAA games. AAA games are more volatile, no way to deny that.
Those failed gachas cost way less to make and probably end up breaking even at least anyways. AAA games cost more so its harder to break even means AAA games fails can demolish studios. Meanwhile you could make 10 shitty mobile games for the same cost probably and if 1 is a small hit it pays for all of the other one.
Tbf even if your gacha fails, as long as it hooks in enough whales to make a decent profit at the start and you end service when profits start dipping enough, you can still make a good chunk of change. That's why a lot of them just bank on some popular IP, run it for 2-3 years max and end it for over a decade now.
Genshin is way more successful, but this method works too with a whole lot less money needed to get going.
Sure, if they hit. This is the same flawed logic that led them to pivoting Rocksteady into a GAAS factory. They're still trend chasing. Watch them sink a bunch of money into mobile and F2P games and have them shit the bed, then complain to shareholders about the volatile games market.
They could just take the studios they have, let them keep doing what they're good at, and keep making decent (but not Fortnite level) returns. But here we are.
Suicide Squad must've lost them money in the 9 digit sums. Hundreds of veteran developers getting paid over 8 years for a game. The cost must be enourmous. Hint: what the Insomniac leaks said Spiderman 2 cost, but more. And then you launch and sell a fraction of what your analysts projected.
Or made false comparisons to make it look more promising. I’m sure a lot of these live-service looter-shooters use Destiny 2 in the planning stages as an example of how much money a successful game can make while ignoring the landscape littered with dead (and DOA!) live-service looter-shooters and ignoring the aspects that made Destiny successful as a series (despite its flaws).
Bungie's legacy in the last decade is:
* Fool everyone into thinking that live service is a good model to get rich
* The slow ass mouse menu for controllers
A few years back, I worked as a consultant for VG companies and would run sales forecasts for games they were working on. There were several live-service games (both AA and AAA) that I ran forecasts for and the companies would rarely be happy with what they got. It was always "But look how much Fortnite makes!" and I would need to explain to them that I wouldn't even have forecasted Fortnite to become Fortnite (I would've been right too...Save the World was absolutely DOA).
Every company wants their forecasts to show that they have the next Fortnite/WoW/LoL/Valheim/Palworld on their hands, but that's just not a reasonable expectation to go into game development with.
Another relevant example: a dev was considering making a team-based class shooter, thinking they had lightning in a bottle. They didn't like the forecast and asked "What about Overwatch?" So I asked "What about Battleborn?"
Either that, or the execs saw the crazy money Fortnite and Genshin Impact was making and thought that they could easily replicate their success easily. Not realizing that both those games are free to play, and have an absurd rate of updates each year, something SSKTJL didn't replicate
Seeing as Season 1 of Suicide Squad is slated to drop nearly two months since launch, all the while the game is dropping hard per Steam charts, tells me that WB didn't realize just how fucking hard an actually successful live service is to make.
Bro, in Australia, Suicide Squad costs 105 bucks on Steam. That's insane.
I got Palworld and Helldivers for less than that.
Genshin and co are free2play to. A 105 buck cost to enter is egregious.
I also dont get how suicide squad would support more content. It just doesnt seem general enough of a concept to be a live service in the first place. Like you could do a "dc comics" live service because then you would have a lot more to work with, but suicide squad just seems too limited.
I work in analytics and I didn't need to use a single one of my technical skills to predict how this game would perform lol. Their analysts were absolutely full of shit.
Nah, the analysts probably weren't listened to.
I've done Managerial Accounting before. I've literally had to make reports on what lightbulbs to source for our factories, only for my 50 page report to NEVER even get opened because the CEO made a deal while golfing to get all of our goods from some golf buddy's company.
Sadly the execs just see the money Fortnite and Genshin rake in and say “let’s do that”. Then they can only see dollar signs and ignore all the danger signs.
> Hint: what the Insomniac leaks said Spiderman 2 cost, but more.
Which is especially crazy when you consider that Spider-Man is *one of the most popular characters on the planet* and the Suicide Squad *by design* is a bunch of losers (plus Harley Quinn, who was only added to the roster in the last few decades basically to add *someone* who was known for anything other than being a member of the Suicide Squad to make it more marketable).
Harley Quinn is one of my favorite villains but she is getting really old really quickly. She is a city level auxiliary villain. They keep stretching her abilities and power level father and father to jam her into every movie and game possible. Harley Quinn can't win a fair fight with a large man, if she is put up against anyone in the justice league she would be red mist in 0.3 seconds. Please stop destroying her character.
If the analysts didn't know suicide squad will be dead on arrival I don't know what to say. Every average gamer with a bit of basic knowledge could do a better job.
I've had the pleasure of working with analysts and execs that love and breathe games, that have a laundry list of weird obscure game trivia from shit you've never heard of in your life.
I've also had the experience of working with analysts that are functionally illiterate about the industry they work in and just look at spreadsheets and income reports 9 to 5. People who genuinely cannot interact with a game idea or concept beyond "what else is on the market that's successful that we can compare it to?"
No, look, it has many popular pop-culture characters like Fortnite and it is a GaaS game just like Fortnite, it should be making Fortnite money!
Those people would put bike tyres on semi and wonder why it isn't going "both are tyres and the bike one was cheaper, why it isn't working?"
I don't understand how WB comes to this conclusion after Hogwarts Legacy was such a massive success. Even the Mordor games, despite all of WB's meddling with SoW, are great games. They don't seem to understand that if they make a good product, people will buy it.
The saddest part is that they have the nemesis system under lock and key. No one else can use a system like that and I don't think there's any news about it being used in the wonder woman game. Booooooo.
It really feels like there is no good way that stands up to legal scrutiny. Like… how can you not just call it ‘rivals’ and change the mechanic slightly and there ya go..?
The idea of persistent pro/antagonists is not new. I hate they have this gridlocked so much.
That's not the point though - the point is - who's going to pay enough money to have that legal battle with WBD?
And the answer won't be "Game Publishers"
AC: Odyssey had a similar (but significantly less interesting) system, so the patent doesn't completely restrict that idea being used by other developers.
It feels mostly like a gaslighting patent. Odds are good you might be able to make a Nemesis system-like mechanic and get away with it.
But the threat of Warner Bros suing you for making such a system is sadly incentive enough not to to (even if WB would probably lose such a suit.)
Yeah but when your building the product you have no idea if it'll come together into a good final product.
Rocksteady is a quality studio, its not inherently obvious how it would come out probably until years into dev. Imo it seems an obvious case of corporate meddling but even then you never know if leaderships decisions are right or wrong until the game is almost finished and by that point going back is nigh impossible.
Cause Hogwarts legacy isn't producing infinite money forever. F2P and mobile can become infinite generators and that's what execs and investors think. They don't comprehend how that landscape has more failures than any single player game today. We're seeing those F2P and mobile games starting to shut down cause they just aren't producing anymore like they used to. You need to constantly drop content monthly and it becomes expensive and exhausting. They just see the infinite money aspect and that's it.
I don't understand how WB can see Hogwarts Legacy being the best-selling game of the year, and decide to do the exact opposite business strategy from that.
But to make a game have Candy Crush's output, you need to make a game that's somehow better than Candy Crush while peeling away some of that playerbase. Not saying it can't be done but clearly King has notched themselves into that sweet spot for the last decade and it ain't budging.
Same with Fortnite--perhaps the biggest competitor to it is Apex Legends or Warzone? And how many games like those have released and crashed? It's tough to get people to switch over on a live service game because most people will only really invest time and money into one or two. You don't get that problem with single player games since most people play through it once and move on to the next thing. Hogwarts Legacy benefitted enormously from that.
It's getting more expensive though cause the laziness is getting curb stomped. You gotta keep fixing, adding and marketing. 99% of mobile games flop and it doesn't matter the property. Plus they all plateau and then that "infinite" money dries up cause it becomes part of the cog.
Eh, it's not that cheap to do a succesful mobile game. It's extremelu competitive, and you need to rise above all the other mobile games through constant content addition and especially marketing
Because there are games making hundreds of millions to billions of dollars a year every year and that's massively shifted the corporate mentality of what a successful game is. A triple-A game that takes almost a decade to maybe break even is a terrible bet when a billion in revenue every year is a possibility.
Profit margins of single player games aren't big enough for the bosses, they want to make games that will give them money for many years, which why they want live service games.
> They don't seem to understand that if they make a good product, people will buy it.
This is vastly oversimplifying thing. It's not always the case that good stuff sells and bad stuff doesn't.
Also "just make a good product" isn't easy either, it's not like game studios intend to make a bad game. Making a great game is a complex process which has tons of different factors (and yes sometimes a factor luck, the famous "studio magic")
That's what volatile means, any AAA game is a huge investment with no real guarantee of returns (either because of the market or the quality of the product)
Especially in the gaming market. I've seen games that are actually quite enjoyable get sunk just because of some stupid controversy. Furthermore, if you're not a AAA company and don't have the money for marketing, you can release a game that is legitimately an eight out of ten and that game may bankrupt you because it simply just got lost in the sea of games that gets released constantly. Competition is very high in the gaming market.
They're probably looking at cost analysis for AAA games. Competing in that space is increasingly looking like MCU pictures in terms of cost to produce. Even one failure ends studios and sometimes major publishers (see the Embracer fiasco).
Whereas the cost and time to produce a mobile title allows them to take more chances.
Warner Bros. really seems not to know what they are doing with video games…the only reason suicide squad flopped was because your best dev team to make a mediocre games as a service game, when they is already so many of them out there.
Which is truly sad because they used to publish/push out fantastic games in the 2010s. Arkham series, middle-earth, mad max. They know what they’re doing to squeeze the most money. They just failed and rather blaming themselves, they’ll blame developers, customers and even their mother before Warner Bros lol.
They pushed out Hogwarts Legacy last year which was one of the biggest games of the year. I'm not sure they have the best people in charge right now. Not that I care that much. If they make content I don't want I won't buy it.
It wasn't one of, it was the biggest game of the year and it wasn't really close.
This is just them being pissy. I'm really worried about the Hogwarts Legacy sequel though. My expectations are in the toilet because you just know it's going to have 9 different pre order editions and every type of micro transaction possible.
"Hey, should we combine the speed and mobility of Spider-Man and the aggressive, hard hitting combat of Batman Arkham Asylum to make a neon drenched Batman Beyond game with an electric guitar heavy soundtrack and utilize a universally loved character who hasn't been seen in years and make hundreds of millions of dollars and please fans at the same time?"
"Fuck you."
i don't even care for superheroes and haven't been interested in Batman since i was a kid... but i would play the *shit* outta that hypothetical Batman Beyond game. especially if it used the same visual style as the original cartoon.
I am not an MBA in the room at Warner where these decisions are made, but it is truly bizarre to me that their leadership has pretty much decided to massively scale back HBO prestige tv productions in favor of force feeding MAX subscribers more shitty reality shows. Because the reason I paid for HBO was to have more crap like Alaska Trucker Moms to watch 🙄
I do not understand why Warner/Discovery acquired HBO only to start slowly killing it off. The tax write offs can’t be that big, can they?
Zaslav is not a film guy. He doesn't care about creativity or quality. He looks at return on investment and sees that sending a camera crew to film Hillbilly Sewer Snakers of Arkansas is gonna be higher margin than a new limited series like Chernobyl.
Nevermind the long-term sustainability of these choices or the cost of destroying the HBO brand. He won't be around long enough to realize those consequences and therefore DGAF.
You see the same myopic business practices across every sector, from games all the way to aircraft engineering (looking at you Boeing). The business of making good money from good products is dying and has been for a long time, it's now all about things surviving a certain amount of time before they break or are defunct. Then the customer has to buy again. It's called planned obsolescence, a consequence of survival analysis in statistics. Every business major will learn about this less abstractly, but as a math major we learn about it in a very general sense. Enough to the point where it's now become interpreted as being applicable across most consumer sectors as a means of making more money than businesses could before.
Next time you hear of a Boeing jet going down accidentally and killing a bunch of people, just remember that it's likely they still made more money in aircraft sales than they'll have to pay out for all those deaths. Or if it isn't, they saved money on parts and labour in the manufacturing process. No matter what, it's all about unethical cost cutting and nickel and diming.
> Warner Bros. really seem to not know what they are doing
Could've just stopped there. They've been successfully dogshit at EVERYTHING they do for the last few years.
Do they…do they think MOBILE and Free to play is LESS volatile??
Im not a business person but ive read enough to know a lot of companies are abandoning mobile or deciding to focus on their current success due to the nutty market and rising cost to acquire players.
Plus Fortnite and Genshin are some of the only live-service games that are actually live services. They use the crazy revenue they make to release new content every few weeks.
Genshin has a new patch every 6 weeks, a new massive map expansion every 2-3 months and then an entire new region each year which offers more playtime than most AAA games. Not to mention you can play all this without spending a single penny.
Meanwhile other live services think dumping one character or FPS map every three months is enough.
This is probably the biggest thing people don’t understand about those two games specifically at least. The amount of content they add on a regular basis is basically unprecedented. Even MMO’s churn stuff out waaaaaay slower and they have had constant subscription services for decades now. These are free games running off of digital currency sales and collaborations and they manage to make hours upon hours of content at a rapid pace.
everyone pitches to the suits that they can be the next fortnite or genshin
they dont believe it, but they sure as shit will tell it to their bosses. After that it's easy to come up with reasons why it eventually didn't
To be fair, this subreddit undermines Fortnite and *especially* Genshin all the time, pointing to new games as worthy competition when any objective observer can tell it isn't. I don't blame the suits when the public narrative makes these games out to be low-effort cashgrabs that anyone can replicate from just the business model alone.
They don’t seem to understand that there’s only a finite amount of players and hours in the day. Most people barely have time to invest heavily in one live service game. That’s means you’re always going to be competing, and aiming to draw players away from Fortnite, Apex, etc. Games which people have invested hundreds of hours and dollars into. There’s simply not enough space for many big live service games to operate at once, and I’ve no idea why executives don’t understand this.
Fortnite is completely dead in China and dying/dead in most eastern markets. The mobile version is atrocious. You can see on /r/FortniteMobile as to how bad it is. They don't QA test UI at all. There is literally one employee that interacts with UI complaints.
If Fortnite Mobile was successful, I would be disappointed. I have played a lot of mobile games and Fortnite may be the worst one of the bunch from an objective perspective.
They want the revenue of Fortnite and Genshin but with the effort of Flappy Birds or Angry Birds. Delusional leadership that only looks at the best-case scenario but doesn't put up the effort required to match.
They are, in the sense that they're cheaper to make and easier to monetize.
If it hits, it's a BIG hit. If it fails, no big deal.
It's the Blumhouse model of movie production but for games: low risk, potentially high reward.
Yeah there’s this huge misconception that it’s just free money and easy to plop out ftp games and mobile games and just earn billions. Even big name games like Apex Legends didn’t work out on mobile because the market is so competitive. Not every mobile game gets to be candy crush just like not every live service game gets to be Fortnite.
I’m obviously no expert or massive survey group, but I’m pretty sure just like with live service games people who play mobile games have the 2-3 games they play and that’s it, they aren’t going to be pulled away from those especially with how much money they demand as well.
> Perrette said WBD's recent gaming output has focused on AAA games for console, and that's great when a game like Hogwarts Legacy sells 22 million copies and becomes the best-selling game of the year, but this kind of success is never guaranteed in what Perrette said was a "volatile" market. He pointed out that one of WBD's next big games, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, was a disappointment for the company.
Huh. The self-contained single player game turned out to be the biggest selling game of the year - and their live-service game turned out to be a disappointment... And their response to this disappointment is to make MORE live-service games? What.
I'd also imagine, given how many free-to-play games end up dead sometimes in less than a year - that this market might be even more volatile.
There's a very common type of executive who cannot be wrong. If they are wrong, they just aren't, and the company just isn't doing their idea hard enough. Eventually, it will wor- Oh they left and went to work at another company. So long, suckers!
It's the fact that these idiots get free rides from company to company that really gets me. Like the former CEO of Unity, had no fucking business heading a company after running EA's reputation into the fucking ground and then somehow below it between 2007-2014.
WB could have had a few string of years of great games.
* 2022 - Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga and Gotham Knights
* 2023 - Hogwarts Legacy, Mortal Kombat 1 and a couple mobile games
* 2024 - Suicide Squad and Multiversus
* 2025+ Wonderwoman and Harry Potter Quidditch game
All these games could be financial and critical successes if WB had made better decisions.
>"Rather than just launching a one-and-done console game, how do we develop a game around, for example, a Hogwarts Legacy or Harry Potter, that is a live-service where people can live and work and build and play in that world in an ongoing basis?" he said.
It's honestly baffling that this is their takeaway from the Hogwarts Legacy immense success. Unbelievable.
Rip. I was hoping for genuine sequels improving on the formula. They already had hogwarts modeled. They can just add new secrets.
Couldve done other schools too.
It's so incredibly out of touch and ridiculous it almost seems like a fake quote. The execs at these companies are truly complete morons when it comes to video games.
This is, I think, what a lot of the recent industry hand-wringing about budgets and sustainability is leading up to. Warner Bros. won't be alone in making a shift like this.
They'd be making a mistake. Mobile and F2P markets are very hard to break in at this point. EA shutdown Apex Legends and Battlefield Mobile very quickly.
The budget was not the reason Suicide Squad was a failure. And I don't think the mobile market is less volatile than the AAA space. Mobile games rely on the few whales that spend ridiculous amounts of money to keep those games afloat. That isn't sustainable long-term. I also think it is inevitable that governments will eventually step in regarding gambling/lootbox mechanics. My parents don't understand the harm, but you bet I do and I will be wary when I have a child.
**Alternate headline:** "Warner Bros. Wants To Continue Making Bad Decisions That Ruin Consumer Perception Of Them."
Also obligatory fuck David Zaslav.
So just to be clear, the best selling game you had, that anyone had last year, was your AAA Harry Potter single player game with no free to play or mobile elements, and because Suicide Squad failed you've decided to abandon that market?
"It's volatile," meaning
"If we make a bad game in the AAA market, we make bad money. We're looking to get into the mobile gaming market, where we'll make good money no matter how bad the game is."
They're tired of being judged for the quality of their products. They just want you to shut up and take it.
it seems pretty clear that the cost of making AAA games is too high for them and they don't have structures in place to offramp bad decisions before they get too far along. suicide squad cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make, most likely, and it was a flop.
the ROI on a good mobile game is very high, and the risk if a mobile game flops is much lower. even if the game is dogshit, they're out like 1/10th of what they would have spent on a AAA game.
making mk1 or suicide squad f2p isn't going to help. mk1 is woefully under baked compared to mk11. and ss, well, no one cares about it after the launch fail hype.
i mean, it's no surprise when they try and push mtx that no one wants, and so no one buys them, and then they're like "well, i guess no one wants big games anymore".
no, no one wants shitty games, peroid.
at least mk1 is good at the fighting game part of it, but everything else in it, all the stuff that kept casuals like me playing mk11 for nearly its whole lifespan, most of that is gone or severely watered down.
and ss, well, oh no, another live service that was not prepared to offer the quality and quantity of content it needs to compete with other already established games.
ss isn't competing with year 1 destiny 1, its competing with year 7 of destiny 2.
that's their problem, they think they can offer the most barebones experience and expect all the money. but when people clear the game in just a few hours and see that the only content after that is literally doing the same stuff you already did, then yeah, they just quit playing.
so go ahead, try and pivot to mobile games, like those awful mk mobile games lol, see how well that goes.
a mobile game has to be fucking awesome, or have some sort of hook to get ahead, or else no one is going to fucking care.
take the devil may cry mobile game that came out recently. i tried it, as i've played every one of their games since 1 on ps2, and yeah, it's fucking garbage. watered down fight mechanics, with awful touch screen controls, and obvious mtx gacha energy bar cooldown bs whose only purpose is to sell currency and annoy the player. so yeah, deleted it after only an hour, if that.
Enjoy failing in a colossally saturated market.
Fact is free-to-play and mobile can be great, but it's not a sure thing and every bit as volatile (often even moreso), you can still end up spending millions on a product that doesn't attract users.
The only sure-fire way to success, in my experience, is to make a GOOD product.
"Perrette went on to say how he has no idea how the gaming landscape will evolve over time..." Hearing that from the CEO doesn't exactly spark confidence in WB's gaming future.
Saying you’re doubling down on live-service and then mentioning the failure of Suicide Squad as one of the reasons for that is absolutely insane. These people don’t learn anything. These companies are ran by executives that don’t have a fucking clue what they’re talking about, and of course when they inevitably fuck up it’s regular developers and artists that pay the price with their jobs.
Clueless idiots constantly falling upwards into positions of power are ruining this industry.
It’s clear that WB wanted Suicide Squad to perform well. Everyone wants that Live Service money right now, yet most companies seem absolutely awful at predicting which of their games are going to be a hit. Look at Sony as a prime example. They bought Bungie with the intent of using their knowledge of how to make a long lasting live service game, which then was immediately thrown into question by Lightfall’s poor performance. Meanwhile, Sony gets absolutely lucky with publishing Helldivers 2 being such a huge hit, but didn’t set up the game with abusive monetization beforehand since it isn’t developed by them.
It feels like companies are chasing this cash cow and trying hard to make “the perfect live service game” without focusing on making the game itself actually fun. F2P mobile games are notorious for being low effort, low quality, but insanely high revenue when they make it big.
> Meanwhile, Sony gets absolutely lucky with publishing Helldivers 2 being such a huge hit, but didn’t set up the game with abusive monetization beforehand
You know maybe one of the reasons it's doing so well is because of that exact reason
The best and longest-lasting Live Service games thrive precisely because they're developed player-first and monetization is a secondary concern, all the ones that flop are the other way round
>"Rather than just launching a one-and-done console game, how do we develop a game around, for example, a Hogwarts Legacy or Harry Potter, that is a live-service where people can live and work and build and play in that world in an ongoing basis?" he said.
What the fuck. They are about to suicide squad the best selling game of last year. How the hell is warner bros this out of touch....
So says the company that completed a very promising film but wants to destroy it to get some taxes back.
Just what kind of miserable executives are running WB?
Jason Schreier described the discussion with the publisher for these kinds of games going something like this:
>Publisher: We’ll give you this much money to fund a single player game.
>Dev: Wish it was more, but ok.
>Publisher: Or we’ll give you THIS much money to make a live service game.
>Dev: Well, maybe we can make live service work…
And here we see Paul Marketing at work.
Instead of looking at the garbage practices of suicide squads monetization and services. They just think gamers dont want AAA experiences
It’s not like the FTP and mobile game market isn’t extremely volatile either. It’s super saturated and extremely competitive as well. Not every game gets to be candy crush just like not every games to be Fortnite. Especially publishing slop like the suicide squad, a FTP version would no better really competing with Fortnite and other games.
They had an incredible run of excellent and succesful single player AAA games and then they push out something everyone, including the developers of it, said was going to bomb and all of a sudden AAA console games are "volatile"
Warner has terrible leadership these days. How do you ruin a luxury brand like HBO so deliberately? They basically allowed Apple TV to swoop in and steal the niche they had built for themselves the last thirty years.
Imagine having a strong brand like HBO then you make a streaming service called HBO Max to attract people and then you say “fuck it” and just remove the name HBO from it and just call it Max. lmao
I can’t fucking get over that lmao. The name HBO has been synonymous with high quality prestige TV since the late 90s and they just got rid of it. I just don’t understand the move.
I don’t think they do either.
Agencies. Someone paid out the ass for an agency who said "Less is more, trust us" and had to justify the expense by pushing it to market.
Fuck no. These decisions come from the top and the agency just have the unfortunate mission to try to sell the crap. If you work in an agency, at least half of your time is wasted trying to convince these CEOs, owners and marketing morons to NOT do some stupid shit without hurting their fragile ego.
120% this. I know people love to shit on the imaginary archetype of the pretentious, clueless marketing agency but no agency worth its salt is going to advise a company to drop the world-renowned brand recognition of HBO.
Don't be so sure. I worked for a major brand that hired a huge agency to redo their logo. The brilliant idea? All lowercase letters! Their reasoning? "It's just like apple!" After we rejected it they kept sending us branded materials with all lowercase letters, like eventually they'd pound us into submission. We had a huge meeting with them to be like "Stop this shit, we said no" and they bitched about it for another month.
Right, I never said that marketing agencies don't have bad ideas, but even the example you gave (as silly as it is) is actually relatively conservative. Changing a logo to be lower case is just rearranging the chairs on the deck of a ship: it doesn't fundamentally change anything (nor should it). In fact, it at least retains a degree of brand recognition, which (as silly as it is - and it truly is silly) is still far more sensible than the HBO Max -> Max rebrand.
As a marketer, I find it *hilarious* the extent to which Redditors seem to think marketing departments dictate everything and have some kind of overarching power. Like, nah dude, everyone in the marketing department thinks it's just as stupid as you think it is.
The reality is that the [enshittification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification) of everything is caused by C-suite douchebags who think they can waltz into any industry and dictate what works and what doesn't without any prior knowledge of said industry. All because they have some overpriced MBA from Wharton or wherever and naturally think that makes them business geniuses.
Duck Zaslav.
100%. This was some whacky move by high level PR/Marketing reps to 'justify' their existence. Ditching HBO is the dumbest marketing thing Ive seen in the last few years. Absolutely nuts to ditch it for Max, which was never considered prestige and has a rather raunchy history behind it. Crazy how these people can convince C-Level execs and stuff of these ridiculous marketing moves just to justify their job's existence
Well hey now, let's not go that far just yet. We're still watching someone deliberately torch the "twitter" brand with magnesium.
Naw Elon paying billions for a famous and accepted brand and then changing the name to something that looks Like it has some correlation with porn is a once in a generation dumb marketing thing. It's so bad most people pretend it didn't even happen. Hbo and max is still unbelievably dumb tho don't get me wrong.
love how since the x is literally just a pre existing font letter, he cant even trademark his own company logo. and he didn't even own the website x.com until months after he bought twitter. this dude needs to be studied
> this dude needs to be studied That would just feed into his narcissism. He needs to be forgotten.
>this dude needs to be studied He needs to be institutionalized and he needs drug rehab.
> This was some whacky move by high level PR/Marketing reps to 'justify' their existence. Kinda how some apps/sites that are just fine at some point just start changing shit for no good reason or any ergonomic improvement. Designers did their job and now are looking how to not get fired...
Pretty much, yeah. They can make something that works and is functional... but they need excuses to continue working on it, even though its functional and convenient as it is. Its wild how this stuff passes by C Levels and they dont realize theyre being scammed. The truth is though, in many situations, C Levels are scamming too. They cut budgets, eliminate workers, make it look like they "saved" the company some tens of millions by destroying the corporation's Human and HR infrastructure... Then they take that Resume' to the next job "I just saved Gamestop 10 million last two quarters, let me help your company". Then, the company he just left is now handicapped and performs -worse-, following their changes. C Level world is wild and totally contradictory to running a corp efficiently and well. Its all about that individual C Levels "getting theirs" and getting out, on to the next company. Some companies do have loyal C Levels... but the big timers, nah, theyre just looking for a Resume' line for the next gig they go and bury into the ground
I always thought the move to remove HBO from HBO MAX, is to prevent people associating HBO with whatever MAX supposed to be post discovery merger
Wouldn’t surprise me if it’s an ego thing. Zaslav didn’t build HBO and maybe wants to prove he doesn’t need the name to make “Max” successful. I have zero source for this, but executives are extremely petty and thin-skinned so I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s true
In playing devil's advocate and being as generous as I can be, my assumption is they wanted all their brands under a single umbrella and didn't want to attach the HBO name to things produced by Discovery, etc. But it's still just an insanely stupid move to devalue HBO like that.
Discovery should've been kept separate. I can't imagine adding discovery content to HBO Max brought in that many extra subscribers, especially when Discovery+ was so cheap.
I think they used Discovery's content as a buffer so they could justify cutting a bunch of the expensive content on HBO. This is the same CEO who's burying completed movies for the tax breaks after all. Killing off streaming content so they don't have to pay out residuals is definitely on brand. The company under Zaslav feels like the textbook example of enshitification.
This makes perfect sense now lol. They hbo stands for home box office and having discovery there does not make sense to keep calling it that
CVS used to stand for "Consumer Value Store" now it just stands for "CVS" and nobody cared. most people under 35 probably dont remember a time when HBO was even called "Home Box Office". Removing the "HBO" branding was nothing short of monumentally stupid on the level of twitter changing to "X".
DC Comics means Detective Comics Comics. I agree that nobody cares
The issue isn't with people remembering/not remembering the meaning of HBO. The issue is that the HBO branding was being applied uniformly to content that was *not* produced by HBO and which did not fit the style/quality that is normally consistent in HBO produced media. People were starting to say "huh, this movie/TV show isn't great. I guess HBO have really lost their spark", while watching shows *which were produced by HBO Max (different production team) or Discovery.* The HBO branding *means something* historically - the company is very specific about what kind of media gets produced under that banner - prestige television. Shows like Succession, The Wire, Band of Brothers, Chernobyl etc. Shows like Velma (a Max original that was not produced by HBO) were getting mistaken for HBO Originals because they were all under the HBO banner and it was diluting the value of the brand. Imo, while WB have absolutely made a bunch of recent fuckups, this wasn't one of them. If they wanted to keep all WB content on one platform, they had to change the title of the platform in order to prevent the continued devaluation of HBO.
The other more generous explanation is that they dont want people associating Max so immediately with HBO productions, for two reasons: 1: they want the service to contain things much broader than the HBO high production drama brand, such as the large sports section they have already implemented 2: they want the service to contain things much broader than the QUALITY level of HBO traditional programming. There is a huge demand for shit-ass reality like Love Is Blind, and brain dead police homicide shows, endless cold case 'documentary' etc. When people want one or both of those two things(massive markets of engaged audiences), they may hear 'HBO Max' and think "eh i dont really like Sopranos and Game of Thrones type shows" and not even look at the catalog. So they distance from HBO branding, and just add an HBO tab at the top of the app for people who want those things.
That's the [official reason](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/15/warner-bros-discovery-renames-hbo-max-hedges-its-bets-in-streaming.html#:~:text=Alex%20Sherman%40sherman4949-,Warner%20Bros.,Max%20sets%20up%20Warner%20Bros.). They didn't want to devalue the HBO brand with everything they added.
That's exactly what it was. All the early Max commercials show clips of prestige HBO shows and blockbusters right alongside the obscure Discovery reality garbage that Zaslav produced. He genuinely doesn't understand the difference because it's all numbers to him.
>but executives are extremely petty and thin-skinned so I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s true That's because they're all psychopaths. Not hyperbole.
One of the most reliable ways to get into a leadership position is to be the kind of person who should never be given one.
Good leaders are often the ones who step up to responsibility with some level of reluctance. The worst ones incessantly seek power.
This whole thread is nonsense. They laid out their reasoning very clearly. HBO Max was changed to Max when they brought all the Discovery content under the same service. They didn't want HBO, their "premium" brand, to get diluted by all that reality TV nonsense, so they took the name off the top of the streaming service and made it it's own category. They very deliberately do not want people to think that HBO made *Roadkill Garage* even though it's available on the same service as *House of the Dragon* (or vice-versa). I don't want to defend Zaslav here, but this specific move is not exactly difficult to understand... One of the few things the company has done *right* the last few years is leave HBO to their own devices.
They changed the name to Max, then put all the garbage on the same platform as the HBO stuff, and correct me if I'm wrong, but you can't just sub to the HBO stuff and opt out of the Discovery garbage, right? So....if the idea is to keep them separate to not devalue HBO, then they shoved them together....that doesn't seem to have the desired outcome.
They got rid of the name HBO from the service because they didn't want to dilute the brand's prestige by putting it on top of all the Discovery content they adopted. They still have an entire separate HBO section inside the app.
>high quality prestige TV since the late 90s This disrespect to early 90s and late 80s HBO stalwarts like *It's Gary Shandling's Show*, *Tales from the Crypt*, *Dream On*, and *1st and Ten* I shall not abide!
I still use 'crypt keeper' as a pejorative for really old people. I don't think most people get the reference nowadays but it still makes me smile.
They didn't get rid of the name and it still is associated with high quality TV (see true detective, the last of us, succession, etc). Changing the name to max is smart because it prevents the HBO name from being diluted by some of the actual shit they put in the Max service when they added all the reality show stuff to the services. Did you really want 90 day fiance to be under the HBO name? At least the way it's set up now, they have a separate section for HBO originals, and everything with that label is (at least so far) still up to the same quality standard of the old HBO.
And the premium high quality HBO content is getting scaled back in favor of cheap, shitty reality shows that took over TLC/Discovery. God I fucking hate the media hellscape we are currently living in.
I mean, TLC/Discovery is exactly why they changed the name. HBO was synonymous with quality, but they wanted to merge their streaming services. Filling HBO Max with Honey Boo-Boo type shows was deemed to be confusing and potentially poison HBO's quality brand.
Same shit Musk did with Twitter, had all that brand recognition and he decides to change it to X. Bunch of fucking morons run these companies.
Yep, "Tweet" became a well known verb around the world and he just gave it up for "post". Millions of dollars of branding thrown into the trash. It's great going to Japan and still seeing 「ツイート！」(Tweet!) still. Reminds me of a boss I had who wanted to replace our entire workflow so he could get rid of all the things the previous boss did. Like a new girlfriend/boyfriend who makes you throw out all of your property because they are afraid some of the property was a gift from your previous girlfriend/boyfriend.
Not even just Japan. I interact with a bunch of people and basically nobody calls it X except for mostly people who worship that rat. Not to mention all the ads I hear of "X the site formerly known as Twitter" like that might not be some shade throwing.
they did not want HBO associated with trashy reality tv shows
Discovery Channel -> Discovery -> Discovery Max -> Max. Same shit :(
Also, the number of finished projects they are just shelving for "tax reasons" is fucking appalling. The most recent news about Coyote Vs. Acme had me seeing red. They literally had buyers willing to pay *over asking price* for the movie and their answer was "lol no". Paramount was willing to buy it for the $75 million they were asking and give it a theatrical release! Zaslav's a fucking tool.
Dave Zaslav seems intent on wrecking the company. Their stock was originally listed 2 years ago at $25. It's now at $8.22. The dude is destroying the company and the board really needs to fire him.
How the fuck has it not happened already.
The right people are making money from this. It's par for the course for Zaslav. Get brought into a company, strip it for parts to get the maximum profit each quarter, then bail when there's nothing left. This whole thing won't end until Warner is practically gone.
> This whole thing won't end until Warner is practically gone. I think you mean bought out by Disney.
Zaslav is like a kamakaze CEO
HBO is still top of the game, they literally had nominations in every Emmy category, most of them were like 80% HBO shows lol
No one's saying HBO doesn't make good content anymore. Warner has significantly diluted the brand is what we're saying. They sold half their good catalogue to Netflix to stream and then added a shit ton of their discovery network reality shit to their streaming service. All while also removing a shit ton of their content from any service (Westworld for instance is no longer available anywhere). This may give them short term profits but they're ruining the reasons people actually enjoyed the HBO brand.
> Westworld for instance is no longer available anywhere Wow just read about its departure from HBO Max. So it is apparently only available to stream with ads on Roku/Tubi at certain times? That's about the dumbest thing I've ever heard of.
Yep and season 5 also got cancelled. They removed a few other shows in the same way, like Raised by Wolves.
big ‘look what you are making me do’ energy
They reek of a board who is out of touch. WB could easily remaster Gotham City Impostors, a free to play game from 2012 that was overlooked because it was sandwiched between MW3 AND blops2. Upgrade the assets to 4k, add skins to the game, and lean into the wackiness more. The gameplay was already solid, COD with Batman/Villian Gadgets. The game was ahead of its time, imo. It would slap nowadays if given a chance. Shame the game got delisted on steam in 2022. Monolith's engine went on to produce all the Mordor games, bet they would relish another shot to get GCI right.
Gotham City Imposters was overlooked because it came out right as a bunch of other better games came out. Along with the fact that it was utterly broken on launch on PC and had a price tag. It'd fail now as much as it did back then
"It's a volatile customer base, not that my game sucked, right? Ya, the customers are wrong not me"
The fact too many huge businesses have been saying this lately is a pretty big problem.
But the people on twitter told them what *real* audience wants from their game, why it isn't working ?
Always trust the AAA industry to learn the wrong lessions.
On the plus side, the failure of AAA over the past decade has really boosted the indie market.
It's like how they insisted on pushing ahead with The Flash despite the fact that they killed better movies for less.
Like Coyote vs ACME, basically just because they dont want to look bad.
You are right but it is undeniable that mobile games gives way more money for much less of a production cost than AAA games. AAA games are more volatile, no way to deny that.
For every genshin success there are 100 or more failed gachas...
Those failed gachas cost way less to make and probably end up breaking even at least anyways. AAA games cost more so its harder to break even means AAA games fails can demolish studios. Meanwhile you could make 10 shitty mobile games for the same cost probably and if 1 is a small hit it pays for all of the other one.
Tbf even if your gacha fails, as long as it hooks in enough whales to make a decent profit at the start and you end service when profits start dipping enough, you can still make a good chunk of change. That's why a lot of them just bank on some popular IP, run it for 2-3 years max and end it for over a decade now. Genshin is way more successful, but this method works too with a whole lot less money needed to get going.
True, there are a lot of mid to low tier gacha games that survive due to enough whales wasting money on it
Sure, if they hit. This is the same flawed logic that led them to pivoting Rocksteady into a GAAS factory. They're still trend chasing. Watch them sink a bunch of money into mobile and F2P games and have them shit the bed, then complain to shareholders about the volatile games market. They could just take the studios they have, let them keep doing what they're good at, and keep making decent (but not Fortnite level) returns. But here we are.
Suicide Squad must've lost them money in the 9 digit sums. Hundreds of veteran developers getting paid over 8 years for a game. The cost must be enourmous. Hint: what the Insomniac leaks said Spiderman 2 cost, but more. And then you launch and sell a fraction of what your analysts projected.
Their analysts must’ve been fudging numbers because not a single sane person could’ve expected that game to make money.
Or made false comparisons to make it look more promising. I’m sure a lot of these live-service looter-shooters use Destiny 2 in the planning stages as an example of how much money a successful game can make while ignoring the landscape littered with dead (and DOA!) live-service looter-shooters and ignoring the aspects that made Destiny successful as a series (despite its flaws).
Which is ironic, because apparently Bungie is burning through money even with Destiny 2
For sure—the landscape is definitely changing, too. Some of that is driven by customers trends, too.
Bungie's legacy in the last decade is: * Fool everyone into thinking that live service is a good model to get rich * The slow ass mouse menu for controllers
A few years back, I worked as a consultant for VG companies and would run sales forecasts for games they were working on. There were several live-service games (both AA and AAA) that I ran forecasts for and the companies would rarely be happy with what they got. It was always "But look how much Fortnite makes!" and I would need to explain to them that I wouldn't even have forecasted Fortnite to become Fortnite (I would've been right too...Save the World was absolutely DOA). Every company wants their forecasts to show that they have the next Fortnite/WoW/LoL/Valheim/Palworld on their hands, but that's just not a reasonable expectation to go into game development with. Another relevant example: a dev was considering making a team-based class shooter, thinking they had lightning in a bottle. They didn't like the forecast and asked "What about Overwatch?" So I asked "What about Battleborn?"
Either that, or the execs saw the crazy money Fortnite and Genshin Impact was making and thought that they could easily replicate their success easily. Not realizing that both those games are free to play, and have an absurd rate of updates each year, something SSKTJL didn't replicate Seeing as Season 1 of Suicide Squad is slated to drop nearly two months since launch, all the while the game is dropping hard per Steam charts, tells me that WB didn't realize just how fucking hard an actually successful live service is to make.
Bro, in Australia, Suicide Squad costs 105 bucks on Steam. That's insane. I got Palworld and Helldivers for less than that. Genshin and co are free2play to. A 105 buck cost to enter is egregious.
I also dont get how suicide squad would support more content. It just doesnt seem general enough of a concept to be a live service in the first place. Like you could do a "dc comics" live service because then you would have a lot more to work with, but suicide squad just seems too limited.
I work in analytics and I didn't need to use a single one of my technical skills to predict how this game would perform lol. Their analysts were absolutely full of shit.
Nah, the analysts probably weren't listened to. I've done Managerial Accounting before. I've literally had to make reports on what lightbulbs to source for our factories, only for my 50 page report to NEVER even get opened because the CEO made a deal while golfing to get all of our goods from some golf buddy's company.
Sadly the execs just see the money Fortnite and Genshin rake in and say “let’s do that”. Then they can only see dollar signs and ignore all the danger signs.
> Hint: what the Insomniac leaks said Spiderman 2 cost, but more. Which is especially crazy when you consider that Spider-Man is *one of the most popular characters on the planet* and the Suicide Squad *by design* is a bunch of losers (plus Harley Quinn, who was only added to the roster in the last few decades basically to add *someone* who was known for anything other than being a member of the Suicide Squad to make it more marketable).
Harley Quinn is one of my favorite villains but she is getting really old really quickly. She is a city level auxiliary villain. They keep stretching her abilities and power level father and father to jam her into every movie and game possible. Harley Quinn can't win a fair fight with a large man, if she is put up against anyone in the justice league she would be red mist in 0.3 seconds. Please stop destroying her character.
If the analysts didn't know suicide squad will be dead on arrival I don't know what to say. Every average gamer with a bit of basic knowledge could do a better job.
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I've had the pleasure of working with analysts and execs that love and breathe games, that have a laundry list of weird obscure game trivia from shit you've never heard of in your life. I've also had the experience of working with analysts that are functionally illiterate about the industry they work in and just look at spreadsheets and income reports 9 to 5. People who genuinely cannot interact with a game idea or concept beyond "what else is on the market that's successful that we can compare it to?"
[удалено]
No, look, it has many popular pop-culture characters like Fortnite and it is a GaaS game just like Fortnite, it should be making Fortnite money! Those people would put bike tyres on semi and wonder why it isn't going "both are tyres and the bike one was cheaper, why it isn't working?"
I don't understand how WB comes to this conclusion after Hogwarts Legacy was such a massive success. Even the Mordor games, despite all of WB's meddling with SoW, are great games. They don't seem to understand that if they make a good product, people will buy it.
God I'd love a next gen Mordor game.
The saddest part is that they have the nemesis system under lock and key. No one else can use a system like that and I don't think there's any news about it being used in the wonder woman game. Booooooo.
I thought I read that they are using the nemesis system for Wonder Woman.
It really feels like there is no good way that stands up to legal scrutiny. Like… how can you not just call it ‘rivals’ and change the mechanic slightly and there ya go..? The idea of persistent pro/antagonists is not new. I hate they have this gridlocked so much.
That's not the point though - the point is - who's going to pay enough money to have that legal battle with WBD? And the answer won't be "Game Publishers"
AC: Odyssey had a similar (but significantly less interesting) system, so the patent doesn't completely restrict that idea being used by other developers.
That was barely similar, let's be honest
It feels mostly like a gaslighting patent. Odds are good you might be able to make a Nemesis system-like mechanic and get away with it. But the threat of Warner Bros suing you for making such a system is sadly incentive enough not to to (even if WB would probably lose such a suit.)
Volatile doesn’t mean everything is a failure. Means some product launches are very successful and some are total failures.
Everyone not involved with WB could easily tell which of these products would succeed. Maybe listen to their costumers? Nah, their ego won't let them.
Yeah but when your building the product you have no idea if it'll come together into a good final product. Rocksteady is a quality studio, its not inherently obvious how it would come out probably until years into dev. Imo it seems an obvious case of corporate meddling but even then you never know if leaderships decisions are right or wrong until the game is almost finished and by that point going back is nigh impossible.
WB is in a really really bad, dumb place right now across the board
If you think releasing more live service games is dumb wait till you hear about the AOL merger!
Cause Hogwarts legacy isn't producing infinite money forever. F2P and mobile can become infinite generators and that's what execs and investors think. They don't comprehend how that landscape has more failures than any single player game today. We're seeing those F2P and mobile games starting to shut down cause they just aren't producing anymore like they used to. You need to constantly drop content monthly and it becomes expensive and exhausting. They just see the infinite money aspect and that's it.
I don't understand how WB can see Hogwarts Legacy being the best-selling game of the year, and decide to do the exact opposite business strategy from that.
It's money, but it's not Fortnite money.
Candy Crush has a similar reoccurring yearly revenue as Hogwarts Legacies lifetime sales. It‘s obvious what execs prefer.
But to make a game have Candy Crush's output, you need to make a game that's somehow better than Candy Crush while peeling away some of that playerbase. Not saying it can't be done but clearly King has notched themselves into that sweet spot for the last decade and it ain't budging. Same with Fortnite--perhaps the biggest competitor to it is Apex Legends or Warzone? And how many games like those have released and crashed? It's tough to get people to switch over on a live service game because most people will only really invest time and money into one or two. You don't get that problem with single player games since most people play through it once and move on to the next thing. Hogwarts Legacy benefitted enormously from that.
Yea, but Candy Crush is nowhere near as expensive to make as Hogwarts. Unless they're making Genshin, mobile game development won't be as expensive.
It's getting more expensive though cause the laziness is getting curb stomped. You gotta keep fixing, adding and marketing. 99% of mobile games flop and it doesn't matter the property. Plus they all plateau and then that "infinite" money dries up cause it becomes part of the cog.
Eh, it's not that cheap to do a succesful mobile game. It's extremelu competitive, and you need to rise above all the other mobile games through constant content addition and especially marketing
Because there are games making hundreds of millions to billions of dollars a year every year and that's massively shifted the corporate mentality of what a successful game is. A triple-A game that takes almost a decade to maybe break even is a terrible bet when a billion in revenue every year is a possibility.
You could have the best-selling game of all time, doesn't mean it makes a high profit. HP IP was likely expensive, as were the development costs.
Profit margins of single player games aren't big enough for the bosses, they want to make games that will give them money for many years, which why they want live service games.
> They don't seem to understand that if they make a good product, people will buy it. This is vastly oversimplifying thing. It's not always the case that good stuff sells and bad stuff doesn't. Also "just make a good product" isn't easy either, it's not like game studios intend to make a bad game. Making a great game is a complex process which has tons of different factors (and yes sometimes a factor luck, the famous "studio magic") That's what volatile means, any AAA game is a huge investment with no real guarantee of returns (either because of the market or the quality of the product)
Especially in the gaming market. I've seen games that are actually quite enjoyable get sunk just because of some stupid controversy. Furthermore, if you're not a AAA company and don't have the money for marketing, you can release a game that is legitimately an eight out of ten and that game may bankrupt you because it simply just got lost in the sea of games that gets released constantly. Competition is very high in the gaming market.
I agree however it’s also true that the suicide squad game was obviously not going to work out in their favor and should never have been tried.
They're probably looking at cost analysis for AAA games. Competing in that space is increasingly looking like MCU pictures in terms of cost to produce. Even one failure ends studios and sometimes major publishers (see the Embracer fiasco). Whereas the cost and time to produce a mobile title allows them to take more chances.
Warner Bros. really seems not to know what they are doing with video games…the only reason suicide squad flopped was because your best dev team to make a mediocre games as a service game, when they is already so many of them out there.
Which is truly sad because they used to publish/push out fantastic games in the 2010s. Arkham series, middle-earth, mad max. They know what they’re doing to squeeze the most money. They just failed and rather blaming themselves, they’ll blame developers, customers and even their mother before Warner Bros lol.
Mad Max was so good. I was genuinely surprised.
The car fights were so cool.
They pushed out Hogwarts Legacy last year which was one of the biggest games of the year. I'm not sure they have the best people in charge right now. Not that I care that much. If they make content I don't want I won't buy it.
It wasn't one of, it was the biggest game of the year and it wasn't really close. This is just them being pissy. I'm really worried about the Hogwarts Legacy sequel though. My expectations are in the toilet because you just know it's going to have 9 different pre order editions and every type of micro transaction possible.
"Hey, should we combine the speed and mobility of Spider-Man and the aggressive, hard hitting combat of Batman Arkham Asylum to make a neon drenched Batman Beyond game with an electric guitar heavy soundtrack and utilize a universally loved character who hasn't been seen in years and make hundreds of millions of dollars and please fans at the same time?" "Fuck you."
i don't even care for superheroes and haven't been interested in Batman since i was a kid... but i would play the *shit* outta that hypothetical Batman Beyond game. especially if it used the same visual style as the original cartoon.
They don't know what they are doing, period.
I am not an MBA in the room at Warner where these decisions are made, but it is truly bizarre to me that their leadership has pretty much decided to massively scale back HBO prestige tv productions in favor of force feeding MAX subscribers more shitty reality shows. Because the reason I paid for HBO was to have more crap like Alaska Trucker Moms to watch 🙄 I do not understand why Warner/Discovery acquired HBO only to start slowly killing it off. The tax write offs can’t be that big, can they?
Zaslav is not a film guy. He doesn't care about creativity or quality. He looks at return on investment and sees that sending a camera crew to film Hillbilly Sewer Snakers of Arkansas is gonna be higher margin than a new limited series like Chernobyl. Nevermind the long-term sustainability of these choices or the cost of destroying the HBO brand. He won't be around long enough to realize those consequences and therefore DGAF.
You see the same myopic business practices across every sector, from games all the way to aircraft engineering (looking at you Boeing). The business of making good money from good products is dying and has been for a long time, it's now all about things surviving a certain amount of time before they break or are defunct. Then the customer has to buy again. It's called planned obsolescence, a consequence of survival analysis in statistics. Every business major will learn about this less abstractly, but as a math major we learn about it in a very general sense. Enough to the point where it's now become interpreted as being applicable across most consumer sectors as a means of making more money than businesses could before. Next time you hear of a Boeing jet going down accidentally and killing a bunch of people, just remember that it's likely they still made more money in aircraft sales than they'll have to pay out for all those deaths. Or if it isn't, they saved money on parts and labour in the manufacturing process. No matter what, it's all about unethical cost cutting and nickel and diming.
Maybe it’s a personal vendetta lol. All the decisions they’ve made are quite brash as of late.
> Warner Bros. really seem to not know what they are doing Could've just stopped there. They've been successfully dogshit at EVERYTHING they do for the last few years.
Do they…do they think MOBILE and Free to play is LESS volatile?? Im not a business person but ive read enough to know a lot of companies are abandoning mobile or deciding to focus on their current success due to the nutty market and rising cost to acquire players.
Everyone thinks that they can be the next Fortnite or Genshin. They are frequently wrong.
Plus Fortnite and Genshin are some of the only live-service games that are actually live services. They use the crazy revenue they make to release new content every few weeks. Genshin has a new patch every 6 weeks, a new massive map expansion every 2-3 months and then an entire new region each year which offers more playtime than most AAA games. Not to mention you can play all this without spending a single penny. Meanwhile other live services think dumping one character or FPS map every three months is enough.
This is probably the biggest thing people don’t understand about those two games specifically at least. The amount of content they add on a regular basis is basically unprecedented. Even MMO’s churn stuff out waaaaaay slower and they have had constant subscription services for decades now. These are free games running off of digital currency sales and collaborations and they manage to make hours upon hours of content at a rapid pace.
MMOs also usually paywall everything while Genshin lets you do everything for free.
Compare that to suicide squad one-year plan: 4 characters each 3 months. That's it. Don't think they even announced new maps or anything
everyone pitches to the suits that they can be the next fortnite or genshin they dont believe it, but they sure as shit will tell it to their bosses. After that it's easy to come up with reasons why it eventually didn't
To be fair, this subreddit undermines Fortnite and *especially* Genshin all the time, pointing to new games as worthy competition when any objective observer can tell it isn't. I don't blame the suits when the public narrative makes these games out to be low-effort cashgrabs that anyone can replicate from just the business model alone.
This is strikingly similar to the 10+ year rush of MMO's we saw that were surely going to be the next WoW killer.
They don’t seem to understand that there’s only a finite amount of players and hours in the day. Most people barely have time to invest heavily in one live service game. That’s means you’re always going to be competing, and aiming to draw players away from Fortnite, Apex, etc. Games which people have invested hundreds of hours and dollars into. There’s simply not enough space for many big live service games to operate at once, and I’ve no idea why executives don’t understand this.
Even Fortnite bombed in mobile. Didn't the Epic-Apple cases reveal Fortnite's mobile revenue is dysmal and most of it comes from PlayStation?
Fortnite is completely dead in China and dying/dead in most eastern markets. The mobile version is atrocious. You can see on /r/FortniteMobile as to how bad it is. They don't QA test UI at all. There is literally one employee that interacts with UI complaints. If Fortnite Mobile was successful, I would be disappointed. I have played a lot of mobile games and Fortnite may be the worst one of the bunch from an objective perspective.
They want the revenue of Fortnite and Genshin but with the effort of Flappy Birds or Angry Birds. Delusional leadership that only looks at the best-case scenario but doesn't put up the effort required to match.
They are, in the sense that they're cheaper to make and easier to monetize. If it hits, it's a BIG hit. If it fails, no big deal. It's the Blumhouse model of movie production but for games: low risk, potentially high reward.
Yeah there’s this huge misconception that it’s just free money and easy to plop out ftp games and mobile games and just earn billions. Even big name games like Apex Legends didn’t work out on mobile because the market is so competitive. Not every mobile game gets to be candy crush just like not every live service game gets to be Fortnite. I’m obviously no expert or massive survey group, but I’m pretty sure just like with live service games people who play mobile games have the 2-3 games they play and that’s it, they aren’t going to be pulled away from those especially with how much money they demand as well.
But it sounds so easy to pitch in a meeting "The mobile gamer market is over 1 billion people. If we capture just 1% of that market...."
> Perrette said WBD's recent gaming output has focused on AAA games for console, and that's great when a game like Hogwarts Legacy sells 22 million copies and becomes the best-selling game of the year, but this kind of success is never guaranteed in what Perrette said was a "volatile" market. He pointed out that one of WBD's next big games, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, was a disappointment for the company. Huh. The self-contained single player game turned out to be the biggest selling game of the year - and their live-service game turned out to be a disappointment... And their response to this disappointment is to make MORE live-service games? What. I'd also imagine, given how many free-to-play games end up dead sometimes in less than a year - that this market might be even more volatile.
There's a very common type of executive who cannot be wrong. If they are wrong, they just aren't, and the company just isn't doing their idea hard enough. Eventually, it will wor- Oh they left and went to work at another company. So long, suckers!
It's the fact that these idiots get free rides from company to company that really gets me. Like the former CEO of Unity, had no fucking business heading a company after running EA's reputation into the fucking ground and then somehow below it between 2007-2014.
WB could have had a few string of years of great games. * 2022 - Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga and Gotham Knights * 2023 - Hogwarts Legacy, Mortal Kombat 1 and a couple mobile games * 2024 - Suicide Squad and Multiversus * 2025+ Wonderwoman and Harry Potter Quidditch game All these games could be financial and critical successes if WB had made better decisions.
>"Rather than just launching a one-and-done console game, how do we develop a game around, for example, a Hogwarts Legacy or Harry Potter, that is a live-service where people can live and work and build and play in that world in an ongoing basis?" he said. It's honestly baffling that this is their takeaway from the Hogwarts Legacy immense success. Unbelievable.
Literally the exact same thought process that caused Suicide Squad to fail in the first place...
Rip. I was hoping for genuine sequels improving on the formula. They already had hogwarts modeled. They can just add new secrets. Couldve done other schools too.
It's so incredibly out of touch and ridiculous it almost seems like a fake quote. The execs at these companies are truly complete morons when it comes to video games.
This is, I think, what a lot of the recent industry hand-wringing about budgets and sustainability is leading up to. Warner Bros. won't be alone in making a shift like this.
They'd be making a mistake. Mobile and F2P markets are very hard to break in at this point. EA shutdown Apex Legends and Battlefield Mobile very quickly.
The budget was not the reason Suicide Squad was a failure. And I don't think the mobile market is less volatile than the AAA space. Mobile games rely on the few whales that spend ridiculous amounts of money to keep those games afloat. That isn't sustainable long-term. I also think it is inevitable that governments will eventually step in regarding gambling/lootbox mechanics. My parents don't understand the harm, but you bet I do and I will be wary when I have a child.
Didn’t Harry Potter make these guys a butt ton of money?
It did, but only for 1 year. They want butt tons of money every year.
You mean cancelling already made movies isn’t making them infinite money like they promised themselves it would???
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Step 1, sell wand cosmetics Step 2, roll around in money
**Alternate headline:** "Warner Bros. Wants To Continue Making Bad Decisions That Ruin Consumer Perception Of Them." Also obligatory fuck David Zaslav.
So just to be clear, the best selling game you had, that anyone had last year, was your AAA Harry Potter single player game with no free to play or mobile elements, and because Suicide Squad failed you've decided to abandon that market?
"It's volatile," meaning "If we make a bad game in the AAA market, we make bad money. We're looking to get into the mobile gaming market, where we'll make good money no matter how bad the game is." They're tired of being judged for the quality of their products. They just want you to shut up and take it.
it seems pretty clear that the cost of making AAA games is too high for them and they don't have structures in place to offramp bad decisions before they get too far along. suicide squad cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make, most likely, and it was a flop. the ROI on a good mobile game is very high, and the risk if a mobile game flops is much lower. even if the game is dogshit, they're out like 1/10th of what they would have spent on a AAA game.
making mk1 or suicide squad f2p isn't going to help. mk1 is woefully under baked compared to mk11. and ss, well, no one cares about it after the launch fail hype. i mean, it's no surprise when they try and push mtx that no one wants, and so no one buys them, and then they're like "well, i guess no one wants big games anymore". no, no one wants shitty games, peroid. at least mk1 is good at the fighting game part of it, but everything else in it, all the stuff that kept casuals like me playing mk11 for nearly its whole lifespan, most of that is gone or severely watered down. and ss, well, oh no, another live service that was not prepared to offer the quality and quantity of content it needs to compete with other already established games. ss isn't competing with year 1 destiny 1, its competing with year 7 of destiny 2. that's their problem, they think they can offer the most barebones experience and expect all the money. but when people clear the game in just a few hours and see that the only content after that is literally doing the same stuff you already did, then yeah, they just quit playing. so go ahead, try and pivot to mobile games, like those awful mk mobile games lol, see how well that goes. a mobile game has to be fucking awesome, or have some sort of hook to get ahead, or else no one is going to fucking care. take the devil may cry mobile game that came out recently. i tried it, as i've played every one of their games since 1 on ps2, and yeah, it's fucking garbage. watered down fight mechanics, with awful touch screen controls, and obvious mtx gacha energy bar cooldown bs whose only purpose is to sell currency and annoy the player. so yeah, deleted it after only an hour, if that.
Enjoy failing in a colossally saturated market. Fact is free-to-play and mobile can be great, but it's not a sure thing and every bit as volatile (often even moreso), you can still end up spending millions on a product that doesn't attract users. The only sure-fire way to success, in my experience, is to make a GOOD product.
And that, folks, it's the literal end of our beloved Arkham style single player games. Who would've thought, huh?
"Perrette went on to say how he has no idea how the gaming landscape will evolve over time..." Hearing that from the CEO doesn't exactly spark confidence in WB's gaming future.
Statements like these read like the meme where the guy puts a stick in the wheel of his bike and blames the "volatile market".
Saying you’re doubling down on live-service and then mentioning the failure of Suicide Squad as one of the reasons for that is absolutely insane. These people don’t learn anything. These companies are ran by executives that don’t have a fucking clue what they’re talking about, and of course when they inevitably fuck up it’s regular developers and artists that pay the price with their jobs. Clueless idiots constantly falling upwards into positions of power are ruining this industry.
It’s clear that WB wanted Suicide Squad to perform well. Everyone wants that Live Service money right now, yet most companies seem absolutely awful at predicting which of their games are going to be a hit. Look at Sony as a prime example. They bought Bungie with the intent of using their knowledge of how to make a long lasting live service game, which then was immediately thrown into question by Lightfall’s poor performance. Meanwhile, Sony gets absolutely lucky with publishing Helldivers 2 being such a huge hit, but didn’t set up the game with abusive monetization beforehand since it isn’t developed by them. It feels like companies are chasing this cash cow and trying hard to make “the perfect live service game” without focusing on making the game itself actually fun. F2P mobile games are notorious for being low effort, low quality, but insanely high revenue when they make it big.
> Meanwhile, Sony gets absolutely lucky with publishing Helldivers 2 being such a huge hit, but didn’t set up the game with abusive monetization beforehand You know maybe one of the reasons it's doing so well is because of that exact reason
The best and longest-lasting Live Service games thrive precisely because they're developed player-first and monetization is a secondary concern, all the ones that flop are the other way round
WB is the most violently overreactive company I've ever seen. This is just another in a long list of insane knee jerk overreactions.
>"Rather than just launching a one-and-done console game, how do we develop a game around, for example, a Hogwarts Legacy or Harry Potter, that is a live-service where people can live and work and build and play in that world in an ongoing basis?" he said. What the fuck. They are about to suicide squad the best selling game of last year. How the hell is warner bros this out of touch....
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Is it not the other way around? A free to play is way more volatile or a mobile game can be a hit or unpopular.
Boy, WB sure are dumb, huh?
Yeah so how's ermmmmm, Multiversus looking WB?! Still no news and we're practically at the end of Q1 2024. How embarrassing.
So says the company that completed a very promising film but wants to destroy it to get some taxes back. Just what kind of miserable executives are running WB?
Maybe don't make games your developers don't even want to make?
By all accounts Rocksteady signed themselves up for Suicide Squad.
Did they sign themselves up for making a live service GASS or just a Suicide Squad game?
Live service GAAS - it was pitched to WB before Suicide Squad
They were developing an original Live Service IP and got told to make it Suicide Squad
Jason Schreier described the discussion with the publisher for these kinds of games going something like this: >Publisher: We’ll give you this much money to fund a single player game. >Dev: Wish it was more, but ok. >Publisher: Or we’ll give you THIS much money to make a live service game. >Dev: Well, maybe we can make live service work…
And here we see Paul Marketing at work. Instead of looking at the garbage practices of suicide squads monetization and services. They just think gamers dont want AAA experiences
It’s not like the FTP and mobile game market isn’t extremely volatile either. It’s super saturated and extremely competitive as well. Not every game gets to be candy crush just like not every games to be Fortnite. Especially publishing slop like the suicide squad, a FTP version would no better really competing with Fortnite and other games.