Warner Bros. has admitted that platform fighter MultiVersus was a flop, adding yet more to the losses the company has sustained in what is becoming a disastrous year for its interactive branch.
In a recent earnings call (via IGN), Warner Bros. CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels said MultiVersus contributed to "another $100 million plus impairment" due to its underperformance, meaning WB's overall gaming writedown on a year-to-date basis is over $300 million.
If you're wondering where the other $200 million of that writedown came from, it was contributed by February's Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League massively underperforming. MultiVersus isn't quite on the same catastrophic level, but that's two live-service experiments that appear to have failed for WB this year.
Warner Bros. will no doubt be disappointed with MultiVersus' failure to perform, especially given that the company believed in the game so much that it purchased developer Player First Games back in July.
After being taken offline last year following a lengthy open beta period, MultiVersus was released in full as a free-to-play fighting game earlier this year. Its character roster includes the likes of Scooby-Doo!'s Shaggy, DC's Superman and Batman, and Adventure Time's Jake and Finn, as well as other familiar faces.
A quick look at MultiVersus' SteamDB page might give a good indication as to the scale of the game's failure; it's currently got just 1,121 players (at time of writing), with a 24-hour peak of 1,741. That's compared to its all-time peak of over 150,000 when it launched in open beta in 2022.
Despite its disappointment in MultiVersus, WB has a plan. Per the earnings call, it's focusing on four core franchises: Mortal Kombat, the DC universe, Game of Thrones, and Hogwarts Legacy, with a sequel and a Director's Cut apparently already in the pipeline for the latter.
According to CEO David Zaslav, Warner Bros. is not just committing to DC, but "in particular Batman", so we may well be about to see a lot more Batman games arriving.
Hey, who knows? Perhaps the single-player game on which Rocksteady is apparently working is a new Batman game. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your movie preferences), we do, however, know that it won't be a game based on the 2022 movie The Batman.
