Hogwarts Legacy was one of the most successful video games in 2023 and brought Warner Bros. billions in sales. Nevertheless, they would like to pursue a different strategy in the future.
Image: Warner Bros.
With Hogwarts Legacy, Warner Bros. released an old-school video game last year. A pure full-price single player without DLCs or microtransactions. And the plan worked: both the pure sales and player numbers are impressive. The game was at the top of the Steam charts for many weeks and more than 22 million copies have been sold across all platforms to date.
So Warner Bros. will probably release more games like Hogwarts Legacy in the future, right? After all, the success speaks for itself. Wrong thought. CEO JB Perrette draws completely different conclusions from the story. He now emphasized at an event (via IGN) that such AAA games are not the future of his own gaming division.
Instead, they want to concentrate more on live service games. Games that, in the best case scenario, generate revenue over a long period of time because players continually invest in certain content. The mobile and free-2-play areas are particularly attractive, says Perrette.
After releasing Hogwarts Legacy which did 22 million units in 1 year and releasing Suicide Squad which failed to meet company expectations, this is sure a move. https://t.co/SQQZ3qMR3b
— Tom Henderson (@_Tom_Henderson_) March 5, 2024
This statement causes a lack of understanding among industry experts. After all, Warner Bros. recently brought a service game onto the market that is anything but good in direct comparison with Hogwarts Legacy. Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is not only struggling with bad reviews, but also with low player numbers. The game was only able to attract around 13,000 players to the screens on Steam at peak times. As a reminder: Hogwarts Legacy had almost 880,000 simultaneous players when it was released.
Only time will tell whether the move away from classic AAA games will really pay off and how the decision will affect a possible successor to Hogwarts Legacy.