Warner Brothers’ gaming department has caused some of the most painful flops of recent years: Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is a huge failure. The new game for Wonder Woman still had to be stopped in development. This has an impact on your currently strongest gaming brand, the game to Harry Potter: Hogwarts Legacy 2.
What’s going on with Warner Bros.? Warner Bros’s gaming department, Wbgames, has suffered some catastrophic failures in the past few months:
Hogwarts Legacy: Official launch trailer
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Hogwarts Legacy 2 will not be a service game, says Insider
That is now the consequence: The plan is now apparently to continue, with which you have success: Hogwarts Legacy sold 34 million times.
As the renowned video game journalist Jason Schreier reports (via YouTube), the consequence is that Warner Bros. turns away from the “Games as a Service” model and develops like the new Batman game and Hogwarts Legacy 2 with a different focus. The gaming journalist Jason Schreier, who is known for his good contacts in the gaming industry, says in a podcast:
Hogwarts Legacy 2 will not be a Games-as-a-service game, the new Batman will not be a Games-as-a-service game and Wonder Woman would not have become a Games-as-a-service game. This is not a company that relies on Games-as-A-Service. You want to go on large brands.
Why service games now have such a bad reputation
What does that mean? “Games-As-A-Service” is now a negative method of how games are developed: “Games as a Service” actually means something positive: games are further developed after the release, extensions, regular patches and updates. In the past, only MMOs and MMORPGs were actually developed in the way. Today, however, classic single player games are also produced in this way. A strategy game like Europa Universalis IV has been further developed for 11 years and has received so many DLCs that it costs almost € 400 on Steam to get the game completely.
After a few failures, “Games as a Service” looks like an unfinished product comes from the market, from which important parts were cut out, which are then subsequently adequately added and sold. This creates the impression that even expensive games are thrown onto the market “unfinished and unpolished”.
Often the game is then not developed as it was actually promised, but the project is still being discontinued in unfinished condition.
This has nothing to do with the actual thoughts of “Games as a Service”: Usually games should appear in this way that are complete for the release and can be played well, but which would be even better over the years.
Successful MMORPGs such as WoW are examples of such successful service games. But the last games of Warner Bros are examples of how it doesn’t work.
Fans now hope that Hogwarts Legacy 2 appears as a classic single player role-playing game and has an appropriate length and gameplay depth for the release, which is not subsequently dismembered: the 15 best free MMOs and MMORPGs on Steam