In a recent interview between another publication site and president of Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, David Haddad, it is said that the company plans on moving to a full “games as a service” business model, where if not all of WBIE’s games feature said service, most will.
Catching wind from publication site DSOG, we learn that VentureBeat posted up a piece that featured Haddad, which happened during the now-ended Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) 2018. The piece explored how WBIE steadily built many internal game studios across PC, console, and mobile platforms, and also touched on games as a service.
Speaking of games as a service, VentureBeat asked if other companies are learning how to play the social media attention game. Below lies Haddad’s response:
“These great games, mobile and console, are built for long-term engagement. The greatest games continue to be played. Trying to be a new entrant, a new release in that environment, where gamers are so invested already, either with their friends or with a virtual currency or just with their time and expertise—finding a way to grab a share of their time is one of the biggest publishing challenges all companies have today.”
In addition to “engagement,” the publication site asked about big launches and if there is a year to year pattern that WBIE abides by, to which Haddad replied:
“We don’t have any annualized franchises in our slate on the console side. What we do focus on, in mobile or console, is just launching a game and then having a long tail of engagement, content that continues to release. In the case of mobile, events and live services and new content and new features. We’re trying to get the most out of our launches by keeping it long term and durable. Lego is a kind of annual franchise, but the individual IPs aren’t.”
After talking about the Lego games being an annual franchise while the individual IPs aren’t, the conversation shifted over to games as a service and what we can expect from here on out:
“But more than ever, the tech stack, whether it’s for publishing or BI or marketing, that you build and serve these games on—as we increasingly move everything to games as a service, the kind of enabling technology you need to keep them hyper-social, to keep them serving well, to keep them engaged, to take the innovations of game makers and deliver them, like the Nemesis system—you’ll see a lot of our investment not just in classic development, designers and engineers and artists, but increasingly in the teams that end up serving live games.”
With that said, what do you think of Warner Bros. seeking to move everything to a service model or games as a service setup? Do you think they’ll get manipulative with their service model or do you think it’ll be none controversial?
