On Friday Jason Schreier, reporting for Bloomberg, released an article about the struggles that WB Games has faced under outgoing executive David Haddad since around 2015. You can read the full article HERE, but to sum up some key points, 2024 was a bad year for the publisher, especially as it related to comic book and comic book adjacent Games as a Service – or GaaS for short – offerings. MultiVersus, the free-to-start Super Smash Bros. style fighting game featuring characters such as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Harley Quinn relaunched and is about to get shut down permanently in May after the completion of its fifth season. Rocksteady Studios’ Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, which at some point was hopefully set to keep going for years and years also severely underperformed. It wrapped up its story anticlimactically last month.

What’s perhaps most heartbreaking about Schreier’s piece is that players shouldn’t expect any surprise DC Comics inspired video games for quite some time, even as the publisher is finding hits in the “Absolute” line of comics and is about to get a cinematic universe restart in July with James Gunn’s highly anticipated Superman. Monolith’s Wonder Woman, according to Schreier, has already burned through $100 million and was quietly restarted last year with a new director. It was announced in 2021 at that year’s Game Awards and it’s not expected anytime soon. WB Games Montreal, the studio behind Gotham Knights, pitched a Constantine project that didn’t get off the ground and a game starring the Flash was canned after the film starring the character flopped last year. Even a director’s cut of sorts for Gotham Knights that would’ve incorporated player feedback was shot down.

via Warner Bros. Games YouTube

Given the amount of consolidation and layoffs in the video game industry, not to mention Warner Bros. propensity to send projects to the farm as a way to help pay taxes, who knows what the future will hold for WB Games. For what it’s worth, however, here are some ways that an observer of the industry would go about course correcting the struggling division.

SMALLER PROJECTS

As someone who has followed the industry for most of their life and has written about them for well over a decade, video games are taking longer and longer to produce. Whether that’s due to studios combating grueling crunch or the time it takes to optimize 4K assets is difficult to say, but it doesn’t take an analyst to see that once upon a time a studio like Naughty Dog could launch 4 games on one console and they’ve yet to release anything beyond remakes for the PlayStation 5 yet.

Another factor to consider is that for sometime now, publishers have been pushing for games that keep players engaged for upwards of 100 hours. This keeps them locked within a single title for months at a time, but it leaves little room for other experiences. When they launched in 2009 and 2011 respectively, both Batman: Arkham Asylum and City could be completed in well under 20 hours and were still massive hits. This is the scope that WB Games needs to be focusing on right now.

They need to also branch out beyond the AAA space to see what smaller studios can do with DC’s iconic stable of characters. The trend to chase – because executives love to chase them – is the one presently being followed by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise. In the pipeline is a AAA title based off of The Last Ronin story, but then there’s also smaller hits like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge and Splintered Fate. It’s not hard to envision a throwback brawler based off of DC Animated programs like Batman: The Animated Series, Justice League Unlimited or even Teen Titans. Similarly, why not try a roguelike starring the Bat-Family?

These will never be hits on par with Hogwarts Legacy, but they could all serve as a way to keep the DC Comics brand alive in the video game space. In one month of release, Shredder’s Revenge sold a million units in its first month alone with a budget much smaller than any recent WB Games DC releases. Those are numbers that are not to be ignored.

COLLECTIONS AND REMASTERS

Released in 2022 and built by Digital Eclipse, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection was a hit for publisher Konami, crossing a million units sold by the first quarter of 2023. It not only served as an easy way to experience some of the best licensed games from the late 80s/early 90s, but it also offered a glimpse into what went into building them too.

Though there are hurdles to overcome, there’s plenty of classic DC Comics games to be mined for similar compilations. Konami, who’s no stranger to such things, has software based on Batman Returns and Batman: The Animated Series that simply should come back, and Sunsoft’s library of games inspired by Tim Burton’s Batman is an easy sell too. In 2023, Limited Run Games dropped the Jurassic Park Classic Games Collection which bundled 8 and 16-bit titles from both Sega and defunct publisher Ocean. Perhaps something could be worked out with Sega that allowed a Batman: The Animated Series title that bundled Konami’s offerings with those of Sega.

Recently McFarlane toys put out a wave of action figures inspired by the fighting game Justice League Task Force but the game is nowhere to be found on any modern store front. The SNES version was developed by the studio that would become Blizzard who also produced The Death and Return of Superman. Digital Eclipse put out a collection of retro Blizzard games, so both parties must be open to mining that back catalog.

This generation has seen big-budget remasters of PlayStation 4 games, but what about games of lesser quality that could use a second chance? With Superman on the way, wouldn’t it be incredible to see a remaster of Superman: The New Superman Adventures for the Nintendo 64 that tried to fix its shortcomings? Why not saddle it with the never released PlayStation game as an added bonus. Between developers like Nightdive Studios, Digital Eclipse, Code Mystics and M2 among others, there has to be an interested party who’s up to the challenge if they simply got the call.

Finally, there’s no reason for games like Batman: Arkham Origins and its spin-off Blackgate that were followed up in 2024 in Batman: Arkham Shadow to be stuck on hardware that’s no longer being produced.

FRANCHISE SHARING

WB Games is a traditional video game publisher, but some of the best DC themed games over the past few years weren’t put out by them. DC’s Justice League: Cosmic Chaos from PHL Collective and publisher Outright Games, for example, was beloved by most who put their hands on it and finds itself on best-of lists. Batman: Arkham Shadow from Camouflaj and Oculus Studios has been lauded with critical praise and has taken home countless VR Game of the Year awards from the Game Awards, The Electric Playground and even this very site you’re on right now. What both have in common is that they were crafted outside of the WB Games ecosystem.

via Electric Playground Network – EPN YouTube

This has been the model that Disney has followed with their overflowing stable of IP since they discontinued publishing their own video games after the release of Disney Infinity 3.0. While not all have been the hits they deserved to be – Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy and Marvel’s Midnight Suns should have sequels in production – titles inspired by Marvel, Star Wars, and most recently Indiana Jones have become some of the best licensed games ever produced.

The key to success here is curation and finding the right partners who desperately want to make a DC Comics game. Sony’s trio of Spider-Man games became the million sellers they were because the people at the top guiding them loved the character and the universe they live in. This is also true for DC’s Justice League: Cosmic Chaos, which follows the formula of things like X-Men Legends and Marvel Ultimate Alliance not only in how it plays, but how it packs it lovingly pays homage to DC Comics history in its Easter Eggs, writing, collectibles and costumes.