Gaming is a 'strategic asset' for Warner Bros. Discovery, CFO says

Warner Bros. Discovery shows no signs of giving up on its video games business any time soon.

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Any hit-driven business is a gamble, and gaming is no different. There's never any guarantee that a game will sell and/or make earnings from microtransactions. WB Games has seen its fair share of hits with games like the Arkham series, the best-selling Mortal Kombat franchise, and more recently the 22 million-selling Hogwarts Legacy, but the pendulum also swings the other way, too.

Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League was a dud, and led to some big losses for the company. Even still, WB is mature enough to understand that these things happen in the games business, and has no intention of just giving up on the segment.

According to CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels, Gaming is an important asset for WB Discovery; in an interview at the recent Bank of America conference, the executive outlined an optimistic look at WBD's games business:

"It actually has been the area that has been dragging down the studio performance in the first half of this year. If you exclude games, everything else would have been flat or up, in aggregate. That is as much a reflection of what's going on this year--we've had one miss with Suicide Squad--but it's also a reflection of one of the strongest years ever last year. That's the important point.

"Yes, our gaming business is a strategic asset for Warner Bros. Discovery. There's no question about it. We've seen with Hogwarts Legacy what the team is able to do, what our IP is able to do. The combination of those capabilities and our content IP can lead to the greatest game in the history of the company, the greatest console game of last year.

"So the answer there is yes.

"To your point, it is just like the film business, a hit-driven business, actually even more so because to some extent the investments are greater, the development times are greater, and it's unfortunate that we've had the two in sequence now, one of the bigger misses following one of the greatest hits."

In other news, WB Discovery CEO David Zaslav has indicated that the company may eventually license out its key IPs to other third-party publishers and developers, not unlike how Disney licenses out Marvel and Star Wars to groups like Electronic Arts and Ubisoft.