Warner Bros Games leadership to depart, is WB's $3 billion games target in jeopardy?

Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment president David Haddad is leaving after 12 years of leading the games division, can WB's $3bn games goal be met?

Warner Bros Games leadership to depart, is WB's $3 billion games target in jeopardy?
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Senior Gaming Editor
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TL;DR: WB Interactive Entertainment president David Haddad is leaving after 12 years amid financial challenges. Despite successes like Hogwarts Legacy, WB Games faced setbacks with titles like Suicide Squad, leading to $335 million in impairments. WB aims for $3 billion in revenue, considering licensing IPs to third parties to boost profitability.

WB Interactive Entertainment president David Haddad is leaving the company after 12 years, sources have told Variety. The news comes after a prolonged 2-year period of agonizing cuts and layoffs in the games sector.

Warner Bros Games leadership to depart, is WB's $3 billion games target in jeopardy? 6

What's going on with WB Games? While largely successful with games like Batman, Mortal Kombat, and the mega-million-selling Hogwarts Legacy, the pendulum has also swung the other with disastrous miscalculations like Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and Gotham Knights. These misses came at the worst possible time for WB Games. In the last 9 months, WB has accounted $335 million in game contents impairments; basically, WB reduced the perceived value of its games by that amount. Suicide Squad was a big part of this charge.

WB management has set a $3 billion revenue target for its games division which it hopes will help offset these lowered-valued assets. In a bid to boost profitability, WBD CEO David Zaslav says it's possible that certain IPs and franchises would be licensed out to third-party partners, similar to how Marvel handles its games business. Unlike WB Games, Marvel doesn't produce its own games in-house and instead leans on already-established teams to do the heavy lifting--like, say, the Chinese monetization masters NetEase with Marvel Rivals.

It's unclear how close--or far--WB Games is to achieving this goal, and whether or not the progress has anything to do with Haddad's departure after 12 years.

Here's what Zaslav said last quarter about gaming:

I think we're through some of the worst and it hasn't been pretty on the gaming business.

But we have four games that are really powerful and have a real constituency that love them and we're going to focus on those four primarily. And we're going to go away from trying to launch 10, 12, 15, 20 different games.

And I think we have a real chance now with focus to have the gaming business be a steadier.

So, I'm very encouraged, you know our ambition to get back to at least $3 billion and then start growing. And there's a lot of building blocks with wind at our back in order to get there.

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NEWS SOURCE:variety.com

Senior Gaming Editor

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Derek joined the TweakTown team in 2015 and has since reviewed and played 1000s of hours of new games. Derek is absorbed with the intersection of technology and gaming, and is always looking forward to new advancements. With over six years in games journalism under his belt, Derek aims to further engage the gaming sector while taking a peek under the tech that powers it. He hopes to one day explore the stars in No Man's Sky with the magic of VR.

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