Warner Bros. Admits MultiVersus Underperformed, Contributing to Another $100 Million Hit to Revenue in Its Games Business

Free-to-play Smash Bros.-style brawler MultiVersus has significantly underperformed, publisher Warner Bros. Discovery has admitted, contributing to a further $100 million writedown for the company’s games business in 2024.

Warner Bros. Games acquired MultiVersus developer Player First Games in July just two months after the game relaunched on PS4, PS5, PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X and S following early access and open beta releases throughout 2022 and 2023.

"Our team is excited to join the Warner Bros. Games family, and we feel that this will be great for MultiVersus overall,” Huynh said at the time. “We are working to make the MultiVersus game experience the best it can be and having our development team integrated with the publisher is optimum for the players."

However, speaking in a recent financial call, Warner Bros. Discovery President and CEO David Zaslav and Chief Financial Officer Gunnar Wiedenfels said MultiVersus' failure had added another $100 million to the $200 million writedown the company's games business had already suffered earlier this year.

Warner Bros. Games' only new game release during the third quarter of 2024 was Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions, which failed to make an impression.

"... we recognise [the games business] is substantially underperforming its potential right now," Zaslav said.

Wiedenfels added more detail: "We took another $100 million plus impairment due to the underperforming releases, primarily MultiVersus this quarter, bringing total writedown year-to-date to over $300 million in our games business, a key factor in this year’s studio profit decline."

According to SteamDB, at the time of this article’s publication MultiVersus had just 686 concurrent players, with a 24-hour peak of 1,741 concurrent players. MultiVersus’ all-time peak of 153,433 concurrent players was set over two years ago, before the game was pulled offline and overhauled. Microsoft and Sony do not make player numbers public.

What this all means for MultiVersus remains to be seen, but earlier this year, after Warner Bros. admitted the failure of Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League contributed to a $200 million hit to revenue, post-launch plans were reportedly scaled back, and layoffs were reported. Season 4 launches on November 12 and ends January 21, 2025.

Warner Bros. Games revenue declined 31% during the most recent financial quarter (July to September), primarily driven by the better performance of the prior year slate, mainly Mortal Kombat 1, compared to the current year slate, Warner Bros. said.

Looking to the current quarter (October to December), Warner Bros. expects games to be flat to moderately better year-on-year, as last year’s launch of Hogwarts Legacy on Switch in November will be offset by lower costs.

During the same financial call, Warner Bros. said it’s now doubling down on four games: Hogwarts Legacy (a sequel is already in the works), Mortal Kombat, Game of Thrones, and DC, "in particular Batman," Zaslav said. Warner Bros. recently published VR game Batman: Arkham Shadow exclusively on the Meta Quest 3, and has a Wonder Woman game in the works at Monolith Productions.

"We are focusing our development efforts on those core franchises, with proven studios to improve our success ratio," Zaslav added.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.