Warner Bros. Discovery has admitted during a recent investor's call that MultiVersus is "substantially" underperforming and has added another $100 million writedown to its game business.

Over the past few years, MultiVersus fans have absolutely been through the wringer. After the crossover platformer fighter was leaked long before an official announcement, its open beta broke records and drew in massive crowds, which quickly died down as it went into Season 2 and content came to an absolute halt.

MultiVersus was then taken offline for a full year so that Player First Games could refocus, which led to it being relaunched this Summer. That should have been good news, but the response to MultiVersus' comeback has been tepid to say the least, with a lot of fans seemingly leaving it behind after waiting so long for it to come back.

Although things seemed steady enough with the game continuing to get content updates and new characters fairly consistently (with Raven and Marceline having just been announced yesterday), it seems that Warner Bros. Discovery isn't all that happy about its performance and said as much during its most recent financial call.

As reported by IGN, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav and CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels admitted during the financial call that MultiVersus has underperformed and added another $100 million to its $200 million writedown during 2024, which mostly comes from Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.

Zaslav said that Warner Bros. recognises that the gaming business is "substantially underperforming" in its potential right now, while Wiedenfels specifically called out MultiVersus as an underperforming release from the company. It's a bit of a surprise considering Warner Bros. purchased Player First Games earlier this year after MultiVersus initially relaunched.

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. - Gunnar Wiedenfels

As of the time of writing, it's not clear what this means for the future of MultiVersus, but it doesn't seem good. Season 4 is bringing in two massively requested characters in the form of Marceline and Raven, so let's hope that they can draw in more crowds and that Player First Games at least gets to give us Daffy Duck and Walter White.

Posted: Nov 11, 2024 10:43 pm
Related Forum: Gaming Discussion

Source: https://www.thegamer.com/multiversus-has-substantially-underperformed-warner-bros-discovery-financial-call/