I’m pretty behind the curve right now on content writing due to work and family commitments, and was seriously considering just posting a “brain empty, come back for Rule 5 on Saturday” post, but I couldn’t let this gem slide from today’s news.
It seems that Warner Bros. Discover Games head J.B Perrette sat down for a little interview with Gamespot and coughed up this gem about some of the publisher’s future development plans:
“Rather than just launching a one-and-done console game, how do we develop a game around, for example, a Hogwarts Legacy or Harry Potter, that is a live-service where people can live and work and build and play in that world in an ongoing basis?”
Hey, chase the current trend! Or, in this case, 2002 called, because “live world where people can live and work and build and play on an ongoing basis” sounds like a classic sandbox MMORPG. If only WB had seen fit to build one of those back in the day for one of their IPs… Oh, wait.
Of course, those are all games that WB either sold the rights to 3rd-party devs to build, or developed them in-house and then sold them off.
Maybe this time will be different. Maybe WBDG has more patience to see a game grow and succeed than past management did.
Maybe.
For the sake of my friends working on the Wonder Woman game, I hope so.
I guess it’s good to know that even though a lot has changed since I worked for WB Games, upper management is still laying down directives chasing last year’s trends. Because I have no doubt that the core designers, artists and programmers on a lot of these dev teams have some great ideas about the games they’d like to make, some of which might actually involve original IPs (gasp), but corporate hath laid down The Law, and the law says to chase the current money-making game trend, even though by the time something is actually out the door, the current hotness will be something else entirely.