In Warner Bros. Discovery’s latest earnings call (type: financial meeting) CEO David Zaslav discussed the future of the company in terms of its views on film, games, culture and mainly “metaverse” – that is, trying to capture fans of a certain brand (for example, Harry Potter or Game of Thrones) in a more holistic way.
This, Zaslav argued, is possible because the company fully owns its brands and “worlds”. As an example, he brings up how Hogwart’s Legacy caught on with Harry Potter fans, and then Zaslav also seems to hint that something Superman-related is in the works. Thus he said:
We have a very good gaming business with 11 different studios, and a real talented capability.
But the real differentiator for us as a company is that we own our IP. That IP belongs to us, and we’re developing it, and in some cases we may choose to develop it with a third party game technology company.
We may be the only media company that owns–whether it be the DC universe, Harry Potter, all the content that we own, Game of Thrones–that’s for us to deploy. I think that’s particularly important strategically.
If you look at Hogwarts Legacy, a big piece of the success of that game is that you go into it. If you’re a player, you go into that game and you’re in that world. That’s kind of a new concept. Before it was gaming and it was storytelling, and now…it’s very difficult to understand what the definition of the metaverse is…
When we launch a product on Max or HBO, and when we have a game, that game belongs to us, but now there’s this in-betweener. It may be in the next couple of years that we launch a Superman movie and…people spend more time and there’s more economics of people just hanging out in the Superman world and universe.
The fact that we own all of that is something that I think is going to be really important as we look forward–as technology develops, and given the amount of time that people spend on gaming (..)”
One must, of course, read between the lines. These are well-chosen words that should more indicate where the thoughts are going right now, but there are many indications that they are planning to have Gunns Stålis accompanied by an associated game just in time, as Zaslav concludes:
“(we) don’t want to be in the motion picture and longform storytelling business and have somebody else in the business of hanging out in those worlds. Those worlds are going to be quite profitable in the years ahead.”
