Though exciting new DLC content featuring familiar faces from all over the Warner Bros. universe has continued to regularly roll out for MultiVersus, a report from Warner Bros. Discovery President and CEO David Zaslav and Chief Financial Officer Gunnar Wiedenfels via IGN reveals things are not going well on the platform fighter’s financial front.
Wiedenfels, on a recent financial call, reported some strikingly poor numbers for Warner Bros. Games, which then saw an additional 50% drop thanks to MultiVersus’ shortcomings alone.
The financial call revealed that Warner Bros. Games has seen a write down (reduction in the book value of an asset) of $200 million in 2024. That number rapidly increased once MultiVersus’ fledgling performance was taken into account.
“We took another $100 million plus impairment due to the underperforming releases, primarily MultiVersus this quarter,” said Wiedenfels, “bringing total writedown year-to-date to over $300 million in our games business, a key factor in this year’s studio profit decline,” he finished.
After an official re-launch back in May that saw MultiVersus reach its highest concurrent player mark on Steam DB (114k), numbers saw a precipitous drop that, save for a slight blip up to almost 14k players in July, has continually waned from 10k down to around the 2k average we see here in November.
The game has been chugging along ever since May with regular character releases (Agent Smith, Samurai Jack, Powerpuff Girls, and most recently Raven, to name a few) and content drops, but the road hasn’t been without its noticeable bumps.
Initial launch was plagued by balance issues, most notably thanks to a ridiculously overpowered Iron Giant who had to be removed from the game for a period to be properly fixed. Though MultiVersus is free to play, players who want full access to the roster and all modes must fork over real cash, and fans have groaned about some of the additional content being extremely high-priced.
Warner Bros. Games also shared some strategy they’re aiming to take moving forward, honing in on four more surefire properties including Game of Thrones, Hogwarts Legacy, Batman, and Mortal Kombat. The latter has long had a powerful presence in the gaming space, but has been on unstable ground since March.
This ground became even more unstable in August when reports of WBG looking to sell its gaming division started circulating.
The future of WBG gaming and MultiVersus is pessimistically unclear right now, but if trajectories don’t change soon we may see MV support start drying up sooner rather than later.