Today Warner Bros Discovery presented its financial results for Q4 2024, and highlighted the continued strong performance of Hogwarts Legacy and the underperformance of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.
During the livestreamed conference call, CEO David Zaslav mentioned during his prepared remarks that the gaming and film sides of the company had "some real misses and some really big wins this year." Speaking of the wins, he mentioned Hogwarts Legacy, defining it as "the biggest game of 2023."
Speaking of Q4 2023 (between October and December 2023), the revenue of the gaming business "increased meaningfully" year-on-year thanks to the continued performance of Hogwarts Legacy, including the launch of on the Nintendo Switch that happened during the quarter.
CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels also commented about the company's gaming business, remarking that Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has underperformed compared to the company's expectations.
We also hear that Suicide Squad's underperformance has been detrimental to the financial performance in Q1 2024 (between January and March 2024), even more so compared to the launch of Hogwarts Legends.
We are lapping the release of Hogwarts Legacy in February last year, which saw the largest portion of its very positive financial impact in the first quarter.
This year, Suicide Squad, one of our key video game releases in 2024, has fallen short of our expectations since its release earlier in the quarter, setting our games business up for a tough year-over-year comparison in Q1
Later in the Q&A, we hear that the company has made investment on its gaming business to achieve a "more consistent cadence of releases" over time.
Hogwarts Legacy is currently available for PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC, PS4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. We recently learned that other platforms are finally getting the content launched exclusively on PlayStation soon. If you haven't purchased this massively popular action-adventure game just yet, you can purchase a copy on Amazon.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is available for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC and its developers at Rocksteady have extensive post-release plans.
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