Warner Bros., feeling the post-Suicide Squad ennui and announcing that it will no longer be 'trying' to launch 10, 12, 15 different games, has announced its decision.

Warner Bros.' Suicide Squad wasn't exactly a hit. The live-service flop, despite the obvious effort, suffered from a meandering development and cost Warner Bros. 200 million dollars. It ended up with the same players as Gotham Knights. The game has 181 Steam users at the time of this writing and hasn't surpassed 1,000 concurrent players on the platform for six months.

Multiversus is another example. It came out of a post-beta break and has... uh... not been doing so well, losing an additional $100 million for the business. Oof. Warner Bros., after spending $300 million on a fumbled project, has taken a hard look in the mirror and done some introspection.

Warner Bros. recently held a financial call. David Zaslav, Discovery's CEO, revealed that the company plans to focus on four IPs. These are DC ("in particular Batman") Hogwarts Legacy Mortal Kombat and Game of Thrones.

Zaslav says: "We have four games which are very powerful. We will stop trying to launch 10,12,15 different games. I think that we have a good chance to stabilize the gaming industry with a focus on fewer games.

You should note that both Suicide Squad & Multiversus heavily featured DC characters. However, I think the hint-at return of Batman signifies a move away from trying to create an extended universe. You might be wondering, Hey Harvey, didn't Batman get shot? Wasn't everyone mad about it? Bucko, I'll remind that this is comic-book worldbuilding. Suicide Squad: kill the Justice League is un-killing Justice League since a while now.

It's a huge task to replace Kevin Conroy. His voice is so iconic that it's impossible to imagine anyone else taking on the role. Roger Craig Smith did a good job in Batman: Arkham Origins. I'm confident he will be there to take up the mantle as the dark knight, when he is not voicing Sonic the Hedgehog. That's a pretty impressive range.

Zaslav says that if it doesn't, then it will be a balanced diet consisting of these four IPs: "We are focusing on those core franchises and working with proven studios in order to improve our success rate," he adds. Which--I'd say, yay! Though I have to mention that Rocksteady had a proven studio with a strong pedigree, and that didn’t stop Suicide Squad. Let's hope history doesn't repeat itself.