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You don’t need us to tell you that Hollywood has some problems lately, but one that might not be immediately apparent is that they can’t quite figure out what to do with video games. After Warner Bros. shut down a trio of studios it owned (one of which was busy making a Wonder Woman game) it was painfully obvious that the company, like many others, was too focused on squeezing every penny out of all these characters, comics, and stories they own.

We’re not going to argue that studios like Warner Bros. know how to make movies – they’ve been doing it for generations now, even if they sometimes refuse to release said films. They know how to manage a movie studio so that they make a profit, even when they don’t always make good movies. We can’t say the same about their efforts to make video games. Rather than license out their characters to a developer for a slice of the profits as it does from time-to-time with Warner Bros. movies and TV (such as with Legendary), Warner Bros. often keeps trying to purchase game studios and, oftentimes, run them into the ground.

Take Rocksteady Studios, for example. They made Batman: Arkham Asylum when they were an independent studio working with the Batman license. The game was successful because Rocksteady knew how to make a great video game about Batman. Arkham Asylum was so successful that Warner Bros. bought a controlling stake in Rocksteady back in 2010 before they made their two follow-up games. The Arkham games were so good that Marvel and Sony got Insomniac to make the same games but with Spider-Man in them. 

Fast forward to 2024 and Rocksteady, the studio who have made the undisputed best Batman games ever, produced one of the biggest flops in recent video game memory in the form of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. What had changed? Instead of focusing on a single-player, story-focused experience, the studio was making a live-service, multiplayer game that was different from anything else they had made before because the order had come down from Warner Bros. to make a game that followed recent trends rather than what Rocksteady was good at.

This is just one (albeit high-profile) example of movie studios like Warner Bros. trying to do things they’re not good at in search of greater profits. The problem, as with many things, comes down to money. Not a lack of it, but a desire for more of it. Warner Bros. could license out DC characters to game studios who know how to make a game who are independent enough to keep a firm eye on quality, but then they would only get some of the money rather than all of it. Instead, they insist on owning the whole process and, because it isn’t what their company is built to do, they make a hash of it, and a bunch of game developers lose their jobs as a result.

The one shining example of Warner Bros. itself managing to make a video game based on one of their franchises is Hogwarts Legacy, a spin-off of the Harry Potter films that sold well enough that the studio green-lit the astronomically expensive Harry Potter TV show that is currently getting loads of publicity for all the wrong reasons. Yet, there is already the hint that they are going to mess that up by tying the story of Hogwarts Legacy 2 to the TV show in some way. Again, their desire to own every step of the process and milk a franchise for all it is worth feels destined to blow up in their faces.

It is the same issue we see in the streaming world. Disney and Warner Bros. set up their own streaming services and, a few years and millions of dollars in development later, realized that they actually make more money making movies & TV shows for theaters and cable networks instead of trying to own the whole process. Then there are all the times that Hollywood tried to make their own comic book companies, and for every DC and Marvel success story there's dozens of others who tried and failed.

Hollywood is uniquely set up to create movies and TV shows, but their insistence on having full control of everything is holding them back and is making the video game industry more unstable and resulting in worse games featuring the characters we love. Ultimately, the brands that studios are desperate to profit off of become more diluted and less trusted with each milking.

The solution, as I see it, is to treat video games more like t-shirts. Warner Bros. (I know I’m picking on them but hear me out) doesn’t print all the t-shirts with Harley Quinn or Superman on them in a backlot at their studio – they team up with companies that know how to make, distribute, and sell shirts at a global scale and reap a percentage of the profits. They don’t own the whole process, but they also don’t have to learn a whole other business to make it work and aren’t saddled with all the losses when things inevitably go wrong.

This, of course, relies on studios trusting other people with their beloved characters, like Disney has with the Kingdom Hearts series, and being comfortable making a percentage of the profits rather than all of it. It is a tough ask in an industry that is increasingly obsessed with endless growth at any expense, but it is honestly the only path forward I can see for movie studios trying to conquer the world of gaming. The video game industry is already struggling under the weight of near-constant layoffs and uncertainty; it is time for companies to learn that they don’t need to make all the money for their brands to thrive. Making movies and making games is just too different for Hollywood studios to do both.

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