Relax, Warner Bros Games Is No Longer for Sale - Push Square

Warner Bros’ parent company AT&T appears to have taken a dramatic U-turn and decided to take its gaming division off the market.

There was speculation that the giant was shopping studios like NetherRealm and Rocksteady around, as it attempted to offload its interactive entertainment business in order to clear some outstanding debt.

Franchises like Mortal Kombat, potentially Batman, Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings should never be fully exclusive to a couple of platforms.

And before anyone starts, Spider-Man is a rather special case in the fact Sony have the movie rights which is a massive bargaining chip that they have never had the opportunity to use in the lifespan of PlayStation because Activision had the licence on lockdown?

It was only around 2014 that Sony could actually do a deal with Marvel!

It's taking an advantage of a couple of assets that it has both the movie rights as leverage and the huge PS4 install base would likely offset any potential lost sales by not being multiplatform.

MS don't have that because xbox keeps coming last in console sales and the PC market alone isn't big enough to make up lost sales on both Playstation and Switch.

I don’t like monopolies and it’s a good thing if less companies are bought by Microsoft and Sony.

@AdamNovice completely agree, and Sony bought the movie rights 2 decades ago before ms ever made a console, because Sony actually makes movies.

@AdamNovice PC market isn’t big enough.

@AdamNovice I doubt Marvel Studios sharing the movie rights with Sony Pictures was a factor at all.

I think the biggest contributor to that decision was likely that SIE owns Insomniac, who has held the Spider-Man game license since before they were even bought out and turned into a first party studio for Sony, and before the deal to share the movie rights was even struck.

Plus Sony Pictures likely has no bearing at all on their game development division.

If Sony having the movie rights was a factor for Spider-Man's game appearances at all, I guarantee you that literally every game since the first movie tie in would've been a PlayStation exclusive rather than multiplatform, especially since back then they even owned the TV rights until the 2010, and they technically bought the movie rights even before then in 1999.

There's like 1.4 billion PC players and counting around the world from 2014 to now!

While I prefer playing my games on PlayStation, I don't think Xbox buying them out would've been the worst choice.

@TheFrenchiestFry I believe there were articles in the past that said that Marvel wanted Spider-Man to appear in other Marvel movies, like Avengers while Sony in return asked for Spider-Man’s gaming exclusivity.

It was something along those lines, so it’s believed that Sony did use its movie rights as leverage to get the IP as gaming exclusive.

@SincereMan Actually Insomniac themselves wanted to develop Spider-Man and it was Sony who inquired them about the opportunity to develop it and treat it like a first party SIE title.

Insomniac finished development on their first Spider-Man game before Sony even acquired their studio so that couldn't have been part of any talks with Sony and Marvel.

Plus the Spider-Man deal based on the emails that were leaked following the Sony hack mentioned nothing about Spider-Man games

The talks were only about Marvel Studios suggesting integrating the character into the MCU while Sony Pictures retained ownership of the character

Nothing about video games was mentioned, and the deal wasn't even struck until early 2015 when the first Spider-Man Insomniac title was already in development

By that point Sony still only owned the movie rights and were simply publishing the game for Insomniac

They only fully gained control of his game rights after acquiring Insomniac in its entirety as they still possessed the Spider-Man game license during that time, which is why Miles Morales is being published under the PlayStation Studios banner

Considering sales data for PC being less than (or generally at best, similar to) sales of some of the individual consoles with most multiplatform gaming titles, it's fairly apparent that, say, 100 million PS4 players is a bigger actual market share of game sales than the 1.3 billion PC owners

Even a game like The Witcher 3, which was a PC exclusive franchise up until 3 and had massive incentives to continue on PC for long time fans (with big save data carry over potential), it sold fairly comparable numbers between PC and PS4, rather than what math could indicate would be 13 times as many with its massive install base of PC users

There have been hundreds of stories of games like Shovel Knight or other big indie titles selling 8 times as many copies on Switch in a month, when they had 20-50 million users, as they did in years on PC

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