In an interview with GamesBeat, David Haddad, president of Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment, revealed that the publisher plans to move everything to games as a service. This is the second publisher that invests as much to GaaS as possible, with Ubisoft already doing this with pretty much all of their franchises.
As Haddad told GamesBeat:
“But more than ever, the tech stack, whether it’s for publishing or BI or marketing, that you build and serve these games on—as we increasingly move everything to games as a service, the kind of enabling technology you need to keep them hyper-social, to keep them serving well, to keep them engaged, to take the innovations of game makers and deliver them, like the Nemesis system—you’ll see a lot of our investment not just in classic development, designers and engineers and artists, but increasingly in the teams that end up serving live games.”
To be honest, the term “games as a service” is not bad provided the launch product is complete, with all its gameplay and storyline featured intact, with the additional story/gameplay content being free and without getting butchered in favour of micro-transactions. The problem is that some studios focus so much on creating a “GaaS” product that completely overlook all other aspects of their games, thus making them feel lacklustre, hollow and soulless.
Still, it’s pretty obvious that more and more publishers will be focusing on games as a service. Whether this will have a negative impact on their games’ quality remains to be seen!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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