The merger of the company was announced at the end of May. WarnerMedia and corporations Discovery… The new giant will be named Warner Bros. Discovery, and will be headed by the CEO of Discovery David Zaslav…
You need to understand that there will be no control over the company AT&T, and management Discovery. The aggregate debt of the conglomerate is approaching $ 160 billion, and creditors and shareholders have been demanding to get rid of unprofitable and non-core assets throughout the past year.
At the same time, the new management actively resisted the sell-off, hoping that the new WarnerMedia strategy would bear fruit. In particular, it was decided not to sell the publishing house Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment (operates under the label WB Games)
Moreover, Sony only on the second try bought out streaming platform Crunchyroll… WarnerMedia hoped to sell the platform for $ 1.5 billion, but the Japanese knocked out a discount of $ 325 million.
The company pinned great hopes on HBO Maxhowever, the platform’s audience is not growing as fast as AT&T would like. In addition, the conglomerate has managed to turn Hollywood against itself with the decision to hybrid release (simultaneously in theaters and streaming) all WarnerMedia films in 2023.
Creation of Warner Bros. Discovery says AT&T has decided to distance itself from WarnerMedia in order to get a large sum of money quickly. And in the course of restructuring, part of the assets will have to be sold.
Almost immediately it became known that the new management was ready to get rid of a number of internal studios controlled by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. And this week it became clear that the “summer sale” has begun.
According to the official press release, the publishing house Electronic Arts buys a studio Playdemic, known for the popular mobile game Golf Clash. The deal is valued at approximately $ 1.4 billion.
For EA, the purchase is part of a strategy to expand its user base through mobile projects. And WB Games claims that the decision to sell Playdemic is related to the implementation “general strategy for creating games based on the legendary Warner Bros franchises. “.
It is impossible to say which studios WarnerMedia will decide to get rid of in the future. The fact is that the release of most of the major releases from WB Games had to be postponed to 2023. However, there are obvious candidates.
So, questions arise to TT Games, which can not in any way release the long-suffering LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga… Her recent projects have also not witnessed much financial success. In 2017, the Playdemic team was bought by WarnerMedia not directly, but through TT Games. The latter also released games commissioned by third-party companies (Disney, Universal etc).
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