Although the second part of Hogwarts Legacy has not yet been officially announced by Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), it’s only a formality…

The first part was the bestseller of 2023, and Avalanche Software’s game achieved this with 24 million sales in less than a year. Avalanche and Warner have yet to talk about DLC (other than PlayStation-exclusive content coming to other platforms this summer). They do have a job offer regarding the engine change, but we’ll get to that later. A sequel is almost certainly coming, as JB Perrette (President and CEO of WBD International Streaming and Gaming) spoke about it at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference. The use of the live service model is guaranteed, but he criticized the consistency of the console market. He wants ongoing support (=money), not just big one-off releases…

“Today, the majority of our business revolves around four main forms of IP in games, all of which are billion-dollar-plus businesses in their own right: Mortal Kombat, Game of Thrones, Harry Potter with, of course, our success with Hogwarts Legacy, and the DC world. The challenge we’ve had is that our business has historically been very triple-A console. As you know, that’s a great business when you have a hit like Hogwarts Legacy. It makes a year look amazing. And then unfortunately when you don’t have releases, or unfortunately we’ve had disappointments as well, we just released Suicide Squad this quarter, which wasn’t as strong, it just makes it very volatile. We think the opportunity for us, and games is a bit of a long multi-year business cycle, is to take those four franchises and be able to develop a much more holistic approach, particularly around expanding into mobile and multiplatform free-to-play, which could give us a much better and more consistent set of revenues.

Secondarily, live services. How do you build a game around Hogwarts Legacy, for example, that is a live service where people can live and build and play in that world on an ongoing basis, rather than just launching a one-off console game? We think we have the franchises. We’ve got some of the biggest studio capabilities, and we’ve got a roadmap and a strategic investment plan to try to grow this business. We think there’s meaningful growth over the next couple of years,” Perrette said.

However, even bigger studios can fail with the live service model, as Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us: Factions, or at least that particular online project, didn’t work out. But back to the job ad: Avalanche Software is looking for a Senior Character Artist with experience in Unreal Engine 4 and Unreal Engine 5. Here’s the catch: Hogwarts Legacy runs on UE4. The sequel will therefore be upgraded to Unreal Engine 5, although it is not mentioned what the successful candidate will be working on…

Source: WCCFTech, WCCFTech, Webcasts, WBD