WB Games Insiders Blame Recent Struggles On Exiting President’s Poor Leadership, Addiction To Chasing Trends: “It Will Take Two To Three Years To Rebuild”
In the wake of president David Haddad’s recent resignation announcement, insiders at Warner Bros. Games are now opening up regarding their feelings towards their former boss, with many citing his lack of decisive leadership and addiction to ‘trend chasing’ as one of the main reasons for the division’s ongoing implosion.
Speaking with and having their concerns subsequently relayed to the public by Bloomberg‘s Jason Schreier as part of his recent report on the studio’s internal turmoil, said insiders described Haddad’s tenure as one of confusion and frustration, all of which continually resulted in a string of back-to-back failures in the form of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, Harry Potter: Quidditch Champions, and MultiVersus.
“To some who worked closely with the veteran executive, the news [of Haddad’s exit] didn’t come as a surprise,” summarized Schreier. “Their only question was why it had taken so long.”
Thanks to his inability to properly guide the division and its bevy of IPs, a group of sources familiar with Warner Bros. Discovery’s business operations have admitted that the company now has, per Schreier, “major gaps in its portfolio that will likely persist for the next year or two”, particularly as they expected Suicide Squad and MultiVersus to continue generating significant revenue at least through the end of the year.
And rather than external market conditions being to blame for the poor performance of this trio of titles, insiders have instead largely agreed that it was Haddad’s own fumbles that led to these digital disasters.
“According to interviews with two dozen current and former Warner Bros. employees, a lack of a strong, cohesive vision during Haddad’s reign — a tumultuous period in which Warner Bros. struggled through multiple reorganizations — led to years of ineffectual trend-chasing and wasted development time,” wrote Schreier. “Along the way, once-revered studios under the Warner Bros. umbrella have taken reputational hits, lost key staff members and burned through hundreds of millions of dollars.”
The Bloomberg reporter further detailed how, despite his career history of working for such developers as Vivendi Games, Sierra Online, and Activision Blizzard, “Colleagues describe him as a polished executive who does not appear to spend much time playing video games himself — something subordinates occasionally found challenging as they tried to talk through the nuances of product decisions,” with some staff having “also griped that it could take months to receive answers to their questions on matters big and small, ranging from a studio’s next game to whether they would participate in the annual E3 trade conference.”
Said issues were only further exacerbated by Haddad’s apparent lack of action, with subsidiaries like Gotham Knights developer WB Games Montreal and Wonder Woman studio Monolith Productions telling Schreier that they “felt stuck in limbo as they waited for decisions from Haddad and his team.”
“The executives in Burbank may have felt pressure to avoid making big calls at the time because the entire organization was beset with uncertainty,” wrote Schreier. “Shortly after Haddad started, the division’s parent company was purchased by the telecom giant AT&T Inc., triggering a lengthy antitrust trial, and then before long spun out to merge with Discovery Inc. The corporate shakeups left heads spinning and generated constant buzz that the video-game division might be for sale.”
In offering an example of Haddad’s scattered leadership during this era, employees associated with WB Games Montreal recalled how his executive team, as led by VP of Production Ben Bell, were initially enthused when following the end of support for Gotham Knights, the studio approached them with an idea for a game based on DC’s resident magical bastard, John Constantine.
However, rather than working to switfly establish the game’s budget, development timeline, and overall scope, said exec team reportedly spent months dodging the issue. When they did finally get into contact, Bell threw WB Games Montreal a curveball by instead suggesting that they should focus on a more “recognizable character”.
Despite months of wasted time, the studio acquiesced, in doing so pivoting from Constantine to the Scarlet Speedster himself, The Flash (though sadly, thanks to the failure of the hero’s Ezra Miller solo film, this game was eventually cancelled too).
Putting a stamp on Schreier’s recap of the situation at the time, former head of WB Games Montreal Martin Carrier admitted to the reporter, “There was a lot going on politically within the organization [at the time]. The focus on games was perhaps lost a little bit.”
Even so, Schreier additionally reports that “Over the past two years, most of Montreal’s leadership have resigned — not just because of the lack of new games but also due to frustration with their corporate bosses, according to people familiar with the events.”
Notably, though Schreier allegedly reached out to Haddad before publishing his article, the exec ultimately declined to offer any comment on its contents.
However, while the man himself may not have spoken to Schreier about the studio’s current status, WBD Head of Games and Global Streaming JB Perrette did – and though he avoided making any specific mention of his colleague’s name, he could not help but admit that the entire division was currently in a bad way.
“We’ll get right back to profitability in 2025,” Perrette said. “We won’t get back to the profitability we want to get back to in the next two to three years. It will take two to three years to rebuild, reset to levels we want to be at, but the bounce back is immediate as far as going from loss-making to profitability.”
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