Warner Bros. Acquires MultiVersus Development Company, Shifts Focus to Free-to-Play

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Warner Bros. Acquires MultiVersus Development Company, Shifts Focus to Free-to-Play
[Player First Games, developer of MultiVersus, has been acquired by Warner Bros. We have worked with Player First Games for several years to develop and launch MultiVersus and are very pleased to welcome this talented team to Warner Bros. Games,” David Haddad, president of Warner Bros. Haddad said in a statement to IGN.

The development and release of MultiVersus, the free-to-play “Smash Bros. If Smash Bros. were Warner Bros.” was a roller coaster ride.MultiVersus will be released as an open beta in July 2022 and will eventually attracted millions of players with its platform fighter brawls and the raw awesomeness of Ultra Instinct Shaggy. But in March 2023, after MultiVersus had been playable for almost a year, Player First Games announced that, unbeknownst to most players, it had actually been in open testing for an extended period of time and closed its servers.

MultiVersus disappeared for nine months, forcing fans to speculate about its continued existence based solely on cross-promotions from McDonald's in Belgium. After a long silence, Player First finally confirmed its return in March, and the game relaunched in May 2024 with a new netcode, characters, and PvE missions to our endorsement. far from being the most popular game on Steam, it has averaged 4,000 on that platform It maintains over 4,000 concurrent players on the platform. Players have complained that the game offers the option to purchase lives with real cash, and Player First has stated that this option is a bug.

Frankly, even if the restart has been received quite positively, given the lingering monstrosities surrounding MultiVersus' disappearing act and the general instability of multiplayer-focused live service games, it is difficult. While an acquisition is by no means a guarantee of the studio's safety, it is certainly better news than its sudden disappearance.

In March, Warner Bros. executive JB Perrett said that after the disappointing sales of Suicide Squad, the company would shift its focus to “free-to-play space”: go Justice League! The Player First acquisition fits that plan Fits nicely; according to IGN, Player First co-founders Tony Huynh and Chris White will continue to lead the studio's development. Huynh said, “Our team is excited to join the Warner Bros. Games family, and we feel this is a great thing for MultiVersus as a whole.”

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