Gotham Knights and Back 4 Blood May Have Achieved WB Games Sales Goals
The LinkedIn profile of a Senior Brand Manager at Warner Bros. Games (spotted by Twitter user Timur222) suggests Gotham Knights and Back 4 Blood may have achieved the publisher's sales goals.
The profile says:
Spearheaded brand, positioning, and channel strategies with cross-functional teams, agencies, and partner studios for game franchises Back 4 Blood, Gotham Knights, Suicide Squad, and unannounced titles. Drove implementation of Xbox Game Pass partnership with Back 4 Blood; working alongside multiple stakeholders and delivering a Warner Bros. first.
Launched massive Beta for Back 4 Blood, resulting in over 5.6M Players and leading to Warner Bros.' biggest Beta ever. Implemented strategic priorities for Back 4 Blood & Gotham Knights to deliver back-to-back Top 20 Games of the year measured by revenue and achieving WB sales goals.
Back 4 Blood being rather successful isn't that surprising. In early 2022, Warner Bros. Games announced that the title had registered over 10 million players, and the same press release also quoted NPD data showing that Back 4 Blood was the best-selling new IP released in 2021 on consoles. The game went on to receive three expansions, though Turtle Rock Studio said a couple of months ago there wouldn't be any new content since they have moved on to their next project.
Gotham Knights, on the other hand, never received any dedicated press release boasting about its sales. All we know is that it ranked second on NPD Charts in its month of release (October) before slipping into eighth place in November. The first game released by Warner Bros. Montréal since 2013's Batman: Arkham Origins, the game got a 7.5 score in Wccftech's review, where its disappointing PC performance at launch was thoroughly noted.
We reviewed the game on PC, where the performance was greatly hampered by stuttering, especially when moving quickly through the city with the grappling hook or the Batcycle.
Even with DLSS (2.0) set to Performance Mode and ray tracing turned off (by the way, you cannot turn on lighting, shadows, or reflections; it's either all disabled or enabled), the gameplay experience was far from smooth on a powerful hardware equipped with an RTX 3090 GPU and an i7 12700KF CPU. When trying to activate ray tracing, the experience got worse even with DLSS on Ultra Performance mode (at 4K, that means rendering from a base of 720p).
The Unreal Engine 4 powered visuals are more than satisfying even without ray tracing, but it's nonetheless disappointing that such a configuration would suffer similar struggles.
Luckily, the developers of Gotham Knights released a lot of performance fixes, and the game now runs smoothly on PC. A four-man cooperative mode called Heroic Assault was also added about a month after the release.
In other Warner Bros. Games news, the open beta of the 2v2 platform fighting game MultiVersus will soon go offline for several months as Player First Games seeks to improve it ahead of the official launch. It'll come back early next year, which is also around the same time as the new Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League release date after the freshly announced delay from late May 2023 to February 2024.
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