Geeks and Gamers Reports: Warner Bros. is considering changing up its approach to video games following another bad earnings call. The company is still feeling the effects of the disastrous Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, the follow-up to Rocksteady’s Arkham games that, according to the previous earnings call in May of this year, was singled out as having cost Warner Bros. $200 million, more than even their worst-case scenario, according to Forbes.

The failure is so catastrophic that there’s speculation that Rocksteady will close down, which, after the four Arkham games that preceded Suicide Squad (well, three of them; Arkham Origins was made by WB Games Montréal), is a shock. The loss is so bad for Warner Bros. that it offset their big win with the Harry Potter game Hogwarts Legacy last year, and now, the studio is considering drastic measures.

In the recent quarterly earnings call (via IGN), Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav suggested they could begin licensing their IPs to outside studios to make games rather than handle everything in-house. That’s actually what Warner Bros. used to do; the problem is that when a game was successful, they bought the studio that made it so they could reap all the benefits from the inevitable sequels, as Game Developer points out.

Rocksteady is the most glaring example; Warner Bros. licensed Batman to them so they could make Arkham Asylum, and when that game was a smash hit, Warner Bros. quickly bought Rocksteady. This was great for them for a while, with the sequels being best-sellers, but now, they’ve got to eat the cost of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, and apparently, it’s a buffet.

Similarly, Warner Bros. licensed a bunch of their properties to Player First Games for MultiVersus, a free-to-play fighting game featuring various Warner Bros. characters from properties as diverse as DC Comics, Looney Tunes, Game of Thrones, and more. (I had lots of fun with the titular duo from Rick and Morty.) But after its first season proved successful, Warner Bros. bought Player First, and the game was taken offline for a year, something players were told wouldn’t happen.