Warner Ramping Up Games Business; 75 Titles in the Works

Following the recent Time Warner fiscal announcement, which revealed Turner's intent to sell off GameTap, Time Warner chief executive Jeffrey L. Bewkes revealed in an investors conference call Warner Bros' intent to really ramp up its presence in the video game industry. Warner will spend hundreds of millions to get a bigger piece of the growing video game pie, and the company already has a $250 million "strategic investment" from a Middle Eastern firm.

"Lego Indiana Jones was the top-selling videogame in June and we have high hopes for Lego Batman, as you can imagine, which we are releasing in September. Over time, we expect games to become an increasingly important part of Warner Brothers' business," said Bewkes, who noted that Warner is planning on releasing 75 games over the next seven years.

He continued, "We're pursuing basically two significant changes in the games business. One is we're going to push to establish ourselves as a third-party distributor, which we've already done fairly successfully in the home video business for other people's product, but it's less common right now in gaming. And second, we are using some [felt] type financing to manage the risks, some of which we got, for example, out of Abu Dhabi."

Warner earlier this year made a big investment in SCi/Eidos, and the company currently owns TT Games, the maker of the Lego games, has a stake in Hollywood-focused Brash Entertainment and currently has the North American distribution rights for Codemasters' portfolio. That's only the beginning for the entertainment giant, however.

"...there's co-development, there are game companies that we have different degrees of ownership in, all of it focused on getting the scale and distribution and to your question of whether we have what we need in terms of human talent in our organization inside the company, you know, it's something we work on all the time," said Bewkes. "We are developing at a pace with the size of our distribution presence, and we feel that we are in reasonably good shape. If you are asking whether we can attract talent that we need, we think we can."

With a massive pile of cash to invest in the business, Warner is confident it can draw away prime talent from other rival video game companies. For example, in late April Warner hired former Vivendi Games' President of Worldwide Studios Martin Tremblay to head up WBIE.

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