Warner Bros' games revenue has declined 41% year-on-year, the company announced as part of its financial report for its Q2 2024, which is the three months ended June 30.

The company doesn't provide detailed figures within its Studios segment (which also encompasses TV and film), but said the decrease in games revenue was due to the "weak performance" of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, especially compared to the success of Hogwarts Legacy in 2023.

The segment's revenue as a whole was down 4% year-on-year to $2.45 billion.

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A Mortal Kombat YouTuber and modder is accusing Warner Bros of "threatening to destroy" his YouTube channel.

In a lengthy statement on social media platform X, ToastedShoes - an Australian YouTuber with 800K subscribers and 1.7m followers on TikTok - claims he has received an "Intellectual Property Infringement Notification" directly from Warner Bros which asks him to delete "all Mortal Kombat 1 videos from [his] channel or else".

"This morning I received an IP infringement notification directly from Warner Brothers stating that the Mortal Kombat mods in my content 'infringe' on their intellectual property rights," Toasted said. "I've been requested to delete all Mortal Kombat 1 videos from my channel or else they will issue copyright strikes and essentially delete my channel in its entirety.

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Avalanche founder Christofer Sundberg has hit back at Mad Max film director George Miller for claiming the studio's game "wasn't as good as [he] wanted it to be".

During promotion for the new Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga film, Miller was asked by GamingBible about whether a new game was considered alongside the film.

He responded that Avalanche's previous game "wasn't as good as I wanted it to be", adding "I'm one of those people that I'd rather not do something unless you can do it at the highest level". He then said he'd love for Hideo Kojima to take on the challenge of a Mad Max game - because, of course.

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Warner Bros., owners of the now-defunct Adult Swim Games publishing label, have contacted some developers about returning ownership of their game's Steam pages. The developers of both Small Radios Big Televisions and Duck Game shared the news on X yesterday. It's a seeming reversal of Warner Bros. stated policy back in March, when all Adult Swim Games seemed destined to be delisted.

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Sandworms play a major part in Dune: Awakening, the big survival MMO coming some time soon from Funcom, the developers behind Conan: Exiles - but the game won't feature the novel's famous sandworm-riding come launch. And, presumably much more importantly for Conan fans, there'll be no penis sliders either.

There will be sand-walking, though, and there's no ruling out of sandworm-riding down the line. We spoke with Dune: Awakening's creative director Joel Bylos at some length in our preview, and he explained the decision like this:

"We actually looked into it. It's just a very strong technical cost, and also a very - it needs a purpose. And we haven't got what the movie has, which is like, 'Go through the southern sandstorms, get to the southern part [of Arrakis]'. So yeah, we don't have that yet."

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It's hard to think of a science fiction universe as inseparable from its canon as Dune. And yet at the same time, it's a universe where so much can vary from one interpretation to the next (as you'll be swiftly reminded any time you catch a stray set photo of a greased-up Sting.)

With that in mind it probably makes a lot of sense for Dune: Awakening, the survival MMO from Conan: Exiles developer Funcom, to take its "alternate history" approach. Dune: Awakening takes place "a few years" before the events of the books, but those events are entirely different timelines, with Awakening imagining a scenario where a "significant moment" in the books, where someone makes a decision of some kind, is decided differently.

Joel Bylos, Funcom's chief creative officer and creative director on Dune: Awakening, was coy about what decision that was, let alone what the consequences of it might be. "It's not Paul that makes the decision," he would at least say, referring to protagonist Paul Atreides. This was after I'd asked whether it might be his drinking of the Water of Life that decision was referring to - the moment where Atreides effectively chooses the path of war in Frank Herbert's novels, and now Denis Villeneuve's films.

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