14 DAY TRIAL // Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment has announced that the launch of LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1 – 4 was one of the main revenue drivers for the company for its second fiscal quarter of the year. The company says that the adventures of the well known characters from the book series that has been turned into movie franchise managed to attract buyers for 2.7 million buyers until now since it's launch at the end of June.
Sales in the Time Warner's Filmed Entertainment segment for the second quarter went up 8 percent thanks to Harry Potter but also Clash of the Titans and Sex and the City 2. It seems that LEGO based games are a gold mine for the company with the brick made Batman game managed to move more than 7 million copies since it was initially put out in 2008.
Warner Bros. seems very interested in becoming a powerful video game publisher. It initially picked up Monolith Studios, who are working on the F.E.A.R. series of shooters with horror elements. The company then added the LEGO video games to its portfolio, buying TT Games, and recently the company picked up some of the remnants of Midway Games, including the team that was working on the Mortal Kombat fighting game franchise. It's not clear if Warner Bros. intends to use the studios just to create video games based on their own properties or whether the company is preparing to create titles based on its own movie launches.
It seems that Warner Bros. is not ready to buy any other video game studios, with a senior vice president in charge of production and development, Samantha Ryan, recently stating to Gamasutra as part of an interview that, “We’re actually I think going to go through kind of a settling period for a little while where we’re going to focus on getting all the stuff that we’ve just acquired well-integrated, and really focus on the games.”