Let’s dispense with the pleasantries and get right into it – Warner Bros. Games has shut down Monolith Productions, Player First Games and WB Games San Diego. It also cancelled Wonder Woman, Monolith’s next action-adventure, which was announced way back in 2021 and received little to no updates ever since.
The reason behind these closures? Per an email to Kotaku, “We have had to make some very difficult decisions to structure our development studios and investments around building the best games possible with our key franchises – Harry Potter, Mortal Kombat, DC and Game of Thrones.” Closing the aforementioned studios is a “strategic change in direction” and “not a reflection of these teams or the talent that consists within them.” You’ve probably spotted the contradictions already, but we’ll get into it shortly.
Regarding Wonder Woman, the company sought “the highest quality experience possible for the iconic character, and unfortunately, this is no longer possible within our strategic priorities. This is another tough decision, as we recognize Monolith’s storied history of delivering epic fan experiences through amazing games. We greatly admire the passion of the three teams and thank every employee for their contributions.”
It also said that despite the difficulties of today, you should all rest assured. Warner Bros. will “remain focused on and excited about getting back to producing high-quality games for our passionate fans and developed by our world-class studios and getting our Games business back to profitability and growth in 2025 and beyond.” Don’t worry about all those people who lost their jobs, everyone – WB Games is going to get back to profitability. The part about how this doesn’t reflect the teams or the quality of talent feels all the more insulting – like an “It’s not you, it’s us” situation.
You could argue that the closures of Player First Games and WB Games San Diego make sense from a “business perspective.” MultiVersus was a massive flop, contributing to a $100 million loss for Warner Bros, and will be shutting servers off in May with only offline play available afterwards. Meanwhile, WB Games San Diego was established in 2019 to work on free-to-play mobile games and hasn’t really delivered anything.
However, this is all more due to too many of the company’s releases missing the mark, per an alleged memo written by WB’s head of games and streaming, JB Perrette, obtained by Bloomberg. “We need to make some substantial changes to our portfolio/team structure if we are to commit the necessary resources to get back to a ‘fewer but bigger franchises’ strategy.”
While MultiVersus was one of those releases, other significant failures included Quidditch Champions and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. The latter is perhaps the most egregious due to debuting universally reviled gameplay in 2023, getting delayed by almost a year, and then still launching to a negative response. It contributed to a $200 million impact on revenue for Warner Bros., and yet, continued to receive support and new content until January 2024.
All of this is seemingly due to the poor decisions made by former WB Games president David Haddad over the years. As Bloomberg reported earlier this month, it was under his leadership that these projects were greenlit. Then there’s the fact that WB Games Montreal was shafted for its Suicide Squad project, and even when reportedly it tried new pitches like Constantine, they were left on read. A Flash video game was the next pitch, but after the film’s flop, this too was scrapped. The frustration of dealing with WB Games allegedly caused many of the Montreal studio’s leadership to depart over the years.
Then there were all the disturbing details about Wonder Woman – how it was reportedly rebooted last year with a budget well $100 million and how the project was failing to “coalesce.” Even the acclaimed Nemesis System, made famous in Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and War and never seen ever again, was seemingly pushed aside in favor of a more typical action-adventure experience.
It could be argued that WB Games is doing all this to correct Haddad’s mistakes, especially with how significantly they’ve impacted the company’s 2024 revenue. And yet, the hogwash about focusing on its key franchises – like DC – is all the more baffling since Wonder Woman is a DC property. Perhaps it means the rumored new Batman title from Rocksteady Studios, which won’t be out for years yet.
Then again, closing studios and taking employees off the payroll to later claim those reduced costs as improvements to the bottom line is perhaps the long-term goal. Gotta give those investors and shareholders some pounds of flesh in time for the next quarterly financial results, after all.
However anyone wants to try and justify it, this is such a massive waste of talent. Even if you didn’t like MultiVersus, it clearly had potential and loyal fans at the start, which were slowly squandered due to its live-service aspirations and monetization. Is it a coincidence that this happened in the same year that Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav said the company was placing more emphasis on live-service titles to “drive engagement and monetization of longer cycles and at higher levels?”
Monolith Productions hurts all the more because of the beloved titles it delivered over more than three decades. Titles like Condemned, Blood, Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, Alien vs. Predator 2, and much more remain classics – many remain my favorite titles to date. To see the studio tossed aside because of terrible management, as the higher-ups portend to focusing on “high-quality games” while seemingly preventing the studio from working on anything else, is just sad. If Wonder Woman was cancelled, it wouldn’t have been the most surprising thing, especially if WB Games didn’t want to shoulder further costs. But to do away with the studio as a whole leaves a bad taste.
This could be seen as more layoffs in an industry afflicted with the same since late 2023. Let’s not forget that other big-time publishers like Sony, Microsoft, EA and Take-Two Interactive have gone through layoffs and/or studio closures over that period. Don’t even get me started on the whole mess involving NetEase Games and reports of divesting its many overseas ventures.
However, these are more tragedies stemming from the many questionable decisions made by Warner Bros. Discovery over the past several years. Even as the company prepares for the next Hogwarts Legacy (with the first game reportedly receiving new content) and whatever Rocksteady cooks up, it’s difficult to really get excited.
Who else will be next on the chopping block? What other projects will suddenly get the rug pulled out because they suffered from prior mismanagement? Regardless of whether things improve or not, it’s the developers suffering at the end of the day, regardless of their past successes or loyalty, even in the face of executive bumbling.
Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.
