BREAKING: Warner Bros. Games is shutting down Monolith Productions, Player First Games, and WB San Diego, sources tell Bloomberg News.
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With how long Wonder Woman was still going to have to cook, it was never going to make its money back. That's more of a mistake that was made 7-8 years ago though.
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It doesn’t seem that big, right?
If WW was stuck in development hell, cutting Monolith makes sense I guess. PFG only did Multiversus, WB SF seemed to only work on/support mobile games, with no recent credits.
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Christ, the game industry is absolutely cooked.
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I really hope these teams are able to stay together. Monolith was absolutely getting wasted by Warner Bros. Games, they're way too good a studio to get stuck making brand tie-ins. Just more dogshit mismanagement from Zaslav though, Warner Bros keeps seeing flops but won't address the problem.
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For a second there, i've panicked, thinking this is about Monolith Soft. Either way, really sucks for the workers, but WB themselves can eat shit
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I'll point out an additional post from Schreier:
I see a lot of people responding to this news with complaints about David Zaslav, but it was president David Haddad who ran Warner Bros. Games for the last decade and who was responsible for overseeing all of the studios and their output.
By the time David Zaslav took over WB Discovery in April 2022, Monolith had already gone almost five years without shipping a game and lost almost its entire leadership team under Haddad's management
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Games are doing fine overall. But I wouldn't want to be working for a mega corp these days. Well, I already didn't want that actually.
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*three movies
Batgirl, Coyote vs ACME and a third one I can't recall the name of.
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Games are doing fine for now, but how much longer will devs and artists continue being treated like disposable tissue before we see the talent pool implode? It doesn't seem to matter what game is built, how well it performs, if it's single player or live service - the layoffs and closures come for everyone.
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The games that survived are doing fine. There's a lot of reason to believe that what we're seeing can at least be partially attributed to just how many games are coming out these days, even good ones. I'm already falling behind on games I want to get to just out of the ones released in 2025.
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Sure is great that they patented the Nemesis system just to do nothing with it for the better part of a decade then shut down the studio that invented it. Brilliant use of talent and the US patent system there.
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The industry makes 300 billion dollars and it "can't afford to make video games."
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If Jason Hall is still out there and sitting on cash, I'd love to see him get some of the team back together and reboot Blood. But my understanding is WB owns the rights and Atari couldn't afford to get the rights (they can publish it, hence why we got a re-release recently).
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Same, I was wondering how WB would shut down a Nintendo-owned developer..
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I know I'm in the minority here, but I really didn't like the nemesis system at all. Just like roguelikes, the infinite repeatability of it was a turn off for me and made it feel pointless. I'd much rather play a hand-crafted, limited, curated experience that actually feels meaningful. These generative systems just feel lifeless and pointless to me.
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I have the exact opposite opinion of procedurally generated continuity (because I play for the gameplay and that stuff keeps the game going well after the story ends), but share the same opinion of Warner Bros.
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Scoob! Holiday Haunt, was the third one.
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There is more to gaming than the AAA studios. There have never, ever been more people making video games. They don't all work for mega corps.
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That's fair, I only knew Zaslav had been pushing hard for live-service games and will likely be the death of Rocksteady. Fuck Haddad too then. Why does Warner Bros employ so many execs with Batman-villain ass last names?
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Even if they can't get the rights, it's not like there's anything stopping them from making a new original "boomer shooter." I don't need it to be called Blood 2, I just want them to make something high-octane and kickass again.
