By far the biggest, most disheartening industry news of the week was WB’s sudden closure of three studios, including Monolith, creators of classics like Blood, F.E.A.R., and Shadow of Mordor. While swinging the scythe and taking out Monolith’s much-anticipated Wonder Woman game, the company said it’s now turning its focus to “fewer but bigger franchises.” On the latest episode of Aftermath Hours, we talk about why this strategy – which might make line go up in the short term – is ultimately a dead end.
We begin the episode by accidentally bursting the dam on another wellspring of Riley Lore – perhaps the wildest yet – before we all move on to a discussion of more sobering matters: the closure of Monolith and two other WB-owned studios. WB, of course, has proven especially eager to dumpster promising projects beyond the world of games in recent years, but what portion of this sickness is specific to the company and where does it overlap with the gaming industry’s own mismanagement epidemic?
Then we talk about Jeff Bezos’ mask-off decision to transform The Washington Post into the propaganda arm of his already-unimaginably-profitable business empire, the latest in a line of tech billionaires bending the knee to tired old king Donald Trump and cackling vizier Elon Musk. Speaking of workplaces that suck, we also discuss Severance, a show that definitely does not suck. It has the trappings of a mystery box, but so far, it has successfully maintained a focus on characters above all else. Fantastic! Keep it up! Please do not become another Lost or Westworld! Finally, we suggest games that would be improved by the addition of a Nemesis System (basically all of them; fuck WB for patenting it).
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that we can add a Nemesis System to Aftermath’s comments section.
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation:
Nathan: I think now we’re finally reaching a point where we’re seeing more misfires than regular fires. At some point, the industry’s gonna have to change course. But Warner’s going further in this direction: fewer, bigger franchises. Destined to fail. No doubt in my mind, that shit’s not gonna work out.
Gita: I hate to reup the Avowed conversation, but I’m seeing my friends like Chris Person and Luke Plunkett wrap on Avowed, and [the solution] is not fewer, bigger projects; it’s more adequately scaled projects with clear parameters. That’s what we need. It’s not limiting the flagship game to once every five years or whatever. It’s having fewer flagship games and not resting all your economic and cultural expectations on one thing. That’s never gonna work. Why not be pleasantly surprised by a medium-sized game doing really well?
Microsoft has repeatedly said, despite what people on the internet will try to tell you, that they are happy with Avowed’s sales, and the developers seem to be very happy with how the game is being received by players and not weird people on YouTube. I can’t help but think that Microsoft – which is primarily a company that makes software and software products – does understand how to scale these things. Why wouldn’t you look to other industry leaders in this, instead of looking to entertainment industry models that don’t make sense with how video games are created?
Nathan: There’s that meme of “I want smaller games with worse graphics blah blah blah.” It’s not even that. I want mid-sized games that are scaled to a relatively sane degree – that are not trying to be everything for everyone because a) nothing can be everything for everyone, and b) the games that are functionally that already exist. You’re never going to supplant League of Legends and Counter-Strike and Valorant and Fortnite.
But these big companies believe that if you just pump enough money into something, you can overcome all of life’s problems. And time and time again, they fail, and the money’s no longer imaginary; there are real, tangible repercussions in terms of how it affects the people who worked on those projects. They don’t have jobs anymore. The only people who were unaffected, as ever, were the fucking executives, and they get to keep making these stupid mistakes.
Gita and Riley: [Pregnant pause] Yep!
Nathan: I think that in the case of something like Monolith, it’s especially galling because their track record is crazy. They were such a good studio in this way that was somewhat underappreciated. I think their games, reputationally, grew after they came out and had their moment. Back when F.E.A.R. came out, people were like “Yeah, it’s kind of this interesting shooter. It’s got slow-mo. It draws on certain types of horror cinema.” Now, decades later, people are still like “Oh man, does the AI in this FPS compare to F.E.A.R.’s?” That’s become its calling card. It’s this legendary game in people’s minds in a way that it wasn’t when it came out.
Same with the Nemesis System. Everyone’s like “Where did that go? What happened to that? That was one of the coolest things to come out of a couple console generations ago. Why aren’t more people doing that?” Monolith came up with all this stuff that should have been imitated and wasn’t. Losing a studio that has that kind of ingenuity is one of those tragedies that can’t be fully measured. You can’t understand the knock-on effects because things that could’ve happened now just won’t. There’s only an absence.
