It has been said countless times and by people far more eloquent than me, but fuck Warner Bros. Fuck ‘em! Fuck both the company generally and CEO David Zaslav specifically for canceling completed projects like Coyote vs Acme in the name of a stupid tax write off, fuck ‘em for rendering a mindboggling number of beloved series inaccessible for the purposes of more arcane tax math, and now, fuck the aforementioned parties, current WB Games CEO JB Perrette, and former WB Games CEO David Haddad for killing off three studios today, including Monolith, creators of No One Lives Forever, Shadow of Mordor, and the until-moments-ago in-development Wonder Woman game.
Fresh off publishing an expose into WB’s heinous mismanagement of its video game properties, Jason Schreier reported today that the company is shutting down Monolith, Multiversus developer Player First Games, and WB Games San Diego. Shortly after, WB confirmed the news in a statement.
“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,” WB wrote. “After careful consideration, we are closing three of our development studios – Monolith Productions, Player First Games and Warner Bros. Games San Diego. This is a strategic change in direction and not a reflection of these teams or the talent that consists within them. The development of Monolith's Wonder Woman videogame will not move forward. Our hope was to give players and fans the highest quality experience possible for the iconic character, and unfortunately this is no longer possible within our strategic priorities. … As difficult as today is, we 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.”
Polygon reports that in an email to staff, Perrette, the CEO and president of global streaming and games for Warner Bros. Discovery, said that the company hopes to "repurpose our talent where possible," but as evidenced by posts from now-former employees, that's far from an across-the-board directive. Perrette went on to talk about "swagger," because these people can never not be nauseatingly embarrassing while also revealing that they do not have souls.
“We need to and will do better for our fans first and foremost, and also because regaining that credibility is critical to us securing even more investment in Games in the years to come,” Perrette wrote in the email to staff. “Getting our swagger back happens one high quality game release at a time, and our financial credibility gets rebuilt one fiscal quarter at a time – delivering what we said we would deliver, and no big negative surprises.”
As Stephen Totilo, former boss of both Schreier and everybody at Aftermath, pointed out to cap off this incredibly dour crossover episode, Warner Bros Discovery’s quarterly earnings update is in just two days. Odds are this ritual bloodletting is, as ever, about pleasing the shareholders. IP like Harry Potter, perhaps the least imaginative story ever told about literal wizards, and Game of Thrones, a franchise so tapped that I grow tired just thinking about it, will continue until morale improves. The studios involved will not, unless they produce infinite hits forever – unless they cause The Line to stand so erect that it tickles God’s own toesie-woesies.
I’m sure said shareholders will leap into the air and click their heels when they hear that people have lost their jobs, and a legacy that includes Blood, No One Lives Forever, F.E.A.R., Condemned: Criminal Origins, and Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor has been flushed down the toilet. I do not imagine many of them will linger long on the fact that WB patented Monolith’s incredible Nemesis System – which allowed enemies in the Mordor games to develop personal rivalries with the player and even taunt you with the specific ways they dispatched you – and then failed to meaningfully redeploy it, preventing other game developers from iterating on a mechanic that could have defined an era.
After all, that is not their job. Their job is to serve, and be served by, The Line. Our job is to slurp slop from the boot heel – to bury ourselves in meaningless nostalgia for boy wizards until we’ve forgotten that human beings are part of this process at all.
