Warner Bros. is reportedly taking a massive hatchet to its games business, as Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier reports that WB Games will be shutting down Monolith Productions, Player First Games and WB San Diego.
Along with Monolith being shut down, the Wonder Woman game the studio was working on, is being cancelled.
It’s a disappointing report, but not one that came as a total surprise. At the beginning of this month, another report from Schreier pointed to the Wonder Woman game being in a precarious spot, as WB was looking instead to put its bets on Rocksteady making a new Batman game. That also was not the first time we’d heard about Wonder Woman having a troubled development.
A report from Kotaku includes a statement from WB, saying that it “had to make some very difficult decisions to structure our development studios and investments around building the best games possible with our key franchises.”
Here is the full statement per 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.
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.
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.
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.”
Scheier’s other recent report went further into the troubles, claiming that the game was entirely rebooted in 2024, which meant it was starting from scratch, three years into development. When Wonder Woman was revealed in 2021, all that existed of it was the trailer. It was “literally nothing” beyond that at the time. Three years deep, an alleged $100 million had already been spent by the time it was being rebooted.
The situation with Player First Games is a little different, because it seems they are being shuttered after MultiVersus failed to be the live-service hit that WB wanted it to be. Now that the game is being delisted, it seems that WB has decided to cut the entire studio.
WB San Diego seems to have been given the worst deal, since it was opened in 2019 to work on free-to-play mobile games. Then that goal later shifted, and the studio’s page on the WB Discovery website now claims it is working to “make an impact on the future of AAA free-to-play games.”
So after starting to work on making one kind of game, that scope was then greatly expanded, and before the team could really release anything, they were shut down.
It’s upsetting to see these closures, and to know that more developers will be losing their jobs because upper management made one bad decision after another.
Source – [Bloomberg, Kotaku]
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