Warner Brothers (WB), after a string of high-profile failures, has decided to axe three of its studios. It’s unclear how many of the few hundred staff members will be affected by layoffs, as Warner tries to gain control of its business.
Monolith Productions, which has been making games since 1997’s first-person shooter, Blood, is among the three closed. Their last games, Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War, set in the Lord of the Rings universe, were well received and had a core feature, the Nemesis system, patented by WB.
Before the shutdown, they were working on a Wonder Woman game, which had reportedly been rebooted to be closer to the recent God of War games.
Warner Bros. Games San Diego will also be closed, alongside Player First Games. The latter had recently released MultiVersus, a fighting game leveraging Warner’s various properties. While it launched in 2022 to a positive response, it was pulled offline and relaunched last year to a muted, if negative reaction over design decisions.
Multiversus was part of Warner’s larger plan to have live service games fill make up the company’s revenue. However, both MultiVersus and the $200 million Suicide Squad game both failed to find an audience.
Both MultiVersus and Suicide Squad have had support for them pulled, with MultiVersus taken offline entirely.
Rocksteady, the studio behind Suicide Squad is now reportedly back on single-player titles. It hasn’t been affected by this particular restructuring so far, however. It did go through layoffs in January.
Warner Bros. Games wants to get its “swagger” back
Warner will be instead focusing on its key properties going forward. The idea, as written in a memo from JB Perrette, head of games and streaming at Warner, is to pull back to a “‘fewer but bigger franchises’ strategy.”
Emails obtained by Polygon show Perrette claiming a “disappointing 2024” as a key reason for the sweeping changes. Instead of using all of what Warner owns, including legacy Midway franchises, it’ll instead back four properties: DC, Mortal Kombat, Harry Potter, and Game of Thrones.
Perrette also mentions that he wants the company to return to its original “swagger” when releasing games.
In January, David Haddad, who had been the head of Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment and in charge of the games division left after a decade.
