Warner Bros. is also canceling the Wonder Woman game.
This is maybe the biggest bloodbath we’ve seen in this industry? What a damn shame.
29 years later, after working with Monolith on one of the worst projects in history… I can finally piss on their grave. Fuck you Matt, fuck Monolith. Yeah this is fucking personal.
What happened?
They were contracted to design the (edit: low-level coin op hardware, etc) API for our new Internet-enabled touchscreen gaming network kiosks (world first at the time) and they were fucking useless. And then had the gall to present the piece of shit at the CGDG 1997, as a half-finished completely non-functional, but presented it like it was their own product and not a massive NDA violation. Presented like their own product which could be generically extended to other platforms. Fuck you Matt. Fuck you Monolith you fucking cunts.
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.
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.
Also, fuck warner bros.
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.
I didn’t like it because it seemed pointless if you don’t really care about getting vengeance on specific thing. So the name of a mob that kills you fills in an empty space? Which is the same thing that happens any time you hit a story beat anyways? What’s the point? It’s all just randomly generated grunts that try and kill you.
It brought very little in the way of innovative gameplay and roleplaying, yet people seem to treat it as the greatest revolution of game design in the last several decades.
I love proc gen stuff for how it can make each playthrough feel different or even just make yours feel different from your friend’s. I appreciated that the enemy would remember how you defeated them in particular, because it called out those unique events. I also don’t know that there are a ton of settings where this mechanic makes sense outside of the two it appeared in already, so I won’t miss it too badly.
Oh I guess it’s that time of the month where WB butchers active projects to reduce expenses. I saw this coming, they literally cancelled a finished movie (Batgirl) just to lower the taxes they have to pay! How anyone would want to pitch a project to Warner Bros is beyond me.
*three movies
Batgirl, Coyote vs ACME and a third one I can’t recall the name of.
I hope one day they suffer a massive data breach and these movies leak in full, even if they’re unfinished. Fuck 'em.
Scoob! Holiday Haunt, was the third one.
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.
Christ, the game industry is absolutely cooked.
The industry makes 300 billion dollars and it “can’t afford to make video games.”
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.
Going on a little tangent here, but it made me think: how could someone start studying now to become, say, a game dev when in some years everything could go belly up because of these mega corps shitty moves? How could they in good faith spend time and money to develop skills for such an uncertain future?
Indie. That’s how.
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.
There are plenty of countries with better worker rights in which to set up shop as well.
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.
All the best games of the last 10 years have been built and published by teams smaller than 20 people.
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.
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
Same, I was wondering how WB would shut down a Nintendo-owned developer…
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.
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
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?
Definitely not Batman villains. If they were Batman villains, they’d be puns like Egsek Yutiv or something to go along with the Harleen Quinzels and Edward Nigmas of its world.
I was thinking more like a Victor Zsasz or an Aaron Helzinger. Not top tier Batmen villains, more like the C-listers.
Are any of the old F.E.A.R. or Condemned developers still at Monolith?
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 still hold the publish rights from the Infogrames days, hence why we got a re-release).
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.
There was a Blood 2 and it sucked, you have a good point
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.
