A few days ago, another sweeping round of layoffs hit the gaming industry when Warner Bros decided to shut down three of its gaming studios. It shut down WB San Diego, it shut down Player First Games, and it shut down Monolith Productions. All three of these were big losses in one form or another. The last one is the focus of many, as the team had been making a Wonder Woman title for over three years. Many wanted to see what it would be like, especially since it would use the company’s trademark “Nemesis System,” which was a beloved gaming feature.
However, the game was canceled when the studio was shut down, so this is yet another “What If?” scenario in the gaming space. Officially, Warner Bros made a studio during the shutdown announcement stating that this was a “tough decision” and that WB was determined to get back to making “great games” and coming back to a place of “profitability.” Those who have been monitoring the situation, though, aren’t so sure that’s the case, and that Warner Bros indecisiveness and bad decisions with past gaming titles led to the game’s cancelation, among other things.
This comes from Jason Schreier, who works for Bloomberg and was a guest on the Kinda Funny podcast. He said that the real issues with the Wonder Woman game started because the former head of WB Games, David Haddad, was a bad leader, and the decisions he made on behalf of Monolith Productions led to some of the OG leaders that made the company amazing to leave the studio. Thus, the Wonder Woman project had to be worked on with a team that was scrambling to get back together and figure out what to do with it. They did have help from Gail Simone, but the team apparently had to reboot the gameplay side of things to be a bit more linear than intended:
“But by then, it was kind of too late especially because last year was so bad for the Warner Brothers Games organization. Last year Suicide Squad was a humungous flop – they wrote off $200 million because of that. MultiVersus and Quidditch Champions, also both flops, [they] wrote off another $100 million because of that.”
It should be noted that those three games mentioned were live-service titles, while Wonder Woman’s game was a single-player adventure with a deep storyline, hence the help from comic legend Gail Simone. Thus, it’s hilarious that WB would think that cutting this game would “fix things” in some capacity when it was the live-service entries that put them in such a bad position in the first place.
