BREAKING: Warner Bros. Games is shutting down Monolith Productions, Player First Games, and WB San Diego, sources tell Bloomberg News.
(bsky.app)
from ampersandrew@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world on 25 Feb 19:14
https://lemmy.world/post/26048212
from ampersandrew@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world on 25 Feb 19:14
https://lemmy.world/post/26048212
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.
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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.
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.
*three movies
Batgirl, Coyote vs ACME and a third one I can’t recall the name of.
Scoob! Holiday Haunt, was the third one.
I hope one day they suffer a massive data breach and these movies leak in full, even if they’re unfinished. Fuck 'em.
Yeah, I’ll see if I can help make that happen. Decent enough movies to come out.
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.
Christ, the game industry is absolutely cooked.
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.
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.
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 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.
There were some AAA standouts, like Baulder Gate 3 and Hogworts Legacy, that did very well. It is possible if the company focuses on producing a fun user experience.
There are plenty of countries with better worker rights in which to set up shop as well.
Ubisoft is french and… ugh no
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.
Success in indie development tends to be very uncertain though. Unless you end up at an established indie studio with a good track record but it’s not like indie studios hire in droves.
Replace mega corp with ‘a publicly traded entity’ and you’re spot-on the money.
There are a very few studios that aren’t beholden to the whims of vulture capitalist investors, and they’re the only ones still putting out absolute bangers (Larian), upholding their promises (Hello Games) or keeping the entire gaming industry from consuming itself in a blaze of pure shitfuckery (Valve).
The industry makes 300 billion dollars and it “can’t afford to make video games.”
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:
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.
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
Are any of the old F.E.A.R. or Condemned developers still at Monolith?
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…
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.
The Problem is… I Love The fucking Gameplay, this together with the Nemesis System was super addictive to me.
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.
But the story beat is static, it always gives you the same enemy in the same situation. The nemesis system turns that story beat dynamic. Every time you hit that story beat you get a different enemy in a different situation. It doesn’t give everyone the same story, it gives everyone their story. It’s innovation is how the system sets up stories and ties them into the gameplay. The system is designed to draw you into an encounter with a nemesis, there are multiple outcomes to that encounter. Those encounters become callbacks in the next encounter and so on and on until you’ve create a storyarc against that enemy.
For example I remember having a nemesis I couldn’t kill with a sneak attack (which was very much my preferred way of getting rid of nemesis I wanted to get rid of). So I had to fight him head on and I set him on fire. He managed to escape while I was being overrun by grunts. One of the grunts slayed me and became a new nemesis. Meanwhile the one that got away gained a new weaknesses to fire. One storyline branched into two storylines. Not only did my individual story born from the nemesis system branch out, the gameplay encounters with those nemesis also changed from the previous encounter. The next time I fought my old nemesis I had a new trick up my sleeve, I could use fire against them. As for the new nemesis, well get to him.
That’s the innovation of the nemesis system. It’s a story generator that gives you your story and each encounter alters the gameplay for the next encounter. But that’s only the foundation of the nemesis system. The Nemesis hierarchy and relations between them is an extra layer of storytelling. For example that grunt who killed me turned out to become a really annoying nemesis, I really struggled killing him and every encounter only made him stronger. So I devised a different strategy. I ended up turning other orks that surrounded him in the hierarchy and started using them to do my dirty work. In the end I wasn’t the one to slay my new nemesis, it was a different ork (under my control) who challenged him and killed him.
And final note on what really makes all of it work is the presentation. The orks aren’t just a randomized collection of traits, they’re voiced and somewhat visually unique and whatever randomized outcome they get to at the end of the encounter gets properly presented in the next encounter. The presentation is the glue that ties all those encounters together into one story. You’re presented with an actual nemesis and not just some generic mute and they “remember” the things you did to them before. They feel like a nemesis and not just some randomly generated grunt.
If you tried it and didn’t see the appeal I’m guessing the game was too easy. I wasn’t impressed by the nemesis system until the orks had a chance to escape or I was forced to retreat or I got killed. The system really opens up and gets interesting when the game gets so challenging that you’re no longer certain what will happen in any encounter.
Right on the money
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.
I’m still not getting why the level of hate here?
You pay someone to do X with a contract; they
Yeah, I don’t know about anything else, but fuck Matt with a cactus.
Stories like these sound wild to most people but sadly they happen all the time. It‘s literally how Google got this big. Still makes me mad how they robbed and trolled Terravision out of their code now known as Google Earth. Not like it‘s a flagship for Google or money maker but they still literally stole the code via hard drive like they stole from so many others. The tech world is full of absolute asshats leeching off of the most talented. It‘s very evident in today‘s tech culture full of crypto, AI and whatnot.
I’ll tell you a secret. And this is coming from somebody that was at the top-top Top of the gaming world for 2 decades… 95% of tech people are complete frauds and charlatans. Its a miracle anything ever gets made. Look at today’s coders… they don’t even know what a computer does, they just download other people’s modules, cobble them together and pray. The vast majority of people who self-identify as being in “comp sci” don’t even understand the very basics.
Can I subscribe to more of your experiences and insights?
Nobody wants to hear them. Because I disabuse people of their cherished views and it doesn’t end well. Thanks though.
Oh I feel like I’m well over any optimistic views on anything. I’ve seen mountains of dollars go to absolute waste more than once, I’ve seen projects succeed despite the absurd negligence of everyone involved, and lies above lies above lies.
So I will find your stories amusing at the very least.
Hit me up in DMs if you don’t want to go public.
I mean I’m open to conversation, I love talking and I love sharing with other humans! You or anyone else can feel free to DM me
Please before you read on, it’s going to get ugly, and know that it is not directed at you. I will leave it at that, proceed at your own risk.
In the public facing area of SM I find that I am very frank and no-nonsense and I will just state the truth, no matter how unpleasant the recipients may find it. I was on BBSs before I was on the Internet, and the Internet before the Web existed. My friend Julian and his friend Frank were the two biggest phreakers in my city and Frank did 10 years for some crazy motherfucking advanced nasty digital shit involving financial transactions. Frank sourced me with an embarrassment of riches in terms of piracy, and enabled me to run my own “game rental service” in Junior High. I have the resume to back my stuff up and I have so many first in gaming I don’t want to hear one motherfucking word of backtalk from anybody who thinks they know more than I do. I did more in the first 5 years of my career than most people will do in their entire lives. I did not just cobble together shit, I literally innovated stuff, I built the things that people now use to build things. And I was doing it with some amazing people along the way. One of them is a major executive at a semiconductor corporation to this day and he’s one of my best buds. Him and I got John fucking Romero kicked out of the CGDC in 1997 for being a drunken boor. Another peer has done digital film work on probably every single film that you have ever seen. I could carry on like an asshole, but I’m just scratching the surface I want you to know.
When I was still a student (e: 1 yr digital media crash course, prior to that it was pure programming and hacky compsci) I won a worldwide multimedia contest. I had made a dentistry simulator where you could actually do surgery on a patient. I conceived, wrote, storyboarded, assembled a team, project managed, budgeted, produced the entire thing myself essentially because at that point I was teaching the teachers. I won 1500 US dollars & my school was awarded $30,000 licenses of software. I wrote the very first plug-in enabled game on the Web that wasn’t just click click, it was a mini golf game for the Swedish mini golf association. I literally programmed my own physics simulation for it. I made the very first touchscreen internet enabled network of gaming systems. I personally made 12 published games for those systems. I made the software and games for North America’s first gaming cafe. I made the very first online parimutuel gaming system. I developed a 3D tennis game that you could play in a web browser and I believe it was a world’s first. I programmed a computer AI that was so advanced he could fucking slay you in a convincing fashion and you would have no way of knowing it was computer controlled unless you knew.
Game systems I developed and licensed are on river boats right now being played by people. I ran one of the first Web studios where I worked with an amazing programmer named Josh and I think WordPress stole his idea. We made a dump truck of money because I was smart enough to do radio ads, advertising to people who are too behind to use the Web but had businesses. I was the lead developer for gameloft.com. I developed the first online gaming software deployed by state-run lottery corporations. I wrote two books on a piece of multimedia software, I wrote the bilingual curriculum for three years of a multimedia college - That’s while I was also running my own game studio from my apartment in Montreal and punching out games in my underwear on Saturday morning and selling them for 8,000 bucks. I made an entire development framework for a company that did pharmaceutical drug sales CD-ROMs to the tune of $20 million per contract. Ran two extremely successful game studios until the golden handcuffs took me to the desks. Started the very first house doctor PC service in my city and I made so much money I stopped answering the phone. This does not even cover 30% of the things I’ve done. I did all of this completely self-taught with virtually no education beyond grade 10. I basically failed high school because I was so mentally ill from them trauma of my family life. I promise I am not bending the truth in the slightest.
Heard every ill-conceived, half-baked opinionation on gaming and I’m exhausted and I’m done with the kid gloves. I really don’t give a flying fuck how much a person likes video games or thinks they’re great or is in love with them or wants to be a game developer, I’m sick to death of it. Nobody has a motherfucking word to say to me and I literally don’t care. I’m a very very open person, I crave knowledge, you don’t get where I went by being an ignorant. But it’ll be a world’s first if you can show up at my door and tell me
If you have a blog or memoir, I would love to peruse it
It sounds like your company could have sued them into oblivion. It’s a violated a non-disclosure agreement that should be the end of their company.
Such naïvety Sorry bro
Big money first bloated up the industry and is now scooping it out from the inside until it collapses. Well, AAA and AA gaming anyways. I‘ve noticed I‘ve been playing smaller indie games for the most part in the last decade and I know why. It‘s not so much a deliberate choice but simply where talent and care has been moving towards.
Seems like if you’re publicly traded you can’t also be profitable in the videogame industry.
I can finally give up on a sequel to Shogo Mobile Armor Division. What a sad day but Monolith also hadn’t released a game in 8 years. If Rocksteady hadn’t made the Arkham asylum series they would be gone too.