Warner Bros. Games' hellish decade offers a valuable lesson to gaming's power brokers: sometimes, you've nobody to blame but yourselves
Well, here we are again. A beloved studio closed. A mobile offshoot chucked on the fire. A scattered, opportunistic attempt at brand synergy binned off after one attempt. Hundreds of talented people – with their families and their mortgages and their institutional knowledge that can, in worker hours, be measured in centuries – all discarded as a result. And one, lone executive departs after a “remarkable chapter”, presumably with a big fat golden handshake for his trouble.
It’s time to start searching for answers. What have we got, folks? Well, there was Covid wasn’t there, that was a tricky one. And there’s Russia invading Ukraine, which combined with the pandemic’s aftermath to make a prolonged, still ongoing period of hefty inflation, which can’t have helped. Interest rates have gone up sharply, too, as a result of all that, so the magic venture capital money tree has wilted, shrivelled, and all but died. Everyone wants to go outside, apparently, or maybe just stare at TikTok, so we’ve got consumer habits to worry about, throw that one in there. And now the seemingly endless flow of money from China’s looking like it’s about to dry up too. That definitely counts as a headwind, right?
It does, of course. These phenomena are significant and very much real (much as we love to think it’s all made up, “the economy” very much does exist, and has very real impacts on day-to-day lives). But they’re also affecting everyone, and not everyone has had the decade Warner Bros. Games has just had. And also, if you look a bit closer, these things didn’t have much to do with Warner Bros.’ problems at all. For one, those problems started first.
The list of issues here is a long one. Monolith, a wonderful, storied development studio that last October celebrated its 30th anniversary, had been toiling for eight years on its next game after 2017’s Shadow of War. Credible reports from Bloomberg suggest it spent the first three of those in a “standoff” with Warner Bros. Games leadership, which knew the game it was working on was a new IP, knew it didn’t want a new IP, but also didn’t actually, apparently, do anything at all about that, until it forced the studio to scrap it entirely in 2021.
The developer subsequently lost its entire senior leadership team as a result – its director of art, director of technical art, vice president of creative, director of production, director of technology management, director of gameplay engineering, and vice president and studio head. As Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier notes, the studio was then “put in the impossible situation of having to simultaneously rebuild a studio while starting a new game from scratch.”
