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.

  • @Krudler
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    157 hours ago

    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.

      • @Krudler
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        1 hour ago

        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.

        • @ripcord
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          157 minutes ago

          I’m still not getting why the level of hate here?

          • @[email protected]
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            21 minutes ago

            You pay someone to do X with a contract; they

            • take your money
            • not do X
            • instead show the idea of X, which is yours, as THEIR product, which doesn’t even work
              • voliating non-disclosure agreements in your contract
              • doing untold damage to your business plans

            Yeah, I don’t know about anything else, but fuck Matt with a cactus.

  • @villainy
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    8212 hours ago

    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.

    • technomad
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      11 hours ago

      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.

      • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮
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        1911 hours ago

        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.

      • @Zorque
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        39 hours ago

        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.

        • @ampersandrewOP
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          78 hours ago

          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.

  • @[email protected]
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    4012 hours ago

    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.

    • Aielman15
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      2012 hours ago

      *three movies

      Batgirl, Coyote vs ACME and a third one I can’t recall the name of.

      • LiveLM
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        10 hours ago

        I hope one day they suffer a massive data breach and these movies leak in full, even if they’re unfinished. Fuck 'em.

      • Jeffool
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        1511 hours ago

        Scoob! Holiday Haunt, was the third one.

    • @ampersandrewOP
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      312 hours ago

      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.

    • kingthrillgore
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      3012 hours ago

      The industry makes 300 billion dollars and it “can’t afford to make video games.”

    • @[email protected]
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      2312 hours ago

      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.

      • SharkAttak
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        38 hours ago

        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?

      • @[email protected]
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        12 hours ago

        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.

        • tiredofsametab
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          24 hours ago

          There are plenty of countries with better worker rights in which to set up shop as well.

        • @[email protected]
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          1711 hours ago

          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.

        • skulblaka
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          08 hours ago

          All the best games of the last 10 years have been built and published by teams smaller than 20 people.

      • @ampersandrewOP
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        412 hours ago

        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.

  • dinckel
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    1612 hours ago

    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

  • djsoren19
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    812 hours ago

    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.

    • @ampersandrewOP
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      1512 hours ago

      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

      • djsoren19
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        610 hours ago

        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?

        • @ampersandrewOP
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          310 hours ago

          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.

          • djsoren19
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            29 hours ago

            I was thinking more like a Victor Zsasz or an Aaron Helzinger. Not top tier Batmen villains, more like the C-listers.

    • @Maultasche
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      18 hours ago

      Are any of the old F.E.A.R. or Condemned developers still at Monolith?

    • kingthrillgore
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      12 hours ago

      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).

      • djsoren19
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        110 hours ago

        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.

  • @brucethemoose
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    12 hours ago

    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.