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Warner Bros. Games' hellish decade offers a valuable lesson to gaming's power brokers: sometimes, you've nobody to blame but yourselvesComics con.Image credit: Eurogamer. Opinion by Chris Tapsell Deputy Editor Published on Feb. 27, 2025 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. Image credit: Warner Bros.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."It then spent around three more years on Wonder Woman, moving from something using its famed Nemesis system (locked away in the IP dungeon by Warner Bros. since 2017) until it became clear that didn't really work in this entirely different, owned-license world, and was rebooted last year. And now it's gone, along with the expertise it housed from developing cult hits stretching as far back as MS-DOS games in 1997, through the iconic Shadow of Mordor, F.E.A.R., Condemned, No One Lives Forever, and The Matrix Online.Really, that studio's mismanagement goes back to Shadow of War itself, in the way it squandered a chance at applying the formula to Middle Earth's sunnier realms for the sake of a slightly tacky, Balrog-battling romp in more brown Mordor sludge. And more pertinently for many, in its grim shoehorning of loot boxes and microtransactions into an entirely single-player experience, complete with their own hand-rubbing vendor orc. "It's frankly complicated," design director Bob Roberts told Eurogamer in the run up to that game's launch, without ever really giving an explanation for why they were added. Six months later, after plenty of predictable outcry, they were removed from the game entirely. Image credit: Warner Bros. GamesRocksteady, one of WB's other main jewels, likewise spent eight and a half years spinning its tail between the wonderful Batman: Arkham Knight and not-so-wonderful Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, another unforced error from upper management. Reports, again from Bloomberg, suggest repeated visits from WB executives, with extensive presentations on how live-service games would be the future.This live-service enthusiasm continued well beyond the flops of other single-player-turned-live-service attempts, such as Anthem, Redfall and Marvel's Avengers. In late 2023 David Zaslav, Warner Bros. Discovery's current CEO - who's arguably most famed for the decision to write off the completed Looney Toons film Coyote vs Acme to save money on tax rather than releasing it - mentioned a drive "to include more always on gameplay through live services, multiplatform and free-to-play extensions, with the goal to have more players spending more time on more platforms." A mixture of unclear vision, struggles to adapt to an unfamiliar genre, and increasing staff turnover as a result ultimately contributed to several delays and an extraordinary loss of $200m. A number of senior developers have left, and the studio's also been through at least two rounds of layoffs after Suicide Squad's release.The issues go on. Warner Bros. Games Montral, the team behind the solid-enough Batman: Arkham Origins, was working on a Suicide Squad game of its own - a decent shout for the most cursed franchise in video games at this point - until it was taken off that and put on another Batman: Arkham game. Only one without Batman - and with live-service elements. Then after struggling with the live-service elements, it took those out and released the middling, occasionally lovable but also utterly confused Gotham Knights, which still featured a load of live-service gear-grinding slurry, only without the moreish, play-with-your-friends fun that playing endless games online at least tends to offer as a minimum. It was then drafted onto support work for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, and has, as with Rocksteady, been hit with multiple rounds of layoffs in the years since. Image credit: Warner Bros. / EurogamerFinally, there are the other two closed studios, in Player First Games and Warner Bros. San Diego. Player First Games was founded as an independent studio in 2019, launched MultiVersus in May 2024 (after a bit of weird beta hokey-kokey where the game was released, with functioning microtransactions, and un-released shortly after), was acquired by Warner Bros. Games two months later in July 2024, and now closed in February 2025.Warner Bros. San Diego is perhaps even stranger: the studio was set up in 2019 to focus on free-to-play mobile games, but doesn't appear to have launched any. Warner Bros. Games' list of published titles includes three mobile efforts since 2019 - Lego Star Wars Battles, from TT Odyssey; Harry Potter: Magic Awakened from NetEase; and Mortal Kombat: Onslaught from NetherRealm - none of which seem to feature WB San Diego on development.The usual sanctimonious chiding from yours truly is appropriate here, of course. This is short-termist; disposing of institutional knowledge is a very bad idea that costs more than it saves; the purpose of a game publisher is to facilitate entertainment, art, and joy, not shareholder profit; layoffs will always be utterly cruel, etc. etc. Overdiscussed as they are at this point, these are true, and will remain true. The human cost is infuriating and intolerable, unsustainable for the industry undergoing unprecedented brain drain, and inhumane as a broader practice. One Rocksteady developer spoke of losing their job while on paternity leave, no doubt plenty more are in similar circumstances. But it also feels appropriate to say something a bit more than that. Image credit: Warner Bros. GamesIn this case, it's the following: these layoffs are a choice, made by a person or a group of people, not by circumstances, headwinds, changing landscapes or novel challenges. Likewise, the games these studios make, the time and resources given to them, the visions - or lack thereof - the enforced IPs and new genres, the changing plans, the indecision, and the poor judgement are just the same. These decisions come from people whose job it is to make good decisions. And these decisions are bad.In Warner Bros.' case, it seems the buck has stopped with David Haddad, WB Games' now former president. The rare case of his easing onto his own sword by Warner Bros. was announced just a couple of days before news of these closures emerged. An internal email sent to staff, as reported by Variety, thanked him profusely for his "phenomenal work" and "vision, talent and passion", as well as commending him on "thoughtfully and purposefully" choosing "a time when our release schedule is lighter" to leave. That light schedule, featuring nothing from Rocksteady or WB Montral for many years, a distant sequel to the publisher's solitary commercial success in Hogwarts Legacy from Avalanche, and now nothing from Monolith forever, is of course down to, well, David Haddad.Therein lies the real crux of it. There's not a peep in there, of course, about the utterly catastrophic mismanagement of massive intellectual properties - Middle-earth! DC! Game of Thrones! More! - and equally massive, hit factory developers. If anything mismanagement is a kindness - a word that inspires the same whiff of medieval buffoonery as "death by misadventure," as though Haddad and co simply had one too many flagons of mead, stumbled into the wrong paddock on the way home and got several hundred people's careers kicked in the head by a cow.Companies will always sanitise internal comms, of course, and likewise the world of publicly-traded entities and quarterly reports dictates a kind of calculated, unspoken rule of ritual excuse manufacture. But still something about it rankles. It's the same kind of insipid, passive voice, buck-passing, responsibility-shirking, reputation-laundering, LinkedIn chuntering nonsense that's everywhere in video games' executive class today, necessity of business or not.Just yesterday, Bossa Studios boss Henrique Oliviers seemed to imply his studio's repeated layoffs were actually caused by a lack of coverage of their games from video games journalists. A notion which might cause the odd battle-scarred pageview merchant to gather the pitchforks, were it not quite so odd. (Setting aside the fact you can fit all of the world's gainfully employed games journos into a single sweaty conference room these days, it's also just quite hard to write about Bossa Games' hot new thing, I've found, when it hasn't released a new video game for nearly five years.) Image credit: Bossa Studios.Although it might seem that way, I'm not, in fact, arguing that any of this is easy. We've all made poor decisions at work, all placed poor bets, bought houses at the top of the market or, if you've same level of business acumen as me, panicked and said yes far too quickly to a Facebook Marketplace low-ball at barely half the list price. And surprises happen! The existence of completed games in themselves, as the clich goes, is a miracle. Mistakes, believe it or not, are fine.They are less fine though when it's hundreds of livelihoods on the line, and when the protection of which is your heavily-compensated responsibility. Pointing fingers - be that at market conditions, global headwinds, or even us understandably loathsome journalists - is not going to get you anywhere. And some solutions are right in front of you. Listen to the people on the ground, the ones making the games, reacting to, cultivating, and enduring your company's culture, deciding each day whether to leave for another studio or another industry altogether. Pay them well. Plan for the long term. Treat experience, even of failure - especially of failure - like an asset in itself. Understand the things these people make, and why they choose to make them. These are the basics, and we should start there.We can rage about the system, the stock market, and the bad luck all we like, and we'd have a good point - it is our purpose, as journalists, punters and just humans, to seek out systemic explanations, to flush out the patterns, when the same things keep going wrong. And systemic issues are real. So are individuals. And this industry will get nowhere without those individuals who make the big calls first taking a long, hard look in the mirror.
