WB Games announced the closure of several game studios, with the biggest axing being Monolith Productions, the studio behind Middle-Earth Shadow of Mordor.
  • xyzzy@lemm.eeEnglish
    14·
    21 hours ago
    1. After Shadow of Mordor 2, Monolith began developing a new IP in 2017
    2. WB said no
    3. Monolith continued to develop it for 4 more years in order to convince WB
    4. Monolith finally unveiled it to WB in 2021
    5. WB said no
    6. Monolith’s entire leadership team and a lot of their talent immediately quit to go start a new studio under EA
    7. Remaining talent asked for time to rebuild their leadership team before embarking on a new game
    8. WB said no
    9. What remained of Monolith tried to rebuild their leadership team while starting on a Wonder Woman game
    10. WB lost a bunch of money on expensive, poorly-conceived flops from existing IPs
    11. WB dissolved Monolith
    12. WB reiterated that they will continue focusing entirely on existing IPs
    • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 @pawb.socialEnglish
      13·
      21 hours ago

      Monolith’s entire leadership team and a lot of their talent immediately quit to go start a new studio under EA

      Man, how restrictive to creativity is Warner Bros executives that moving to be under Electronic Arts is better? 😧

      • Stovetop@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        19 minutes ago

        EA is the gilded prison. Despite their negative reputation, they have been known to offer two things to studios:

        1. Relative job stability

        2. A hands-off management style

        The problem with EA is not so much that they seek to be exploitative (they are, but that’s not the objective), but rather that they are very bad with money when it comes to studios that make more enthusiast types of games (the kinds that we come here to talk about). And they’re impatient when it comes to making money, so they want to skip the “growing pains” step of every team they acquire or start up. They get these studios that are populated by teams of veteran developers and just shove tons of money and resources at them to make whatever AAA game they want.

        They are banking so strongly on all of their titles selling like hotcakes that they are never prepared for a game to do just okay, so they fail to recoup their crazy budget even on games that would be considered successful by any other metric. EA can eat the loss because they have all of the FIFA/Madden/Need for Speed/Sims money subsidizing their failures, but eventually the cuts and microtransactions occur to try to make up the difference, because shareholders.

        For what it’s worth (and while I am sure things are different today in the current unstable industry) I’ve heard from some developers I’ve met that EA is at least one of the publishers that will still try to keep you if you are an experienced dev and your studio closes. You might get stuck doing some menial, spiritless work, but the reason why EA is still in business despite their reputation is that they still have a lot of very reliable IP in the normie market. And that’s job security.

  • _edEnglish
    4·
    22 hours ago

    … Shadow of Mordor that earned Monolith it’s stars and stripes

    This guy obviously never heard of Alien VS Predator 2, and No One Lives Forever.

    The marine and alien missions in AVP2 were killer.