Warner Bros. Games have enacted some corporate-mandated chair-rejigging after shuttering three studios earlier this year. The company are now divided into four divisions that’ll be focusing on the four game series they want to do stuff with.
As reported by Variety, these four bits will focus on making games about Game of Thrones, Mortal Kombat, the DC Universe, and the wizard that I’m not going to bother naming.
Warner Bros Games Montréal head Yves Lachance has been tapped to oversee the making of Game of Thrones and unnamed wizard games as a senior vice president, while NetherRealm’s Shaun Himmerick is getting a similar promotion to look after games involving a bit of Mortal Kombat or DC superheroes.
This rejigging, Warner Bros exec JB Perrette says, is all about “optimising our team structure to develop long-term franchise roadmaps”, which is definitely some words. It follows Warner Bros. Games shutting down Monolith, Player First Games, and Warner Bros Games San Diego back in February, resulting in an unspecified number of job losses.
At that time, Warner Bros. indicated that this circling of the wagons around what they’d identified as their four golden geese was its plan going forwards, following a big live-service push that hadn’t delivered the sorts of returns games industry execs look for in that sort of thing. Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League ended up as the poster child of the company’s ill-fated efforts to go in that direction, which were followed by Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment president David Haddad departing at the start of this year.
At the time it was closed, Monolith – developers of games including No One Lives Forever, F.E.A.R, and the Nemesis system having – had been working on a Wonder Woman game which had reportedly suffered a troubled development and was cancelled alongside the studio shutdown.
Meanwhile, Player First Games’ Multiversus shut its online doors last month, and you can on longer buy it on the few storefronts that it hasn’t been totally erased from as part of that process.
Going forwards, Warner Bros. Games have already committed to making a wizard game sequel, and debuted Game of Thrones: War for Westeros at the Keighleyfest just gone. They’ll be the first of what WB execs will hope resembles a wave of hits to get out of some rough financial waters. It was also hinted earlier this year that letting Rocksteady go back to single-player was a thing that could happen, which would in theory be a shred of good news amid all the bad that’s come of WB’s strategy over the past few years.