Warner Bros Shuts Down Monolith, the Studio Behind F.E.A.R., Condemned, Shadow of Mordor, and Wonder Woman

Warner Bros are closing three video game development studios as they seek “to get back to a ‘fewer but bigger franchises’ strategy”, according to a leaked staff memo from Warner Bros head of games and streaming JB Perrette. The three studios in question are MultiVersus developer Player First Games, free-to-play specialists Warner Bros Games San Diego, and Monolith, the 30-year-old studio behind No One Lives Forever, F.E.A.R., Condemned: Criminal Origins, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, and a troubled forthcoming Wonder Woman adaptation that has now been cancelled.

Bloomberg broke the story last night, and Warner Bros have now confirmed the studio closures and Wonder Woman’s cancellation in a statement to Kotaku. “We have had to make some very difficult decisions to structure our development studios and investments around building the best games possible with our key franchises — Harry Potter, Mortal Kombat, DC and Game of Thrones,” they say. This “strategic change in direction” is “not a reflection of these teams or the talent that consists within them”.

As for Wonder Woman, the company’s “hope was to give players and fans the highest quality experience possible for the iconic character, and unfortunately this is no longer possible within our strategic priorities.” The release concludes with the rousing note that “as difficult as today is, we remain focused on and excited about getting back to producing high-quality games for our passionate fans and developed by our world class studios and getting our Games business back to profitability and growth in 2025 and beyond.”

The closures continue a terrible couple of years for Warner Bros, who have doubled down on live service adaptations of their many licenses, but struggled to convince players in sufficient droves. The big recent disaster was Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, a handsome but creaky game-as-service extravaganza reportedly imposed on a studio known for rich single player fare, which has lost Warner Bros hundreds of millions of dollars. Following the latter failure, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment president David Haddad announced that he would depart the company this January, after 12 years as boss.

JP Perrette comments a little on all this in the leaked staff memo, circulated by Bloomberg. “The quality of too many of our new releases has really missed the mark,” he wrote. “We need to make some substantial changes to our portfolio/team structure if we are to commit the necessary resources to get back to a ‘fewer but bigger franchises’ strategy.”

Player First Games are arguably the saddest victim of Warner’s cuts – founded in 2019 and acquired by Warner Bros in July 2024 off the back of an initially positive response to now-shuttered Smash Brother-from-another-mother MultiVersus, a whole six or seven months before getting axed. I also feel for Warner Bros. Games San Diego, who had yet to release a single game. But I grieve most of all for Monolith.

I had sort of assumed that Monolith would never be closed, because how could you close the studio who gave us F.E.A.R., Condemned and Shadow Of Mordor. It’s been a while since those releases and I’m sure many of the team members have long since moved on, but their legacy is infectious. F.E.A.R. is the definitive Matrix FPS: its rippling bullet trails and gusts of muzzle smoke have become something of an indie shooter subgenre, revisited by swaggering upstarts like Trepang. Condemned is perfectly atrocious in its Finchery pipe-wielding cellar fights. And Shadow Of Mordor is the game that lifted the Orcs out of interchangeability and procedurally transformed them into amazing, evolving archvillains.

Monolith’s Wonder Woman appears to have been living on borrowed time for a while – announced in 2021, it had reportedly “struggled to coalesce” amid leadership changes and project reboots, costing Warner $100 million in the process. Still, there was cause for some hope. While it seems likely the game would have been afflicted by the same live service rot as Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad, it was once planned to make use of Shadow Of Mordor’s Nemesis system.

Warner Bros have yet to announce how many jobs will be lost in the course of the studio closures. Best of luck to everybody affected.