Today's stories include even more updates on WB Games and Wonder Woman, the Nemesis System patent expiring in 2036, and 10 games are taking up all the money. We'll have all this and more because this is Kind of Funny Games Daily. Welcome gamers, this is Kind of Funny Games Daily for Wednesday, February 26th, 2025. I'm the Night Drive, Andy Cortez, and I'm joined by The Lock, Roger McCorney.
How to be here. Good morning, Roger. Big day. Big day.
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Today after Kind of Funny Games Daily, you'll get the Gamescast, where the topic is very much on topic. How would we save WB Games? And the stream afterwards. Really big stuff.
We're returning to Blessed Dark Souls playthrough. On the big set. On the big set. Very excited about that.
So Mike will be here. You know what? I don't want to admit that I'll miss him, but I miss him a little bit, Rodney. Just a little bit.
Just a little bit. I miss the guy. If you're a Kind of Funny member, you can get today's Greg Way, and you can get Alien vs. Predator in review this afternoon.
We're talking about Predator 2. Danny Boy. You want some candy? God, what a movie.
What a disaster. Can't we talk about that. Thanks to our Patreon producers, Delaney Twain, Carl Jacobs, Omega Buster, and Karen Lidner. Today we are brought to you by Greg Miller's Live Chicago Show and BetterHelp, but we'll tell you about that later.
For now. Let's begin for, let's begin what is in forever will be the Roper Report. It's time for some news. We have five stories today.
A picker's dozen! And we have five stories, but before we get into the actual real stuff, Greg Miller, come on to us. Come join us. CEO Greg Miller.
Yeah, CEO Greg Miller. Hello, everybody. It's me, Greg Miller. How are you guys doing?
He's not getting a $23 billion bonus or whatever. I'm not going to go to Patreon. I'm not going to be funny right now. My way about it is.
Imagine the last 24 hours for Greg Miller, the biggest DC Comics fan y'all know, all right? I get to hang out. I get to see my friends. I get to come to work.
Be great. And then guess what? Jason Schreier comes in. He rips away my heart and soul.
He says, WB Games, getting rid of Monolith, getting rid of this Wonder Woman game, right? A whole bunch of other shakeups over there. That leads me running away from Tim Gettys. I'm supposed to be working on these split fiction videos with him, right?
Run away from that. Run out here. Do a Gamescast, right? Just ranch and rave and whatever.
Then I'm like, I finally put it behind me. I can start healing. But then you're like, we should do a great Gamescast today where we save WB Games. I'm like, yes, we should.
We're going to do that. I'm like, well, I'll have that morning block, that 10 to 11, to do email, to plan the show, to have a great time. Wake up. Ben says something.
I push him out of the way. I get one of these square boxes. What was that, like, 80s? Was there a show or movie where people were in these little square things?
I mean, Hollywood squares, but they were in prison. No, it was like a sci-fi show where the people were captured in these little squares. I don't know. I think it was a Michael Jackson video where they're doing that thing.
Yeah, that was very different. Black or black. You know it. I don't know why you want to be.
That's a different song. I thought it was. You're singing Who's Bad? You're black.
Who's bad. You know it. You know it. So how does Black or White go?
Doesn't matter if you're black or white. Is that one where you're going to do a Panther, too? I'll never forget Fox premiered that. I'm just regular TV.
I was eating this cake my mom made. Jason, how are you? Did you know that Michael Jackson stole a song from Weird Al? And Weird Al came up with this great hit called Eat It.
And then Weird Al. And then Michael Jackson was like, oh, I'm going to take that and make it beat it. Let me stop it. Jason, how are you?
Of course, breaking news left and right. How are you feeling? Yeah, man. I was in the middle of an interview with someone yesterday and happened to see on my phone getting a couple texts that were like, hey, Warner Brothers just shut down monolith and canceled Wonder Woman.
And I was like, sorry, of course I've been interviewing. Can we reschedule this? So I literally had to cut off the middle of the interview, rescheduled it for today. And then rescheduled it again because I was like, I'm going to come on Games Daily and talk to these guys about Warner Brothers.
Because yeah, there's a lot of stuff that I feel like maybe context that people should have or clarity about the situation that people don't have. I mean, just to give you an example, and this is just one of many things that I've been thinking of. A lot of people are like, oh, fucking David Zaslav ruining everything. Like, I can't believe Zaslav is doing more tax cuts, blowing up his games business.
But like, Zaslav has nothing to do with this. This is the result. What happened yesterday and what has happened recently is the result of decisions that have been made since long before Zaslav took over. Like, when Zaslav took over in April 2022, which is when you can see a Warner Brothers Discovery, Monolith by that point had already gone four and a half years without releasing a game and lost all of its leadership group.
So this stuff is nothing to do with Zaslav. It's kind of this history. If you have to look at the last decade of Warner Brothers to understand why and how a lot of this stuff has been happening. Do you think, so I understand that.
Is it still right to just blame leadership in general for WB Interactive, right? Is the reason Monolith isn't getting anything out is because everybody's getting away of it? Yeah. So, okay.
So I think maybe the best way to do this is we can kind of go studio by studio. But I also, I want to answer any questions you guys have because I know you have some lingering questions. I have a PowerPoint. It's like, so we're going to make the next Destiny.
It's going to be Destiny. Wait, oh shit. Different PowerPoint. So, so Warner Brothers Interactive for about 10 years from 2015 on, it was run by a guy named David Haddad, who Warner Brothers announced last month that he's going to be stepping down because shit has hit the fan.
But for about 10 years, David Haddad ran that studio. And when he took over WB Interactive and the games division, he inherited this thriving publisher. Arkham Knight had just come out or was about to come out. They were really firing on All Cylinders.
Mortal Kombat was doing really well. They had a lot of stuff going for them. And over the last decade, they've gone in the complete opposite direction. And we've seen a lot of these studios floundered.
Now three of them are shut down. We've seen a lot of these game franchises go nowhere. We've seen companies like Rocksteady going, making games that nobody wanted. We've seen companies like WB, Montreal kind of struggling to get pitches off the ground.
And it's really just been a disastrous few years. And the only reason I think that Haddad kind of survived 10 years is because Hogwarts Legacy came out and did such big numbers. It was such an anomaly that it saved his job for a couple more years. But yeah, I mean, his tenure has not been great.
A lot of people I've spoken to have worked with him describe it as like this kind of classic executive indecision and refusal to make calls because making calls means exposing yourself to risk. And if you make calls and expose yourself to risk, then you lose your cushy job and it's better to stay seated. And this is also under the landscape of Warner Brothers having all this corporate turmoil. So Warner Brothers was like AT&T and Time Warner merged and then that didn't work out.
And then Warner Brothers got split out under Discovery. And this whole time there were rumors that the games division was for sale. So it was really just a mess from the top on down. And I imagine it was very difficult for any executives to succeed in that situation.
But yes, a lot of people point the finger, and I think it's fair to, at Haddad for everything that has happened and everything that happened yesterday. Had you heard the same rumor that they were trying to sell off these things but not the IP and then license them back and yada, yada, yada, yada? Yeah, that was all public. I mean, that was never going to happen.
Like, nobody's going to buy, like, why would anyone buy Rocksteady just to then have to pay, like, to license the Batman IP for Warner Brothers? Like, it makes no sense because by buying a studio, it's not just like you're dishing out money, however many hundreds of millions of dollars to buy the studio. You then have to pay all those salaries. And I saw this being discussed yesterday when people were like, why didn't Warner Brothers just sell Monolith instead of shutting it down?
It says no one wants to buy an expensive studio in Seattle, pay those salaries, and then have to start from scratch on a new IP or, like, license Wonder Woman and pay those fees. And none of the, the math doesn't make sense there. So yes, Warner Brothers was always kind of, like, in this intractable position. They were never going to sell.
Other than, I think they sold one mobile, play that, like it was, their mobile division. But the rest of it, I mean, no, they were never going to sell it. Okay. Is it just a situation, Jason, where these people making these decisions don't really want to be in this business?
It just feels like it's, it seems like a lot of people up top that you were mentioning that are too scared to make the call or to take a risk like that. It feels like they're kind of not in the, I guess, right line of business. It's like they came from a different division. They're like, oh, I don't know shit about games.
I'm not really willing to make a call on any of this. I think part of, so Haddad and his crew, I mean, some of them came from other businesses. He had been at, I believe he was at Vivendi before. When you maintain the status quo, especially in a position of like corporate turmoil, where you want to be in your chair when all of the dust is settled and like you want to be in making that sweet, sweet executive money for as long as possible, making risky calls and putting big money into things can make you a target.
You have to be the person who's like justifying to your bosses why you decided to green light this whatever and give them a hundred million dollars to do whatever. Of course, if you don't make calls, you're still burning through tons and tons of money because you're just paying people salaries to like do very little or do nothing and accomplish nothing. But that is less risky than actually making the calls. And that's just one part of this, right?
There's also a lot of trend chasing. There's also a lot of just kind of lack of vision, I would say, for a game's division and what that would look like. So, yeah, I mean, let me get into Monolith, right? Because Monolith is the big story of this week.
Monolith just shut down. That is like the big story here. I want to talk about exactly what happened to Monolith because I think there's some context that maybe not everybody has. So Monolith has been around for 30 years, 31 years, I believe it lasted until yesterday, making a whole lot of cult classic games.
Fear, no one less forever. But really, in 2014, they had the breakout hit, which is Middle Earth, Shadow of Mordor. And that was by far the most successful game. It was critically acclaimed.
I think it was nominated for Game of the Year. That game did really well. They made a sequel, Shadow of War, which didn't do quite as well because people were not fans of the loot boxes. That's a whole other story.
I remember that? I forgot. I think I'm part of that. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. That's, I mean, talk about trend chasing, right? Loot boxes are cool.
Let's stick them in this game that has no need for loot boxes. It's very strange. And they removed them. Like, six months later, they were like, oh, shit, this is a bad idea.
We're just going to blow it out. So after Shadow of War, they decide, we don't want to do another one. So instead, we want to do a new IP. And the whole leadership group gets together.
They start working on this new IP. They want to have their game studios working on their big franchises, superhero games, Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, et cetera, Mortal Kombat. But here, Monolith is spending all this time trying to make a new IP. And there's a lot of just kind of like, it's almost like a standoff between the two parties where like, Warner Brothers knows they're not going to allow this to happen.
Monolith has a lot of sway and a lot of clout because you have these guys who have been working on these games for a while, had a lot of success with the Middle Earth games. And so they feel like they have the autonomy and the clout to be able to do what they want. There are some attempts here and there to kind of like squeeze IPs into this legacy, this game that they're making. Doesn't quite work out.
And it really- You know what IPs they were trying to put in? I don't know exactly. I mean, I think they tried like on paper experimenting with as many as all of them. I mean, just trying to figure out like if you can grab this onto it.
It didn't work. Again, we're talking about three years here. So we went through a lot of different iterations. This is a new IP.
New IP always takes a long time. But people there, I mean, they were excited about it looking beautiful and having cool procedural narrative ideas. I don't know if it would have ever worked, but that's what they were doing, right? Cut to 2021.
I believe it was the spring of that year, maybe like March, April, something like that. But around then, finally word comes down, hey, this is not going to happen. And it's kind of, it was a lot of stringing people along. A lot of different people at different levels were told, like, maybe there's a chance of this, maybe not.
Is this going to happen? I don't know. Quick digression here. I don't know about you guys, but I recently, like within the past few years, I've had some experience kind of pitching things to Hollywood executives, people at the Hollywood streaming networks and whatnot.
We have not had that experience. I don't know if you guys are out there pitching a kind of funny show. Greg pitched to John Drake's small Watto. Yeah.
Okay. Well, Drake, he's the one to go to. He'll green line everything. Yeah.
So what happens when you're pitching Hollywood, it's really bizarre. It's they do this thing called the Hollywood No, which is like they say on these meetings in these rooms. They're like, I fucking love it. Like, this is awesome.
Let's keep chatting. Can't wait to work with you. And then you just never hear from them again. And that I feel like is a lot of what that culture was kind of very much in place in Burbank at WB Games, because there was a lot of just kind of, especially in the Monolith Project, a lot of like just months and months and months of dragging things out or like meetings.
It was described to me as like people at a high level would go to these meetings with people at Warner and they would leave the room and just like say to each other, like, what just happened in that meeting? Like, was anything actually decided or figured out or was it all just like platitudes? And that's kind of what this is like, what it's like working with this regime at Warner. And it was very frustrating for a lot of people.
So anyway, cut to April 2021. Legacy is canceled. And Monolith's leadership team, the entire leadership team, quits. Every single director.
I put this on Blue Sky. Maybe you can screencap this. But I put this on Blue Sky. You know, break the basic formatting of all this, but yeah, we can.
Yeah, right? Just make another box. Easy. Let's do that real quick.
You got small walking down there. Web browser on there. You're killing it there. We know we're talking about that.
That's going on there. They're killing it. Hold your phone up to your camera there. So Monolith's entire leadership team, if you look at the movie games for Shadow of War, you'll see this leadership group.
It's seven people. They're directors. All seven of those people left the studio when Legacy was canceled. I believe six, five or six of them would then go on to start a new company called Cliffhanger Games, which is under EA.
And they are currently working on the Black Panther game for EA. Okay. So this is... I'm not sure we'll never see it.
Well, let's... I'll save that for a future... No! I have no idea what's going on.
But okay, so they all leave, right? And so this is also around the time, so like mid-2021, this is also around the time when Monolith is given Wonder Woman. Like, basically, the decision is made, and I don't know exactly who made the call, but it's very clear that Warner Brothers isn't interested in new IP, and so Monolith winds up taking Wonder Woman and deciding we're going to make a Wonder Woman game. And by the way, if you look at the timing of this, so this is spring 2021, the Wonder Woman game is announced in December of 2021.
You guys might remember, I mentioned on Kind of Funny Games Daily, I think around Game Awards time a few months ago, I was like, when Wonder Woman was announced, like, that was nothing. Like, literally, I mean, if you look at the timeline here, they start working on this game, or they take over this game in April, May, June-ish, 2021. They announced it six months later, which I think was... That probably happened for a lot of reasons, but one of the reasons was like, hey, like, Warner, we need to light a fire, because we need to actually get something shipped here, because Monolith hasn't actually shipped anything in four years now, and they're starting from scratch.
But here's the thing that happens also, is that in addition to having to start from scratch on this Wonder Woman project, which by the way, I think, well, I'll get into the kind of the tech of it all in a second, but in addition to having to start from scratch on this Wonder Woman project and just basically start a new game, they also no longer have their studio leadership. So they also have to rebuild their studio. And then it's not just the directors, too. Like, a bunch of other people under them wind up going to Cliffhanger 2 and leaving Monolith, and Monolith is essentially eviscerated at this point, and they have to spend a lot of time rebuilding.
And there are a lot of good people remaining there. A lot of people speak really highly of this guy, David Hewitt, who took over as the studio head of Monolith, and I believe was still there up until the end. But still, I mean, under any circumstances, like, rebuilding a studio to that extent alone can take years, but trying to do that while making a game is, like, next to impossible. Like, imagine if tomorrow, all of Kind of Funny's leadership quit.
I mean, maybe that would be interesting. But, like, imagine having to, like, work on projects while trying to rebuild your studio and, like, rebuild... company at the same time it was crazy and that's what they do it was in a possible situation by the way this we're still in the timeline we're still 2021 so again a year before zazlab even took over a year before wdc even happened so when you mentioned them showing off that little tiny trailer at game awards that's like the most extreme form of you know whenever people always complain why are you showing this so early it's like well people do this for recruiting and but this is like the most extreme form of that where it's like we don't have anybody here really yeah it was like we need to recruit desperately also we need to have something announced because like that'll help us a lot of times if a game studio has something announced like it can help prevent cancellation a little bit obviously did it in this case but certainly gave them a little more time than they might have if it was never announced or something like that um so yeah and so uh there's also this tech issue which i won't get into the specifics in part because i don't actually know them all but like my understanding is that there was a debate are we gonna stick with our like internal studio tech are we gonna use unreal engine and they wound up sticking with the internal studio tech uh but uh the loss of some of their kind of engineering talent that had been around for years and years and helped make that tech um made it a lot trickier to do that even though i'm sure it also had its advantages when you have like a tech that has really good um tools or good a good editor or whatever else it is you want to stick with that but yeah that was also would lead to some problems over the next few years as well um so yeah so they're working on this game trying to rebuild their studio at the same time really really difficult um and they go through a lot and then uh the game is uh essentially uh rebooted um they switch to records i believe this is like beginning of last year or end of 2023 so most of the time when greg miller insider extraordinaire said that he heard that it was the same trouble um uh and uh yes do you have any idea of how i know you said it was rebooted but do you know like a percentage of how much in development the game was before it got rebooted yeah i mean none of this is linear right and it's always kind of like an amorphous thing but i will say the main thing that was rebooted from my understanding is that the nemesis system they have been playing around with this idea originally that wonder women would have a nemesis system where like you befriend people and then uh they it's like the nemesis system in reverse where like they become your allies and they were playing around with how to make wonder woman and so on um we're not wonder man well kindness kindness is look um yeah and then uh they rebooted it um to be more of a kind of god of war style more traditional action adventure game um but by then i mean it was kind of too late um especially because last year was so bad for the wonder brothers organization um last year suicide squad was humongous flop they wrote off 200 million dollars because of that multiverses and quidditch champions also both flopped wrote off another 100 million dollars because of that last year was so bad that that is essentially what led to one of those ousting haddad and then everything that has just happened um and so yeah that's kind of what led us to today i've been hearing for a while for at least the last couple of months that wonder woman was almost certainly getting canceled i alluded to it in the story that i ran a few weeks ago about warner brothers and like the dodd's regime i think i said a couple times that the fate in that article that the fate of that game was in question um in fact uh jv perrette you won't get to in a second but he's the big boss of the games division he had been saying that like we're going to focus on these big franchises and one of them the main ones are i think it's harry potter game of thrones mortal kombat and then um dc but dc specifically batman he would mention so he would be like we're open to other ideas like specifically um so very clear that like and rossetti is doing a new batman game i reported that a couple of weeks ago but very very early yeah right it's it's very i mean if you look at how we got here it's all very wild like the fact that man i could go on forever about that game and the fact that um you take a studio that is renowned and acclaimed for making the single-player narrative action adventure games and put them on a multiplayer live shooter that alone is just like such a like unfathomable misstep but also going with the suicide squad is just crazy like why don't you keep trying stop it's really here you made batman you made the arkham series let's make these kind of games i think it had the slipknot guy from the movie yeah uh jason i want to ask you about monolith but uh player first games right like that was something that then closing down we heard about multiverse of course uh ending support right but then buying the studio seven months ago and then shutting it down do you have any information on that or what was the you know the idea behind that yeah um uh i'm trying to think i mean i've heard a couple things secondhand that i don't feel super comfortable sharing typically yet but i don't know i often say things on the show and then they get aggregated no i would say that in a case like that like when you have a studio acquisition that is kind of tied to the release of a game um sometimes the studio has some leverage in cases like that where it's kind of like hey um if you want this to be a long-term relationship if you want us to keep working on this game assuming it's a success um let's let's put a ring on it if you want to then put a ring on it and let's let's make this a long-term relationship that sort of thing and i imagine that something similar happened here but i'm not 100 sure but i do know that like them buying player first was a bet that multiverse was going to be a success which they really thought it would be yeah yeah man um but i want to get to i want to talk about the current kind of regime so um well i want to talk about the studios i got questions about wb montreal you have all this up your sleeve yeah i will get to that in a second i want to do i want to do oh i think we should do the ad break here is all i'm saying remind everybody of course we can only do cool stuff like this i can do the i can advertise for warner brothers here warner there's just a great place to work sounds like it pad your resume for three more months before it's all over uh we're going to do stuff like this have jason running here on our cool video wall without your support uh we are kind of funny we're all about live talk shows and if you love that we'd love you to pick up a kind of funny membership either on patreon.com slash kind of funny youtube.com slash kind of funny games apple or spotify to get all of our shows ad free and of course get your daily dose of me greg miller in a series i call greg way right now you're not using your benefits so here's a word from our sponsor this episode is brought to you by me greg miller chicago what are you doing thursday april 10th at 7 p.m the answer come to my live show that's right mrs miller's baby boy is coming back to chicagoland putting on a 90 minute one night only show live from the goodwin auditorium at benedictine university in lyle i'm missing a bit of up at noon with a bit of my best comic-con performances with a lot of my chicago influences i'm calling a late night with greg miller and it's gonna offer never before heard adolescent tales an interview with one of my favorite bands of all time a conversation with milly ramsey about growing up in the internet spotlight your live questions for me and of course tons of fabulous 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just sabotaged the entire structure no you made it i don't know if you heard earlier when we were just ranting and raving about the cake my mom served here you're even harder to rail with this don't worry about it don't worry about it where you're killing jason thank you so much you're doing this with us sure yeah so um let me just finish a thought real quick a little bit up to you guys ask other questions about the other studios whatever but um so hadat is gone so in this place is this guy named jb perett who's the head of games and streaming and he um i think he's gonna kind of slow down the search for a successor to be like the new president of wdb games and i think he's gonna take over and step in and this is part of him being like we need to return to profitability after an awful year we're making these cuts we're canceling this game we're gonna try to get um refocused on all this this other stuff um and from a kind of i i talked to him once i talked to her a few weeks ago he strikes me as a smart guy he's a guy who knows what he's talking about um he talked a little bit when i was talking about like how game development is a nonlinear process and he's understood that and he understands that and i was like holy shit like you're saying something that like most studio heads like it took them 20 years at all you've been doing this for a year and i love how smart you are and i love how smart we are but so many people say what is a nonlinear process when it comes to games what does that just like meaning that like you would think that it's kind of like i don't know like writing a book or writing a script or you just kind of like do things in order and they happen you can kind of like holistically look at that as opposed to game development where you might have fits and starts you might work on features only to find that they're not actually fun and you have to like completely throw them out and they completely change how things work or like you build a level and then the combat system changes and so you have to redesign your entire level to account for the new combat system that sort of software it's just all constantly changing all the time um it's like that you know yeah i mean that's funny you could argue that like uh that is one of the reasons game development is expensive and maybe that's the problem that's one of the different kind of funny games anyway anyway this guy jb who took over he came in made this fucking shitty awful call to like cut a bunch of jobs which is part of his like mandate to restore profitability yada yada um but i do think there's like a little bit of ray of hope i mean i guess we'll see how he does taking over the role now i've heard good things from people around him people say he like asks the right questions people are certainly higher on him than they were on hadad i think a lot of people all across the org studio heads all across wb are not exactly um crying to see hadad go to see a regime change there i think there was a lot of frustration towards him and i do think there's like a vision of the future for wgames that looks pretty good it just might take a few years before we actually get there do you think they get enough time to get there yeah because like i don't see them doing this only to then just like double back and cut costs i guess you never really know but like i think zaslav like as early as like recently as a year ago was being like hogwarts legacy holy shit this is the future like i think they are interested in doubling down on games and really just kind of they see games as a place of growth um and their strategy for doing that is to double down on the big franchises which seems like a smart one i guess we'll see what happens i mean hogwarts legacy was such an anomaly that if they're expecting all their other games to hit that level they're in for a rude oh but when has an executive board ever had misplaced you know sales expectations yeah even like hogwarts legacy 2 there's no way that it meets those same levels of expectations because the hunger for like a new harry potter game is still not there anymore it's been satiated but yeah we'll see we'll see yeah that was i kept on bringing up that point yesterday in the games cast it's like that's the best and worst thing that could have happened to wb games i think like and obviously made a shitload of money 30 plus million copies it was 30 million copies as of october of last year so who knows where it's at now but like now everybody thinks up top that like every game can do that now all of our stuff can do that it's like no man like harry potter is the people buying harry potter are the people that are also playing free to play call of duty and fortnite and those like there's just a massive fan base there that isn't necessarily going out to buy uncharted 4 exactly about this 40 percent they play you know this one game yeah exactly yeah it's uh i get the sense that someone like pared is smart enough to recognize that that's not going to happen but i think their standards are going to be pretty high like these are all going to be big investments that they expect to be billion dollar franchises or billion dollar games okay i don't think they are going to settle for like a game that sells two million copies so we'll see what that looks like okay so that's the executive team that's the monolith stuff one thing i was wondering yesterday you know you heard rumors that this uh one game would be canceled forever have you had they also been expecting the studio closure was this news to everyone yesterday complete shock and surprise to everyone i mean it makes sense if you think about it like here's a studio that is not really the same uh people that it was eight years ago when they released the last game hasn't released a game in that long was it would have to start from scratch on a new thing or be a support studio which i mean what is there to support at this point you already have wb montreal essentially being a support studio so like it doesn't really make sense um from a obviously it's awful from a human level but you're looking at it just on paper like from a sociopath executive level to make these decisions it doesn't really make sense to keep them around if you're canceling the game um but no as far as like i so i heard not forever but really it was only within the last month or two maybe two months ago that i started hearing wonder it was almost certainly gonna get canceled um but no as far as i know like everybody was shocked that the studio was closed especially a studio with a name of that kind of legacy attached sure sure so then talk to me about wb montreal you say they're basically a support studio where are we at with them where do you want to talk about their journey yeah man so it's a long one i mean they have been around for a long time um since like 2010 or something like that they came out with arkham origins which uh i think some people appreciate even though it was always kind of the black sheep of the arkham games the one that rock study didn't want to talk about like i'm just wanted to focus on their own um and uh and then they had a bunch of false starts so like after origins they're working on two games they're working on a suicide squad game and a damien wayne game and then both of those were canceled one after another um and then they were they had this new mandate of like do a service game and also reinvent batman like batman uh eventually the service stuff was kind of stripped out of that and that is what became gotham knights that's a game that i think had a trouble development as they all do do you know around do you have any idea like timeline wise what these mandates were given out and then maybe like pulled out of hey we're not doing that service are we talking like 2019 2018 ish so that thing started developing gotham knights in 2017 and that's when um the mandate from hadad and team was they used to wear this word this phrase called digitally powered which was like uh before games as a service became the big term that was it it was like how are we gonna like equip these games with long-term revenue plans and digital content drops and blah blah blah it sounds way more fun to their credit games the service sounds very corporate yeah yeah it does but when you say digitally powered to like people who were at warner at the time they like get a shutter though that brings back awful memories um and yeah so uh i don't know exactly when it was kind of like when gotham knight stitched that it was a couple years into development where it was like hey this is no longer the plan like we're gonna switch gears on this one but that was a period of like big game as a service stuff which another thing by the way a lot of people have talked about how like in recent years people like zazlav and jb brett are talking all about games as a service but the games as a service made started long long before that and this is more executives just kind of like saying what shareholders want to hear because if you look at their current slate of games um they're not games as a hogwarts 2 is not gonna be like a game as a service like batman from our city is not gonna be a game as a service so um the the concerns this is not a company that is like going all in on game as a service they're going all in on those big franchises but is that because they touch the stove like they fuck around to find out kind of thing like they saw how the industry was going they saw i mean with a suicide squad what happened no i think they still believe that there's like room for success like i was talking to um uh i talked to executives there who talk about how like uh the um there there may be or there is like they can envision a world where like you were playing in hogwarts with your friends and you go hang out with your buddies in hogwarts and you're all wizards together and taking classes together and there's there's like they have these kind of fantasies in their heads about games as a service that might work it's just that these particular projects that are currently in development i'm sure they have a game of service at some point somewhere but those are not them um they're also focusing on mobile by the way they're doing a lot of stuff in mobile that they hope uh will hit in a way that some of their other mobile games did not i cannot imagine the amount of times metaverse was thrown around at these uh at any of these meetings when you're talking you go with your friends to classes at hogwarts like that sounds like for my 9 30 potions class yeah that sounds like such a like directive of we also need to be in this sphere that's so funny that's so funny but it's also i mean you can see that working right like hogwarts mmo i remember there were hogwarts like muds back in the day that were incredibly popular people role-playing in the hogwarts universe it's it's it's so Thank you. appealing proposition for a lot of people i think yeah i that sounds really good but i also think about that could just be a fortnight mode you know i feel like that's the inevitable place we're gonna go like have you heard anything about that like i know that uh james talked about how he wants to collaborate more with fortnight in the future is that something that's on the table as maybe an alternative to what they're doing or what they were doing i i don't know um i can't imagine it's a significant part of their revenue if it is yeah so then for wb montreal obviously goffin nights doesn't do well where does that leave them yeah so they wound up in this kind of a more first position sort of like what happened um to monolith i was mentioning earlier where it was kind of this back and forth of like meeting after meeting and then trying to pitch things and never really getting a no but not getting a yes either or it'd be like yeah we're really excited about this um uh so are you gonna give us a budget or timeline no just like keep working on that like keep doing what you're doing like those are the conversations that people have which i meant was infuriating for a lot of people um yeah so uh wb montreal after gotham nights um their original vision was like hey we know this isn't perfect but we have all this tech we have this team together we have this chemistry why don't we do like a miles morales style like 1.5 gotham nights game that really just kind of like takes out of that stuff and like makes it a lot better um and that was canceled after the performance of gotham nights uh so that's that's yeah it's really sad because like companies these days maybe because budgets are so high just don't give teams the opportunity to kind of learn from mistakes and make the kind of the i don't know the mass effect 2 or the uncharted 2 or the assassin's creed 2 like the game that really builds on the foundation and makes something really great instead we keep reliving the cycle right where it's like all these former triple a devs leave the big company to go start their own thing and they bit off away but bite off more than they can chew they make a game that isn't is maybe a seven and then yeah they get closer fun and get taken away or absurd venture buys their entire studio i don't know uh well i wanted to bring up just development of gotham knights and it kind of reminds me of like the story of veil guard where it was going to be a game as a service game and they had to sort of reinvent it and make it a single player rpg where like when we talk that this game was going to be a game service are we talking destiny style and was there a whole lot of we have to reboot this project happening with gotham knights no dragon age they had to reboot a lot of things and this they did not because if you look at the structure of this game i mean it's already when i say service i mean the idea was like in gotham knights you'd still be teaming up with a friend's multiplayer it would be the same sort of game it's just like for the year after development or the years after development we would be releasing new boss packs and like stuff having to do it was just kind of like ongoing content plan so it's not like they drastically changed the game as far as i know and with that like the way gotham knight is structured it definitely is built to uh kind of have that they just didn't do it so that makes a lot of sense yeah exactly um and then so yeah so after gotham 1.5 was canceled um they wound up pitching a constantine game um before realizing after months of pitching that like burbank was never gonna say yes to that and just kept dragging them a log they wound up uh uh i think burbank the people in wb when i say burbank that essentially means wb games corporate um i think they said like hey dude why don't you do something about on the flash or joker and they pick the flash i want to pick on that but then that didn't happen there was a lot of i think there was a belief from wb and burbank that like wb games montreal had kind of they couldn't be trusted to make new games after gotham knights was such a failure and that they should become a support studio and while some of these pitches were going on a lot of people from montreal got put on wonder woman um and even some other games throughout the org um and so they essentially were turned into a support studio for wb but burbank didn't want to say that to the company like they didn't want to say like hey we're gonna make you a uh would be fun to see who's pitching the superman game over there jason what the hell i feel like there's never been a superman game like maybe ages ago there was like a pitch deck of one but uh i've never heard anything concrete about a superman game actually happening why would he's kind of overrated all right everybody he's also like almost impossible to design around you know because he's just way too overpowered and we already played back down yeah and like you know superman 64 like flying through rings like how can you top that i remember hearing that uh like rocksteady was adamantly opposed and was like we will never make a superman game like we fucking hate superman what are we idiots that's incredible greg do you remember years ago i think we're at the jw and like the rumors of i mean i'm gonna put you on the spot i'm gonna blow up your spot here uh sorry in advance but there were rumors about superman floating around that mean tied to rock city and i ran into you and i was like hey man like sorry rock city's not making sure you're like oh i know they're making suicide i was like wait a minute you know more than you're letting god greg miller you're not you're you're keeping some insider info jason i have so many secrets i don't even tell you no you know how could you not tell me this is why i'm always so quick people like a fucking games journal i'm like i'm not i'm not i'm somewhere in between i'm not a critic and entertainer or whatever yeah you're a ceo you know how much i'm a dirt bad ceo shareholders i gotta satisfy the shareholders what kind of funny does is infotainment i don't know what you want to call it right but it is the idea that there's wrestling k-fame all the time so yeah no when i was wearing the superman shirt psyched at least like i knew that rock city was not making a superman game but also the one thing you and i need to talk sometime privately like we did dice about like i have a multiple source there was a superman game in development in the past decade now i'm old you know i'm talking about i think i was at ign when i originally heard this from two different people that i have full trust and belief in but i've never heard anyone talk about it which studio i can't say that i don't want to say that publicly i'll tell you i'll tell you yeah exactly i think we have lunch i think we have lunch plans at gdc we can discuss yeah we do right i'll tell you later we'll figure it out i'll tell my wife what to tell you about the superman game jason i know we only have you for about 10 more minutes before you're part out yes what else do you need to cover what else do you need to tell i got on a call with the person who i had to interrupt yesterday tell them we appreciate their sacrifice we appreciate them doing this for us uh what do you what else is there to say about wb games right now and where they're at yeah i don't know i mean so uh so monolith is no more player first is no more wb san diego is no more so they're consolidating um i think it's it's um i think they're man with the overall industry vibes there's no sense of security about anything or anyone but um but i do think that like uh rock steady and um wb montreal and avalanche obviously some of these studios are in more secure places now as a result like like the big the big cut just happened i can't imagine there will be more cuts in the next year or so but again you never know what the games industry but like as of right now it seems like this is their big drastic move and now they're going to see what the fruits of like this new strategy look like over the next couple of years so um there are reasons to be bullish about like the remaining lineup but it's just so tragic it's so sad that like all these people who worked at monolith some of whom had been and have now not shipped the game in eight years and will not ship one for who knows how much longer because of this and it's just so sad and tragic that all of these people are just kind of like swallowed into this corporate like drama like casualties of that and um yeah it's just sad like having having the wrong people in charge or people in charge you like don't make decisions or don't have a strong vision um it can just be so cataclysmic and it's a hard job man it's like i was having drinks with someone at dicey was like have you ever thought about things from a publisher's perspective from the perspective of someone who has to go through the spreadsheet and make the job cuts and i was like first of all i'm a lot more sympathetic for people who lose their jobs and have to worry about it to feed their families but sure i do i do have a little bit of sympathy for that position it's a tough position to be in but that's why you're paid a million dollars a year to do it is because you are trusted to run things in that role and so having people in charge having people in charge for a really long time can just be so cataclysmic in so many ways um i know how tough it is because we have you know greg had to counterpick gta 6 on our fancy brick league you know what i mean like tough decisions out there that is not especially because when it gets delayed you're gonna be like damn no that's what i want i counterpick it a better example is when kevin comes over he's like hey can we refill the kegerator and i'm like how much is it of course andy and roger you have computers i'd love to get super chats over here cj splits on uh yeah no i can't see anything about tt games we didn't cover this jason what's going on with tt games obviously i know arthur parsons a whole bunch of them left they want me that funko game that was not great and i don't hear anything about the lego franchise anymore from them yeah they actually are one of the few uh studios in the umbrella that has a game coming in the near future they do have a lego game coming i believe it's for next year um i could be there's also by the way there's like that harry potter definitive edition the dlc thing that is coming as well um so there are a couple of things there's also that game of thrones like weird mobile game that's announced yeah it has like everybody in it yeah we were all mentioning that yeah jesus uh jesus subtle's worth has a super chat asking about this rumored batman beyond game is it true what can we get in the cards i haven't even heard that rumor what is the rumor exactly playstation exclusive batman beyond game or the strategy to stay afloat playstation would have to drop a bag that doesn't sound like a rumor that sounds like that sounds like people on reddit really open any sources jesus know your place i mean i know that so i said before i reported a couple weeks ago rock said he is making a batman game returning to their roots i don't know exactly what it is uh i was gonna say do they know what it is yet yeah it's still it's like kind of it's early it's early but i worry a little about that because they're gonna run into a similar problem the monolith did where they've lost a lot of leadership and um uh so seth and hill and jamie seth or uh uh seth and jamie the uh the two um founders of rockstar jamie walker and seth and hill the two founders of rocksteady um left and formed a new studio called hundred star and they've recruited some of their former colleagues so um there was some talent in there which by the way under haddad's leadership like we saw the directors of monolith leave founders of rocksteady leave a bunch of leadership in montreal leave like a lot of attrition at the level of people that's working with what the plan was over there i know it's very early on jason any of the james gun sort of you know conversations that we mentioned yesterday what do you know do you have any information as to how james gunn would try to be involved in any wb games development and any of what is happening with rocksteady or is he even involved because like yeah because like when he was talking about stuff it seemed like he was just kind of on the outside like oh would you want to do a marvel rival thing it's like yeah maybe like it didn't seem like he was that involved the whole process i think uh that was well i don't know i mean i get the feeling that that's more about the headlines and the stories than it is what's actually happening but i don't know it would be happening um with a very narrow group of people so it's probably just hasn't trickled down to me but i imagine it's more like gun coming in and being like hey like story people like here's what we're doing let's make sure that this is all canon or whatever and let's make sure this all kind of syncs together um but this idea of this it's always been kind of flight of fancy to be like we're gonna have the dc verse and they're all gonna be connected the movies and the games and that's never happened the timelines they're all just like completely completely introduce the multiverse and it works yeah exactly that's what you need man we need more multiverse exactly oh gosh um do you have any uh anything to talk about regarding the nemesis system oh yeah i always have something to talk about what do you mean regarding the like uh future plans patent i know you know we've seen many people report that the nemesis system is patented until 2036 yeah i mean i don't know i think that stuff is overblown um because uh like i don't know a lot of that is tech and you're not going to recreate it somewhere else but also like i don't really think many game developers are out there being like we want to copy exactly what the nemesis system does like a lot of people have been playing around with procedural storytelling in different ways but like with or without a patent i can't imagine a ton of triple a studios being like we are going to make this exact same thing and if they do something different then maybe like experiments with similar ideas it feels different then it wouldn't violate the patent so i don't know i i think that has been that story has been pretty overwhelmed it's my gut it really is yeah it is but man if we had more time i would go on and on about the patent trolling that led to the creation of uh uh essentially led to bobby codic taking over activision actually go replay nice i read it with my ears oh wow me too very good as one does as one does yeah patent trolling was ralph bayer who was the creator of the magmox odyssey was like a notorious patent troll and won all these patent lawsuits for like patenting sports games essentially uh it's a pretty crazy part of video game history there it is play nice the rise fall and future of blizzard entertainment jason's latest book i also told jason that i uh signed up for like my third bloomberg subscription i was like i was just like no no i i have like two other running ones i still i gotta look at rocket money and something like which one to cancel but yeah i had to sign up for a third one yesterday i have to get that article i just say you don't i tweet gift links to all my articles on blue sky not on i said tweet but like i don't there anymore blue skies i post gift links on my articles you just read them for free there you don't subscribe if you don't watch it subscribe but i appreciate it yeah we're good i'm gonna tell my bosses i got three subscriptions yeah from one person of course um well jason that's gonna do it for us here thank you so much for all your time and all your patience with us sorry it took so long to get to your portion of it we have to talk about you know some michael jackson's very weird and i don't want you to leave empty-handed jason i know you're always looking for scoops you're looking for threads to tug on all right i don't know if you've heard about stars in the bank all right now we have a very successful game show here called kind of funny game showdown and i do have stars in the bank which will allow me to steal three stars from tim it's a developing storyline i haven't seen bloomberg cover it you know so i'm just putting it out there vgc always knocking on my door jordan middle are always trying to get an interview i'm like i'm a chasing man okay get out of here this is something you can pick up send me the tips to um mike at bloomberg.net and we'll check it out thank you jason schreier uh this has been kind of a games cast for you guys for february 26th 2025 we appreciate all of y'all we will see you on games daily after this