Warner Bros. has confirmed that it is cancelled the Surprise Lady sport that’d lengthy been within the works at Shadow of Mordor developer Monolith Productions. As had sadly turn out to be a norm for the the video games business in 2025, that information has come alongside the closure of Monolith and two different studios beneath the WB Video games umbrella – Multiversus dev Participant First Video games and Warner Bros. Video games San Diego.
These strikes, first reported by Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, have since been confirmed by Warner itself in a press release supplied to Polygon.
“We now have needed to make some very troublesome choices to construction our improvement studios and investments round constructing one of the best video games attainable with our key franchises — Harry Potter, Mortal Kombat, DC and Recreation of Thrones,” a spokesperson for the corporate stated, “After cautious consideration, we’re closing three of our improvement studios – Monolith Productions, Participant First Video games and Warner Bros. Video games San Diego. It is a strategic change in course and never a mirrored image of those groups or the expertise that consists inside them.”
They added relating to the cancellation of Surprise Lady, which a earlier Bloomberg report had famous was “struggling to coalesce”, that the “hope was to provide gamers and followers the very best high quality expertise attainable for the enduring character, and sadly that is not attainable inside our strategic priorities”.
Polygon has additionally shared sections of an e mail JB Perrette – Warner Bros. Discovery’s CEO and president of worldwide streaming and video games – reportedly despatched to employees about these closures and the cancellation. The exec wrote that latest releases not doing in addition to WB Video games had hoped has led the corporate to determine to refocus on “fewer however larger franchises” going forwards, because it goals to “regain our credibility and swagger at producing nice video games”.
“Getting our swagger again occurs one prime quality sport launch at a time, and our monetary credibility will get rebuilt one fiscal quarter at a time,” Perrette added, “delivering what we stated we’d ship, and no massive destructive surprises.”
As of writing, it is unclear precisely what number of jobs have been impacted by the closures. Perrette famous that WB hopes to “repurpose our expertise the place attainable”, however numerous ex-Monolith staffers – together with systemic narrative designer Nathan Savant and UX design director Mila Pavlin – have posted on BlueSky that they are now searching for work following the closure.
